continued iran baiting; when will it end? we shudder to think…

‘On Eve Of 4th Of July Parade U.S. Attempts To Lure Iran Into Shooting Down Another U.S. Plane’, July 3, 2019, moonofalabama.org

“Today a manned U.S. reconnaissance plane entered Iranian airspace in a clear attempt to provoke Iran into shooting it down. Such an incident would have created an occasion for Trump to give the American people a special 4th of July fireworks.”

“The case today is not in doubt. The U.S. military definitely tried to provoke Iran into shooting down another one of its planes.
  The US Airforce RC-135V Rivet Joint are signal intelligence planes that snoop on other countries.

The plane flew over the islands Abu Musa and Sirri in the Persian Gulf which are Iranian territory and Iranian airspace. It falsely signaled that it was an Iranian plane.

The aviation transponder of the U.S. spy plane was set to a code that is associated with Iran. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) defined (pdf) 24-bit addresses that identify the type of the plane and the country where a plane is registered . The 24 bit codes for Iranian registered airplanes begins with the country identifier 0111 0011, written in hexadecimal as 73.

As @GDarkconrad pointed out, this isn’t an accident, the USAF did this with Venezuelan codes off the coast of #Venezuela too. US reconnaissance planes are impersonating the codes of the countries they are conducting reconnaissance on, endangering future civilian flights.”

“This morning the U.S. spy plane willingly penetrated Iranian airspace. It squawked a fake code which showed ill intention. This happened on the 31st anniversary of Flight 655. The Iranian military would certainly still like to take revenge for that mass murder. It was a huge provocation likely intended to lure Iran into shooting it down.
Whoever came up with it, and those who signed off to allow this incident to happen, will now be disappointed. Iran clearly did not fall into their trap.

The world owns a big thank you to the Iranian air defense crews on Abu Musa for their disciplined behavior.”

Had Iran shot the plane down it would have been clearly within its rights. But imagine it had done so. A manned U.S. reconnaissance plane, not a drone, would have come down and the crew would be dead. U.S. media would scream for revenge.

It would have happened on the eve of Trump’s 4th of July speech which will be followed by the military parade and overflight he ordered. 5,000 people from military families are invited to the event.

An ideal TV situation to announce that the U.S. Commander in Chief ordered to ‘obliterate’ Abu Musa island, the castle that controls the Strait of Hormuz, with maybe a small nuke. The U.S. public would have loved those 4th of July fireworks. Newspapers would headline “Commander In Chief Demonstrates His Resolve!” Trump’s approval rating would soar to above 80%.

It would take days until the information that the flight was an intended provocation would enter the news. U.S. media would simply ignore it just as they ignored the evidence about Flight 655. The island would be unusable for Iran but the wider environmental damage from a small, kiloton range nuclear device would be minimal. No one in the U.S. would care about it.

One wonders who came up with such a nefarious plan. Was it Trump, the great showman, himself? Was that the reason why he ordered the military to join the 4th of July parade on such a short notice? Or was it John Bolton or ‘we lie, we cheat, we steal‘ Mike Pompeo? Some minion at the CIA or CentCom?”

Iran fury as Royal Marines seize tanker suspected of carrying oil to Syria’; Iran summons UK ambassador over incident off Gibraltar as tensions escalate over nuclear deal, July 4, 2019  [who wrote that stupid title?]


“Tehran responded by summoning Britain’s ambassador to its foreign ministry to explain what it described as an “illegal seizure”, which had been earlier described by the UK as enforcing the EU’s sanctions regime against Syria.

It is understood that the ambassador, Rob Macaire, reiterated the British position during the meeting, saying: “[The UK] welcomes this firm action by the Gibraltarian authorities” to enforce sanctions against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Marines from 42 Commando were involved in the overnight seizure, with some landing on the ship’s deck by rapidly descending down ropes suspended from a Wildcat helicopter, and the rest following up via speedboat.

MoD sources said British troops were at all times acting under the direction of the Gibraltar police. The marines provided the technical expertise to allow the tanker to be boarded at sea.

But the British position appeared to be contradicted by Spain, whose acting foreign minister, Josep Borrell, said Gibraltar had seized Grace 1 after a request from the US to Britain to pick up the tanker laden with crude oil.

White House national security adviser John Bolton welcomed the seizure of the ship. “Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of EU sanctions,” Bolton tweeted. “America & our allies will continue to prevent regimes in Tehran & Damascus from profiting off this illicit trade,” he said.

The UK Foreign Office faced a dilemma over the past few days knowing that if it seized the Iranian oil ship, as requested by the US, it risked deeply antagonising Tehran, which is desperate to increase its oil exports.”

“…the Foreign Office reasoned that it had a legal and moral duty to impound any ship that was heading to Syria in breach of EU sanctions. It was the Iranian’s surprise decision to enter Gibraltarian waters with its communications transponders on that left the UK with the option to impound the vessel.

In making its decision, the UK had to weigh the possible knock-on effect on the Iran nuclear deal, as well as reprisals against British diplomats in Tehran that work in an embassy that was trashed by Iranian protesters in this century.

“Mapping data showed it sailed a longer route to the mouth of the Mediterranean, around the southern tip of Africa, instead of via the Suez Canal in Egypt.

Panama’s Maritime Authority said on Thursday night that the ship was delisted from Panama’s international boat registry as of 29 May after it received an alert indicating that the Grace 1 had participated in or was linked to terrorism financing.”

And there you have it: a report full of agitprop iron-clad innuendo, folks.

‘Iran’s ‘duty’ to seize British tanker if UK fails to release captured ship – senior official at IRGC’, RT.com, 5 July, 2019


“Gibraltar’s Chief Minister Fabian Picardo claimed that the ship was transporting crude oil to Syria “in violation” of the EU sanctions placed on Damascus. According to Madrid, which considers the waters off Gibraltar to be its own, the British captured the ship at the request of the US. Officials in Washington, meanwhile, welcomed the seizure of the vessel, saying that it was carrying Iranian oil.

Later in the day, Iran summoned the British ambassador and slammed the seizure of the vessel as “a destructive step” and “a form of piracy.” Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Abbas Mousavi argued that the sanctions against Syria are illegal under international law and Iran does not recognize them.

On Friday, Major General Mohsen Rezaee of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who is also the secretary of the influential Expediency Discernment Council, tweeted that Iran should be ready for counter measures.

Should Britain refuse to release the ship, it is the authorities’ duty to seize a British oil tanker,” he argued.”

On June 13, 2019 Tony Cartalucci had offered Brookings Institution’s 2009 In their 2009 paper, “Which Path to Persia?: Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), the corporate-financier funded Brookings Institution would first admit the complications of US-led military aggression against Iran (emphasis added):

‘...any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. 

The paper then lays out how the US could appear to the world as a peacemaker and depict Iran’s betrayal of a “very good deal” as the pretext for an otherwise reluctant US military response (emphasis added):

The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.

And from 2009 onward, this is precisely what the United States set out to achieve.

First with President Obama’s signing of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, up to and including President Trump’s attempts to backtrack from it based on fabricated claims Iran failed to honor the agreement.

The 2009 policy paper also discussed “goading” Iran into war, claiming (emphasis added):

With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion [of Iran] would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.

Unmentioned directly, but also an obvious method for achieving Washington’s goal of provoking war with Iran would be the US simply staging an “Iranian provocation” itself.”

“How likely this is to succeed remains questionable – decades of US sanctions, covert and overt aggression, as well as proxy wars have left Iran resilient and with more influence across the region now than ever. Still, Washington’s capacity for sowing regional destruction or dividing and destroying Iran should not be underestimated.

The intentional creation of – then withdrawal from the Iran Deal, the US’ persistent military presence in the Middle East, and sanctions aimed at Iran all indicate that US policymakers remain dedicated isolating and undermining Iran. It will continue to do so until its geopolitical goals are met, or until a new international order creates conditions in the Middle East and throughout the global economy making US regime change against Iran impossible.”

Oh, the irony of this administration claiming to ‘support the IAEAnow after three long years…  As for who might be the true underlying authors of No Nukes/Total Hell on Iran, we can speculate Netenyahu, Bolton, Pompeo, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, along with the Iranian CIA Desk (internal regime change) as authors.  As for the larger picture, of course, Iran, Russia, and China are the new Axis of Evil, quaintly described earlier as ‘The Great Competitors’ (to American hegemony) because: Eurasian Heartland geopolitics.  Syria, of course, is a proxy in the Pipelineistan Wars.  But as this stinkin’ Empire is losing its power, it’s more dangerous and unpredictable, especially given the dyspeptic, deranged, and volatile nature of the President.


Iranian Safavid artwork

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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Iran was cool. Western media tried to spin it to their advantage. Didn't stick. (Like Argentina). Then, it was the spy drone shot down. More brinkmanship. Iran was cool. Could have taken out the tail too. Private airspace. No go. Next, US military tries a little bolder move. Send in a bigger spy plane and pretend it is Iran's. Again, Iran was cool. They see war baiting and consider the consequences.

Next, lapdog terrorist state UK does high seas piracy on an Iranian tanker in Gibraltar. Spanish loyalties to the EU kick in. Mixed up sanctions. Russian owned, Panamanian flagged. Court battles. Blatant international law ignorance. Next, Israel will pull some excusable act. How much will an oppressed nation take before striking back?

While Bolt-on may be in Mongolia, the Pentagon generals are following orders to push this destruction of an independent nation to the hilt.

Sucks being an american with a conscious. Leave them alone. Stop making enemies to justify military budgets already. Quit while you are ahead.

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wendy davis's picture

@QMS

seizure, i hadn't realized that gibraltar is a british protectorate. but good on madrid for trying to name the US as having given the UK their orders.

yes, i agree with you and not so much tony cartalucci:

Unmentioned directly, but also an obvious method for achieving Washington’s goal of provoking war with Iran would be the US simply staging an “Iranian provocation” itself.”

as with the alleged iranan limpet mines nonsense, t'was mischief by the IDF, as may the next provocations be.

i suppose my biggest fear is that more flase flags and baitings of iran won't lead to that nation unleashing rockets, but given 'attacks on amerikan interests' may lead to 'limited nuclear war' on iran.

i'd added this initially, then deleted it: ‘Russians Help Iranians Dig in as Final Battle Against Great Satan Looms’, John Helmer, June 27, 2019, russia-insider.com (just the opening for now)

“The Russian General Staff has reinforced the air defences for Russians at the Iranian nuclear reactor complex at Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf, according to sources in Moscow. At the same time, Iran has allowed filming of the movement of several of its mobile S-300 air-defence missile batteries to the south, covering the Iranian coastline of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. More secretly, elements of Russian military intelligence, electronic warfare, and command and control advisers for Iran’s air defence systems have been mobilized to support Iran against US and allied attacks."

isn't the subtweet cartoon under bolton's ship seizure tweet great?

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Cassiodorus's picture

Donald Trump exposes its idiocy like nobody else. He (with John Bolton and Mike Pence whispering in his ear) has his own plans to overthrow the world's democracies for cheap nature (which is mostly, at this point, cheap oil, since they are busy mining the Alberta tar sands for the stuff, and tar sands are not relatively cheap). So for instance Iran, as you've pointed above. Also Venezuela, which displays his violent ineptitude in spades. As Roger Harris pointed out yesterday in Counterpunch:

For instance, Guaidó was unknown to 81% of Venezuelans a little more than a week before he got a telephone call from US Vice President Pence telling him to declare himself interim president of Venezuela, which Guaidó dutifully did the following morning at a street rally flanked with US and Israeli flags. A member of a marginal far-right Venezuelan political party, Guaidó was not even in the top leadership of his own grouplet.

The desperation of this ploy is well-illustrated by the fact that they couldn't get anyone more prominent to do their dirty work. As for Iran, gjohnsit below exposes the embargo as a fraud and a fake -- so yeah they can't overthrow the PSUV government in Venezuela, they can't keep China from buying Iran's oil, they can't invade Iran, they can't, in short, get a "win," because their whole notion of life is based on death. What else are you going to call printing $22 trillion and handing most of it to the military?

The core of it all is the capitalist perspective which views the planet as a repository of cheap nature -- the real, physical world is to be an object of exchange insofar as it is recognized at all, or an object of plunder if it can be gotten for free. (And as for the plans to colonize Mars, they're trading in fantasy. Nobody is going to go millions of miles away from Earth to live underground their whole lives under soil contaminated with perchlorates and destroy their bodies with 37% gravity.) This perspective is "Cartesian" because it's based on the separation of mind from body -- only in this case "mind" is Donald Trump and his puppet-masters, and "body" is an increasingly attacked planet Earth with all the people in it.

So here's one summary of the ruling class's plans for the collective future:

The plan is well underway and it sure ain’t the Green New Deal. Just imagine a more extreme version of the world that already exists: where healthcare is rationed; where wealth inequality strangles democracy; where austerity is a weapon of class warfare; where millions die prematurely from toxins in air and water; where war and incarceration is the solution of choice; where people are rounded up in concentration camps; where corporations rule unchallenged; where extreme weather wrecks havoc in an expanding circle of misery. The only new thing about their solution is the stench of fascism that grows ever stronger and more odious.

Are these people stupid? Psychotic? What's your guess?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

amigo? hella lotta homework you've given us. ; ) i'd pretty much breezed by VZ as i would have needed to bring in the most recent assasination plots against both maduro and possibly guaido as a false flag, but as all the reports announced by VZ FM jorge arreaza translated from spanish (orinoco news etc.), tra la la, i'd chosen to tick with iran.

and yes, bolton's been tweeting up three storms about guaido and the murdering VZ military, and with all due respect to roger harris, the NYT is pretty much mainstream. (it's behind a paywall for me, so i won't be able to see if the UN said the same thing.)

@AmbJohnBolton · Jul 5 "US is proud to be supporting Interim President Guaido & the democratically elected National Assembly, which is courageously working to free Venezuela of a ruthless dictator responsible for Venezuela suffering the single largest economic collapse outside of war in at least 45 yrs." and more like that.

and with all due respect to gjohnist, guess we'll see if trump blinked just for a moment...or not. Vox ward? i stopped reading at this rubbish; sorry:

"At the time, it was unclear exactly what that intelligence said, but reports over the following days provided a bit more clarity. Iran apparently intended to target US troops in Iraq and Syria, or even use drones against Americans in a key waterway near Yemen. There was also information that Iran put cruise missiles on ships, heightening fears that it might attack US Navy vessels with them."

wish i had the time to read the trillion dollar boondoggle and your moser link, but homework time is over for me (weekend chores calling). i will add that the AOC/markey green new deal is a boondoggle for capitalists in its own right. dozens of new finance capital bidnesses are sprouting up to er...profit mightily from it. but...at least they're semi-honest about it. (wish i'd kept the lists i've seen in the twittererse.

more later as i'm able; thanks, cass. but yes: commodifying and financializing the natural world is what bidness does best, isn't it? (esp. amerikan bidness and compromised non-profits.)

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wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

esp. re: why all Rs and some Ds are tanking AOC's GND. which, by the way, never mentions the US military being the largest carbon footprint on the planet, but hilariously DOES use the DOD's language: 'climate change as a force multiplier', and the buzzwords of 'zero-sum carbon' (market fixes, false solutions, and clean and/or 'renewable' energy, which sure doesn't equal 'sustainable', including with the external costs..

howie hawkins' green party green new deal does at least have a peace dividend, but has stuff like 'electric cars' (wth?), but his socialist policies are great, and that's what i wish he were running on primarily. to me...it's so baked in now that mitigation should be the focus (yeah, demilitarizing would slow things down a bit). i wish the Red Deal folks could not re-invent the wheel, but could learn from the indigenous in mexico and south america. i'd given a bunch of links to aspie corner i'd dug up with portions of the ecosocialist treatises from the cochabamba accords (bolivia), la via campesina, and Orca II (?: that dooesn't look right).

but crap, cass; i dinnae know there'd be so much homework on this thread. arrrrggh!

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis All Moser is saying is that the elites don't really care too much about anyone or anything outside of their nasty ridiculous trips. The passage in question doesn't make much of the Green New Deal.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

I hope you won't give me/us a pop quiz! but here you are. i read it differently as moser hinting at where to look, where not to look, until at the bottom he lauds both miz gabbard's acronym, then the green part new deal and the red nation.

but as i honored you by who showing bolton's tweet re: the murderous maduro regime at the NYT, did you happen to click in? oddly, internet explorer let me in early this morning, so i scanned it, and if there's anything true in the UN report, my guess is that it's minimal.

but no, to trump's blinking on sanctions: gjohnsit used sources laden with 'insiders say', etc., and it's been russian ships carrying iranian oil to china, as iran had been down to exporting about 500,000 gallons a day on average (down from a million and a half, apparently), not enough to keep their economy alive.

will iran seize a UK tanker s some state officials have advised/warned? that might be considered 'taking the bait', so we'll just have to see.

increasing their uranium enrichment amounts and percentage levels is a whole 'nother hot-potato issue. (RT had some news this a.m., but not newsworthy/trustworthy enough to bring, imo.

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wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

moser's a polemicist, which is fine in it self in some ways, but he extrapolates our future in some weird ways.

i'll quote this passage:

"When Trump and the Republicans deny climate change, when Pelosi, Pallone, Perez, Biden and Obama join with Trump in sabotaging the Green New Deal or dismissing climate action as too expensive, too dreamy, not practical or too pure — they are all bold-faced liars and frauds."

and of course pelosi had called it a Green Dream, but he's lying. have you read the tome? just as a for instance: 'retrofit every building in the US with clean power' or whatever those meaningless buzzwords mean. trillions, even if could even be done without creating more climate change havoc. his link to pelosi claimed it was because pelosi thought it would interfere with bidness or something, which she hadn't said. another of his links below that paragraph went to another of his 'capitalism, militarism, and big oil' tomes. well, anyone following the debate should get that, although few do, or pretend not to.

but neither does ocasio's deal mention the US military carbon footprint. loads of appeals to identity polititics, over and over, but it's another capiitalist con in my book.

but now she's saying 'it was just a suggetion, not a blueprint. some say the basis of it had come from tom friedman, the mustache of wisdom; as to that i'm agnostic.

what will get enacted are the many forms of geo-engineering: carbon sequestration, carbon capture and storage, and rubbish like bill gates and company's scary dreams to block out the sun. what could possibly go wrong?

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@wendy davis but I understand the GND calls for a 50% reduction in the military budget. If so, that would seem by its logic to take care of a lot of the current US military carbon footprint.

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wendy davis's picture

@wokkamile

you're referring to. I'd linked to the non-pdf version when i'd featured my critique as well as others. but this seems to be the pdf version (i wasn't willing to scroll thru it, and if what you say is in it, it's been epically updated. that link doesn't even include a date, as far as i could see.

thanks for your interest, albeit this thread was supposed to be specifically about 'baiting iran'. never can control where the comments go, of course.

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wendy davis's picture

@wendy davis

house.gov website under press releases or some such. if you'd meant howie klein, or the green party new deal, irrc, there was a military (peace) dividend in how to pay for the GND. you can find it at his 2020 website.

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@wendy davis pdf/non-pdf distinctions or even of the separate Green Party GND, where the 50% military cut may appear. Generally I'm squarely in favor of AOC's proposal as it's a major step forward. The GP's idea may cover more ground, but it's chances of passing are nil, and even the more limited AOC proposal will meet and has met major resistance from the usual PTB quarters. AOC's GND isn't perfect, but it's a great start.

As to o/t, my above was merely in response to your own comments, as the thread creator, in several posts about the GND.

Re Iran: I wouldn't advise further provocations by the Trump admin, although I understand he may be doing this for either political reasons domestically or to partially satisfy his warmongering nat'l security team. This could get out of hand -- military response by Iran, leading to a US greater response, then war, regional at the outset, but likely to bring in Russia. Then we are really up the crick.

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wendy davis's picture

@wokkamile

discuss the continued baiting of iran, and maybe should have said that to cassiodorus to begin with. but i did him the honor of reading ten of his links that were quite off-topic in the spirit of 'no one can control where a comment thread will go.

i do get your drift, same as i get cass's, but respectfully disagree. the only portions that might pass into law are those that will feed the capitalist machine, even if a few of the hazily worded portions are included: 'promoting biodiversity, organic farming,' etc.

plain text may have been the wrong term. what i'd meant was text from which oe could copy paste. at least for me, the one i'd given you did't lend to that.

fortunately, the grayzone project has covered the UN censure of 'the maduro regime' that the NY Slimes had covered as i'd hoped cass might have as he'd brought VZ into the mix.

'Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas slams UN High Commissioner Bachelet’s report on Venezuela as a politicized collection of baseless accusations by “advocates of regime changeJuly 7, 2019 Anya Parampil (three short outtakes)

"When United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet traveled to Venezuela earlier this year, she met with an array of citizens who lost family members to right-wing violence in the country.

Yet shockingly, when Bachelet released her long-anticipated report on the situation in Venezuela on July 5, it was as though that meeting never took place.

Apparently unmoved by the testimony of Figuera’s grieving mother, or anyone else’s story of injury and suffering, Bachelet made no mention of opposition violence in her report. Her failure to properly detail the plight of Venezuelans who have suffered at the hands of anti-government rioters was just one of many glaring omissions which has one of the top international legal experts to have served at the UN calling the high commissioner’s objectivity into question."

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis in order to support it as against the sort of mass extermination the elite consensus in America actually supports. One way to look at it is to argue, as many have, that the Green New Deal is a mere departure from the status-quo politics of America, which is about letting everyone die before doing anything at all. The Green New Deal could completely suck and it would still be a departure. When we are pleading for our lives the bar is set extremely low.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

thinking, cass, and here at c99% hope dies last, so i'm the outlier, as i just happen to disagree is all. for one thing, it's the sort of incrementalism that always stands in the way of sweeping awareness and change, as historically LOTE voting. also, the climate emergency began at least twenty of thirty years ago, but now that capital can profit mightily from the concept, reports are coming daily like: '45 million species are at risk!'. well, of course they're at risk. and have been for quite some time. and a lot of the risk comes not just from climate chaos, but from Big Ag factory farming and glyphosate, bT crops, and bill gates ad company's Green Revolution.

i just went and grabbed howie hawkins' ecosocialist GND and the how to pay for it has now devolved to 'cuts to the military budget' from an earlier iteration that was fairly bold, more on the order of 'close all military bases'.

but here's a serious Q: do you really believe that with so much of the world's nations running on fossil fuels, that climate chaos can be reversed in time 'to save the human species'? the feedback loops now extant seem to indicate No, but then it depends which 'scientists' one reads, doesn't it?

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis is their willingness to keep existing systems intact in order to get their pointless two cents worth of change, which itself vanishes as soon as the incrementalists' sponsors attain power.

What everyone learns from the struggle to establish the Green New Deal is that the elite murder-suicide consensus isn't even willing to go as far. One saw for instance Hillary Clinton's plans for climate change, which involved promoting the manufacture of a few solar panels while on the next screen the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia boasted that his regime supplied Clinton with 20% of her campaign finance money. At any rate, most elite opposition to anything even as half-baked as the GND doubtless has to do with the promotion of the GND, which poses a utopian dream in opposition to the current reality.

(The Molly Crabapple cartoon concludes with an evocation of this utopian dream.)

If it's anything they want, it's that they want us to wait quietly for our murder-suicide outcome. No utopian dreams will be allowed outside of the ones your ruling class has approved, which exclusively involve their pursuit of more money and power, eventually leading to escape homes in New Zealand where they imagine themselves sitting out the climate change mega-catastrophe, ha ha. Your ruling class has spoken.

In that regard, the inadequacies of the GND cannot yet be the primary issue with it. Maybe after it actually stands a chance, which now it doesn't.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

cartoon again...before i began gagging...again. clearly, miz 'unfettered capitalism' klein wrote the script. and yes, i've seen it deconstructed by actual socialists on twitter, most especially the appeal to identity politics in crabapple's figures, and an fdr-esque mobilization, and tra la la.

i will say that moser at least saw that at the heart of clmate change lies: capitalism, which the ecosocialists in the global south have known for decades. 'fix a capitalistic corporate problem with more capitalist profiteering'? i just don't see it. but you seem to have not answered my Q to you.

here; let me go fetch whitney webb's piece on the democrats' GND; i'd used in my critique of it months ago.

'Corporations See a Different Kind of “Green” in Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal”, mintpressnews, feb. 8, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” initiative was unveiled on Thursday and quickly became the target of disingenuous ridicule from both sides of the aisle. But as Whitney Webb highlights in this Dec 18, 2018 piece, there are very serious reasons to be concerned.
by Whitney Webb

i've heard naomi wolf's critique was similar, but it was all in a long video, so i didn't watch/listen. but trying to find webb's again, the first hit was popular resistance, and they said that klein's original vision was to cut the military budget by half. not.good.ehough., even at that.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis But they are promoting a new Age of Utopian Dreaming, which is what they want. Let's promote a better utopian dream.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus
i'll let you dream it. on later edit: to repeat myself: the bucks should be spent to mitigate the next climate disasters, as when the army corps of engineers' levies failed in new orleans, when hurricane disaster relief by the USA still hasn't happened...globally? name the nations: floods in bangladesh, famine in so many african nations (not all written by climate change), on and on. mitigation, as to me, it's all written in stone now, esp. as carbon ppm is not the largest forecaster of doom, but melting seacaps and glaciers, permafrost melting, methane unleashed on the ocean floor as the oceans heat up exponentially, and all.those.feedback.loops.

and no, it wasn't that the figures were dorky, just IP politics appeal, FDR mobilization, as well as to 'the justice dems' by naomi this changes everything klein. i will be featuring her a little bit in my coming diary on 'socialism 2019', however. ; )

sorry i'd neglected to put in the link to webb's critique above, but on a subtweet of one Justice Dems signing on she'd used i did find this:

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis how about the social order? Is that written in stone now too?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

snoopydawg's picture

Did the dudes in the plane know that they had been setup to fly over Iran because their leaders were hoping it would get shot down? If they didn't they know now. And they should be pissed. And if they did how do you talk someone into committing suicide? Can you imagine what was going through their minds as they got closer to the border.

This country is nuts. Insane.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

wendy davis's picture

@snoopydawg

i'm embarrassed to say i'd never even thought of that. oh, no, they couldn't have known, could they? nah. but yes, they do know now, and sure, they'd be pissed as all giddy-up.

nuts. insane. too stupid to yield to a multi-polar world. and your line from strife delivery about says it all.

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@snoopydawg n/t

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

wendy davis's picture

@on the cusp

me? nopers (blush).

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@wendy davis Bet the pilot and crew didn't volunteer for that shit!
What commander would order such a thing?
Want to bet nobody gets court-martialed?

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

snoopydawg's picture

@on the cusp

Operation Northwoods. Some military gents thought that it'd be a great idea to bomb their own ships and blame it on Cuba. Or fly a few planes into buildings for the same thing. This is why 9/11 being an inside job wasn't so far out of reach for some people. This had been planned before.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

wendy davis's picture

@on the cusp

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@wendy davis not intended as an insult.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

wendy davis's picture

@on the cusp

i hadn't even thought of snoopy's great question, and said that at least the crew couldn't have known. so no, i don't get why you'd called me a goober and the rest of whatever else you'd said. if you're kinda sorta apologizing for snark gone wrong, i'll accept that.

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@wendy davis @wendy davis was your clue.
I now realize how sensitive you are, and will start my joke comments with something like "this is my attempt at humor coming atcha!".
Or not comment at all.
More likely, not comment at all.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Seems that the UK will sail off the coast of Iran some sorta of vessel sure to cause world opinion to go against Iran and justify bombing them. Like maybe some (empty) hospital ship going to India to cure poor children with cancer. Or a cargo vessel full of teddy bears and kittens for the poor children of Africa.

Seems to me that the neocons are trying to force Trump into war given he declined his chance with the drone strike.

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wendy davis's picture

@MrWebster

but yes, well said. gotta say, though, my fave agitprop from the guardian was;

In making its decision, the UK had to weigh the possible knock-on effect on the Iran nuclear deal, as well as reprisals against British diplomats in Tehran that work in an embassy that was trashed by Iranian protesters in this century.

kewl, dudes.

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wendy davis's picture

but i'm awake since before first light most mornings. tonight's closing song will be (and yes, i know this was pre-1973 when there was a draft. (ending it was the shrewdest thing those masters of war mofos ever did). but the best anti war song ever, and richie havens owns it now. my thanks to both him and the mind-boggling song-writer peter yarrow. hard not to cry every time i hear this... g' night.

Tell the people they are safe now
Hunger stopped him, he lies still in his cell.
Death has gagged his accusations

We are free now, we can kill now,
We can hate now, now we can end the world
We're not guilty, he was crazy
And it's been going on for ten thousand years!

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozX0KazFoDk]

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@wendy davis @wendy davis of mine from the 60's he could do other people's songs that were good in their original version but still give a chill bump touch to them and I wasn't surprised to see the kind of person he was 'in person', not on a stage.

I was living in Boulder Colorado in the late 60's when they shut off all traffic on a big part of Pearl Street downtown, turning it into a great place to walk, with bookstores, restaurants, bars, a place to hear/watch musicians,jugglers,craft people, you name it,all along this mall.

One day walking past a Club on the mall club I saw 'Richie Havens Tonite!'on the marquee and right in front of it was a small group sitting around listening a guitarist that I saw in the same spot almost every day, but clapping along in rhythm on one of the benches was Richie Havens,so I stuck around.
He was so warm and friendly to everyone like they were all people he knew well and liked whenever anyone introduced themselves and it was Richie asking about their lives not talking about his own.
Of course he obliged when people asked for a song but first asking everyone else to join in on the song, and if we didn't know the words hum, or clap along so it was a very warm feeling among all these strangers and the music felt that way.

Then Richie handed the guy back his guitar,asked to hear more from him to which the guy gladly complied and Richie joined in with everyone else until it was time for him to go but not before thanking all of us for it.

Such a humble warm person and it was interesting to watch up close his style of playing guitar, open tuning and a lot of hard strumming but what also got my attention were his fingers, I mean that guy had big hands and really long fingers that made the guitar neck look mighty thin.

Crazy thing but I can't remember even one song we all sang that day but I certainly remember very well the warmth, the good feeling, among this group of strangers.

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

this; i must have had the tab open for too long. what a wonderful wee havens vignette, and from my old stompin' grounds too!. ; ) he really is the man, isn't he? it is kinda funny you can't remember one song, though...but that's a long time ago now.

he does exude warmth and so much soul, even on film. his performance at woodstock: mmmm, mmmmm.

now there's a whole walking mall downtown, musicians, jugglers, and what not. heck, i even used to sing on the mall when i was in massage school in the early 70s. ; )

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@wendy davis It was on the corner across from the Daily Camera and 'kitty cornered' from Tom's Tavern and Shannon's and if you ever went into Walt & Hanks more than once or twice you were there when I was.
I was always on the pool table up front, other than that I hung out up 'on the Hill' by the University in The Golden Cue Pool Room (still there when I last visited) and lived just north of town on Joe Hess's place across from where the big mobile home Lee Park got built.
I think that Joe's place had a lot in common with Steinbeck's 'Tortilla Flats',a lot of wine was drank, the chickens and goats wandered all over the place so you had to keep the front door or they'd be in there too and Joe would sometimes get calls from angry nearby residents telling him some of his horses (and/or goats) were loose, trampling down and eating their yards and shrubbery.

Joe would apologize then tell them he was 'sending some of my boys to catch them, then he'd tell us to let them eat another 10 or twenty minutes then go get them.

One last story. One day the call was about one of his ponies called Blaze that had been tethered to a big tire out in the field that had been seen trotting down the highway with the tire bouncing behind him, and for that we all left immediately to get him before the Sheriff's office could impound him. He was hard to catch and the traffic he caused didn't help.
I also had a girlfriend that lived in Ward where I lived at times in that cabin right beside the Post office and with a population of about 80 everyone knew everyone that came around.
Whenever you drive the Lee Hill Road to Boulder at your last high point coming down the mountain that mobile home park stands out as an eyesore, now it looks better than other mobile home places because they planted trees and did a lot of landscaping work.
But I will never like it and I remember myself and a few others that Joe let live on the place tried to think of a way to stop it from being built, we knew our sabotaging of the equipment only slowed it down but we did it anyway.

Joe knew the old man that sold the property(for 100k around 1969) and so we were allowed to continue to ride horses on that big piece of land until we got a legal notice about 'trespassing'.

I have many many stories around happenings around that 'stomping ground' as you mention it which where I did a lot of 'stomping around' all around the place myself.

Small world indeed.

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

but to neither shannon's nor walt & hank's that i can remember. i don't know how to play pool, me. i had a friend from the old days who liked some folks who hung out at tom's. oddly, she was an alcoholic, go figure. did you ever know mo siegel who'd made celestial seasonings? his wife oddly went there sometimes, and her with five kids. again, go figure. manly the bars i went to had live music, but one kinda cool thing about tom's was...it was Just a Bar.

i didn't know north boulder well, but i kinda remember it was sorta old farming land, but i love the stories you've told. ; ) ward i knew slightly, but what a hard to place to live if ya liked long daylight hours, iirc.

horse riding, oh cool! i love ponies, but i've tragically always gotten of horses...the wrong way. but i came back to mancos, co after i finished massage therapy school, it must have been 1976 or '77? i'd started college at CU in 1968, and hoo, boy, had boulder changed by the time i went back a decade later. soooo gentrified. for pay parking lots? ay yi yi!

thanks for the vignettes, and small world indeed.

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wendy davis's picture

that i've been watching some season or other of MI-5 ('spooks' in the UK), and the US CIA is intending to bomb 'critical targets in Iran' because iran just obtained the designs for the necessary 'nuclear trigger' for making nuclear bombs.

life imitating 'art' (of a sort).

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wendy davis's picture

(i'll need to watch and/or read the transcript later; chores 4 now)

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wendy davis's picture

‘Iran Ready to Enrich Uranium at Any Purity Level: Official’, tasnimnews.com, july 7, 2019

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Although the level of uranium enrichment in Iran suffices its present purposes, Tehran is fully prepared to increase the level and quantity of enrichment to any amount if there need be, Spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) said.

The current level of uranium enrichment is fulfilling Iran’s demands for fuel necessary for running its nuclear power plants, Behrouz Kamalvandi said on Sunday.
Although there is no urgent need for higher-grade enrichment to produce fuel for the Tehran nuclear reactor at present, Tehran is fully prepared to enrich uranium at any purity levels or quantities, he added.

The uranium used as fuel for nuclear power plants should have a purity level of 5 percent, he added, noting that the nuclear medicine industry and the nuclear propulsion systems consume 20% and 60% enriched uranium, respectively.
“We do not need fuel for the Tehran reactor for now, but will supply it if necessary,” Kamalvandi said, adding that the AEOI is ready for an “upward trend in uranium enrichment” under orders from senior authorities
.
On Sunday, Iran declared the second step in reduction of its commitments to the 2015 nuclear deal by ramping up the level of uranium enrichment to over 3.67 percent.
President Hassan Rouhani had warned on Wednesday that the second step of reduction in Iran’s commitments would take place on Sunday, saying, “On July 7, the level of (uranium) enrichment in Iran will not be 3.67 percent anymore, as we will abandon such a commitment and increase it (enrichment) to any amount that we need.”
Iran maintains that the new measures are not designed to harm the JCPOA, but to save the accord by creating a balance in the commitments.

[large snip]

Last week, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium exceeded 300 kg.

and here’s iranian FM javad zarif on the subject, also on july 7.

and FM zarif on twitter:

the IAEA has always claimed that iran is in compliance, and as john steppling said in the video: lots of testilyin' will go on at the IAEA meeting. jeezum crow.

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wendy davis's picture

yeah, i' watching treme for the fourth time... ; )

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g81-U6uSHX8]

afro-indians
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmgXIMbT3cU]

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