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“People are more or less represented by the states which they form, and these states by the governments which rule them. The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time – that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy not only of the accepted stratagems of war, but of deliberate lying and deception as well – and to a degree which seems to exceed the usage of former wars."

-- Sigmund Freud

News and Opinion

Afghanistan bomb: Trump finds the keys to the family gun cabinet

Donald Trump’s random use of the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan has dramatised the ongoing US failure to win the father of all wars – a conflict begun by George W Bush in 2001 when he attacked the Taliban regime in Kabul and which is now in its 16th year. Afghanistan is the longest-running conflict in US history, and for the Afghan people it has become an interminable agony. Civilian casualties are rising. In 2016 they were the highest the UN had ever recorded, with 11,500 non-combatants killed or wounded, a third of them children. ...

No plausible explanation has been forthcoming for why General John Nicholson, the US Afghanistan commander, suddenly decided to deploy this previously unused weapon of mass destructive power at this particular moment, or whether additional MOAB attacks are planned. Judging by his remarks after the attack, Trump seems unconcerned about the impact on civilians, or how such unilateral escalation may look to the rest of the world. ...

Given free rein, the US air force seems to be behaving particularly recklessly. It has yet to accept full responsibility for its disastrous bombing of an apartment building in Mosul last month, which killed as many as 150 people. This week, US-directed coalition airstrikes blew up 18 allied Syrian fighters by mistake. Last week’s naval cruise missile attacks on a Syrian airbase did nothing to halt the suffering of Syrian civilians, but they did enable Trump to pose as a tough international enforcer. Now he is adopting a similar posture on North Korea, where this week’s deployment of a nuclear-armed naval taskforce is turning a long-standing problem into a dangerous crisis.

Trump badly wants to prove he is the real deal as president. Brushing aside wider considerations about relations with Russia or the safety of Seoul residents, his principal focus seems to be on building up his personal profile as a tough commander-in-chief who is not to be trifled with. Having previously decried America’s role as world policeman, it is as if he has discovered the keys to the family gun cabinet. The Afghan bombing again suggests he cannot resist the urge to throw his weight around.

U.S. Drops Its Biggest Non-Nuclear Bomb on Afghans, Already Traumatized by Decades of War

“Mother of All Bombs” Never Used Before Due to Civilian Casualty Concerns

Fulfilling Donald Trump's campaign promise to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, the Pentagon dropped the “mother of all bombs” — one of its largest non-nuclear munitions — for the first time on Thursday, in Afghanistan. The 21,600 pound weapon was developed over a decade ago, but was never used due to concerns of possible massive civilian casualties.

The Pentagon said it used the weapon on an ISIS-affiliated group hiding in a tunnel complex in the Nangarhar province. The group, according to the Pentagon, is made up of former members of the Taliban. ...

US never dropped the MOAB in Iraq due to collateral damage concerns. I was on the targeting team that considered it @barbarastarrcnn https://t.co/ypq6uyVSbg

— marcgarlasco (@marcgarlasco) April 13, 2017

“We were going after a target, I would say, in a similar manner,” said Marc Garlasco, a former senior targeting official in the Bush-era Pentagon. “But the concern there was that once the weapon was put forward as an option, we reviewed it, did a collateral damage estimate, and well let’s just say the collateral damage was impressive. It was decided that the civilian harm greatly outweighed the military gain.”

“It’s got a huge blast radius. I mean, it’s beyond huge,” Garlasco said. “I’m sure the collateral damage estimate is going to be fairly extensive. And you’re not talking about just blast, and people within that blast, you have to consider secondary and tertiary effects of use of the weapon. So looking at things like: How does that affect the water supply to people? Is it going to destroy power within the area?”

Afghans Respond to Insult of U.S. Dropping Massive Bomb: "Would a Mother Do That to Any Children?"

This is an excellent and important article which provides context for the findings of MIT scientist Theodore Postol (posted in EB yesterday) regarding the (quite probably) faked intelligence upon which Trump's decision to bomb a Syrian regime military airbase (killing 9 civilians including 4 children) was based.

Did Al Qaeda Fool the White House Again?

With the U.S. intelligence community effectively silenced by the fact that the President has already acted, Theodore Postol, a technology and national security expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undertook his own review of the supposed evidence cited by Trump’s White House to issue a four-page “intelligence assessment” on April 11 asserting with “high confidence” that Assad’s military delivered a bomb filled with sarin on the town of Khan Sheikdoun on the morning of April 4.

Postol, whose analytical work helped debunk Official Washington’s groupthink regarding the 2013 sarin attack outside Damascus, expressed new shock at the shoddiness of the latest White House report (or WHR). Postol produced “a quick turnaround assessment” of the April 11 report that night and went into greater detail in an addendum on April 13, writing:

This addendum provides data that unambiguously shows that the assumption in the WHR that there was no tampering with the alleged site of the sarin release is not correct. This egregious error raises questions about every other claim in the WHR. … The implication of this observation is clear – the WHR was not reviewed and released by any competent intelligence expert unless they were motivated by factors other than concerns about the accuracy of the report.

The WHR also makes claims about ‘communications intercepts’ which supposedly provide high confidence that the Syrian government was the source of the attack. There is no reason to believe that the veracity of this claim is any different from the now verified false claim that there was unambiguous evidence of a sarin release at the cited crater. … The evidence that unambiguously shows that the assumption that the sarin release crater was tampered with is contained in six photographs at the end of this document.

... After reviewing other discrepancies in photos of the crater, Postol wrote

It is hard for me to believe that anybody competent could have been involved in producing the WHR report and the implications of such an obviously predetermined result strongly suggests that this report was not motivated by a serious analysis of any kind.

This finding is disturbing. It indicates that the WHR was probably a report purely aimed at justifying actions that were not supported by any legitimate intelligence. This is not a unique situation. President George W. Bush has argued that he was misinformed about unambiguous evidence that Iraq was hiding a substantial amount of weapons of mass destruction.

While Postol’s appeal for urgent attention to this pattern of the White House making false intelligence claims – now implicating three successive administrations – makes sense, the likelihood of such an undertaking is virtually nil. The embarrassment and loss of “credibility” for not only the U.S. political leadership but the major U.S. news outlets would be so severe, especially in the wake of the WMD fiasco in Iraq, that no establishment figure or organization would undertake such a review.

Russia, Syria & Iran demand no further US strikes on Syria – demand full UN investigation into chemical incident

Plot Hole

The main roadblock standing in the way of the establishment narrative that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had his air force use sarin gas on civilian noncombatants in Idlib earlier this month is the question of why. Why would he do such a thing at this point in time? Why, when he is winning the war, after the Trump administration announced it had no intention of deposing him, would Assad choose to do something he knows for a fact will turn the world against him and bring the rumblings of regime change back to his doorstep? Why? Even if he is the worst person in the world, why would he choose to do such a stupid, suicidal thing? It makes no sense to anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability.

Last week the New York Times published an unbelievably feeble attempt at answering this “why” question, which essentially boiled down to the assertion that Assad does such things as a show of dominance, to make the Syrians “feel defeated” and “as miserable as possible” because he’s basically a flesh-and-blood comic book supervillain. [More examples of this media narrative at link. - js] ...

So if you’re having trouble following, the argument we’re meant to believe is now as follows: Assad somehow faked the surrender his chemical arsenal three years ago or has procured more chemical weapons since, he used them at the most disadvantageous time possible knowing without a doubt that it would provoke retaliations from the west, and he did it as a show of strength and savagery to terrify the Syrian people into submission while simultaneously reassuring these same Syrian people that he doesn’t have such weapons or any intention to use them. This is of course coming from an extremely powerful media network with an extensive history of collaborating to manufacture consent for the military actions of the US government, which itself has an extensive history of using false flags to help facilitate said manufactured consent.

Right. Nothing suspicious about that at all.

{Along the same lines, see: Syria: Cui Bono? - js]

General H.R. McMaster wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to Syria

Senior White House and administration officials tell me Trump's national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria. McMaster's critics inside the administration say he wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to the Euphrates River Valley. His supporters insist he is only trying to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump's new strategy to defeat the self-described caliphate that controls territory in Iraq and Syria. ...

Trump himself has been on different sides of this issue. He promised during his campaign that he would develop a plan to destroy the Islamic State. At times during the campaign he said he favored sending ground troops to Syria to accomplish this task. More recently, Trump told Fox Business this week that that would not be his approach to fighting the Syrian regime: "We're not going into Syria," he said. ...

Trump's top advisers have failed to reach consensus on the Islamic State strategy. The White House and administration officials say Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford and General Joseph Votel, who is in charge of U.S. Central Command, oppose sending more conventional forces into Syria. Meanwhile, White House senior strategist Stephen Bannon has derided McMaster to his colleagues as trying to start a new Iraq War, according to these sources.

Besieged Syrian towns evacuated as huge people swap begins

The evacuation of four Syrian towns besieged by rebels and government forces began on Friday under a deal brokered by opposition backer Qatar and regime ally Iran. ...

Critics say the population movements are permanently changing the ethnic and religious map.

Activists said buses carrying rebels began leaving the rebel-held towns Madaya and Zabadani, near Damascus, on Friday morning in the first stage of the deal, which will also see the evacuation of residents from two pro-government Shia villages in northern Syria. All 16,000 residents of Fua and Kefraya were expected to leave, heading to government-held Aleppo, the coastal province of Latakia or Damascus.

More than 30,000 people are expected to be evacuated under the deal, which began on Wednesday with an exchange of prisoners between rebels and government forces. The evacuation of the four towns – two besieged by the army, and two by the rebels – had been due to start on 4 April but was repeatedly delayed.

U.S. May Launch Strike if North Korea Reaches for Nuclear Trigger

The U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test, multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

North Korea has warned that a "big event" is near, and U.S. officials say signs point to a nuclear test that could come as early as this weekend.

The intelligence officials told NBC News that the U.S. has positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region, one just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site.

American heavy bombers are also positioned in Guam to attack North Korea should it be necessary, and earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group was being diverted to the area.

The U.S. strike could include missiles and bombs, cyber and special operations on the ground.

North Korea blames rising tensions on Trump’s “aggressive” tweets

A North Korean government minister blamed Donald Trump’s aggressive tweets Friday for the “vicious cycle” of tension currently permeating the Korean peninsula, and issued a stark warning to the U.S. that any “reckless military maneuvers” will be met with a “powerful nuclear deterrent” — just days ahead of a visit to the region by Vice President Mike Pence. ...

The latest comments in this saga were made by North Korea’s vice foreign minister Han Song Ryol. “If the U.S. comes with reckless military maneuvers then we will confront it with the DPRK’s pre-emptive strike,” he told Associated Press. “We’ve got a powerful nuclear deterrent already in our hands, and we certainly will not keep our arms crossed in the face of a U.S. pre-emptive strike.”

Han may well have been reacting to a story published Thursday evening by NBC, which claimed the Pentagon was preparing to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea if Pyongyang pulls the trigger on another nuclear test. The report has not been corroborated by any other news outlets and a senior administration official told the AP it was “completely false” that the U.S. was preparing for a pre-emptive strike.

"It's just boys with toys!" - Trump's trigger-happy bombing spree

Give Sean Spicer a break. Hitler may not have dropped chemical weapons from planes, as he alleges Assad did, but Spicer shrewdly avoided creating an even bigger media frenzy. He could have cited a precedent much closer at hand. LBJ and Nixon dropped more than 13 million gallons worth of Agent Orange in Vietnam, on “innocent” men, women, and, yes Ivanka, babies, including “our own” troops. Some of the people who ordered that could probably still be rounded up for trial, if not droned.

-- Jeffrey St. Clair

Trump’s not the new Hitler... he’s the new Kaiser Bill

[L]et me propose an alternative to those who see Trump as Hitler sans the moustache (although retaining the bad haircut). Stick with Germany, its villainous past making it an agreeable foil for us Anglo-Saxons. Rather than focusing on the Third Reich, however, consider the Second. That’s right: Donald Trump as Kaiser Wilhelm II. ...

That Wilhelm was the last monarch to rule Germany was in no small measure due to his own folly. When he assumed the throne in 1888, Germany had already emerged as a great power and proud possessor of the world’s mightiest army. As Kaiser, Wilhelm was determined to make Germany greater still, his stated ambitions not differing materially from Donald Trump’s vow to ‘Make America Great Again’. The Kaiser was given to bluster, which concealed his own fears and insecurities. In his role as supreme war lord, he loved playing soldier, sitting astride some magnificent mount as grenadiers, uhlans, cuirassiers, and infantry regiments without number paraded by in review. He coveted colonies and wanted a navy that would stand comparison with that of his British cousin. He was impatient and ambitious.

Yet Wilhelm knew nothing of statecraft. A gambler and an opportunist, he lacked prudence. ‘He knew how to make the gestures, to utter the word, to strike the attitudes in the imperial style,’ Churchill wrote in profiling the Kaiser. ‘He could stamp and snort’ but he possessed neither character nor consistency nor foresight. His modus operandi was to raise a ruckus and to see what might happen. Impulse took precedence over calculation. In the long run-up to the war of 1914-1918, the Kaiser’s penchant for recklessness was on full display. On multiple occasions, he instigated crises that brought Europe to the brink of war over issues that no European leader viewed worth fighting for. Take the Agadir Crisis of 1911. Annoyed that France was asserting primary influence in Morocco without properly accounting for German interests there, the Kaiser opted for a show of force. Dispatching the gunboat Panther seemed to suggest Germany was looking for a fight. Thus did Wilhelm come within an eyelash of dragging all of Europe into a conflagration over an issue of trifling importance.

Just three years later, in no small measure due to the Kaiser’s own miscalculations, Europe plunged headlong into that abyss. The ensuing cataclysm cost Wilhelm his throne, his empire, and much else. No participant emerged with less than grievous wounds. In Donald Trump we may have another Wilhelm II on our hands — someone who poses a danger, not because he is intent on evil, but because he is erratic, unpredictable, and totally oblivious to how others may interpret his words and deeds.

William Astore is thinking about Germany, too:

What Does an “America-First” Foreign Policy Actually Mean?

As an historian, I’ve spent much time studying the twentieth-century German military. In the years leading up to World War I, Germany was emerging as the superpower of its day, yet paradoxically it imagined itself as increasingly hemmed in by enemies, a nation surrounded and oppressed. Its leaders especially feared a surging Russia. This fear drove them to launch a preemptive war against that country. (Admittedly, they attacked France first in 1914, but that’s another story.) That incredibly risky and costly war, sparked in the Balkans, failed disastrously and yet it would only be repeated on an even more horrific level 25 years later. The result: tens of millions of dead across the planet and a total defeat that finally put an end to German designs for global dominance. The German military, praised as the “world’s best” by its leaders and sold to its people as a deterrent force, morphed during those two world wars into a doomsday machine that bled the country white, while ensuring the destruction of significant swaths of the planet.

Today, the U.S. military similarly praises itself as the “world’s best,” even as it imagines itself surrounded by powerful threats (China, Russia, a nuclear North Korea, and global terrorism, to start a list).  Sold to the American people during the Cold War as a deterrent force, a pillar of stability against communist domino-tippers, that military has by now morphed into a potential tipping force all its own.

Recall here that the Trump administration has reaffirmed America’s quest for overwhelming nuclear supremacy.  It has called for a "new approach" to North Korea and its nuclear weapons program.  (Whatever that may mean, it’s not a reference to diplomacy.) Even as nuclear buildups and brinksmanship loom, Washington continues to spread weaponry -- it’s the greatest arms merchant of the twenty-first century by a wide mark -- and chaos around the planet, spinning its efforts as a “war on terror” and selling them as the only way to “win.”

In May 1945, when the curtain fell on Germany’s last gasp for global dominance, the world was fortunately still innocent of nuclear weapons. It’s different now. Today’s planet is, if anything, over-endowed with potential doomsday machines -- from those nukes to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

That’s why it’s vitally important to recognize that President Trump’s “America-first” policies are anything but isolationist in the old twentieth century meaning of the term; that his talk of finally winning again is a recipe for prolonging wars guaranteed to create more chaos and more failed states in the Greater Middle East and possibly beyond; and that an already dangerous Cold War policy of “deterrence,” whether against conventional or nuclear attacks, may now have become a machine for perpetual war that could, given Trump’s bellicosity, explode into some version of doomsday.

Or, to put the matter another way, consider this question: Is North Korea’s Kim Jong-un the only unstable leader with unhinged nuclear ambitions currently at work on the world stage?

Contractor Whose Business Model Is Price Gouging the Pentagon Has Powerful Wall St. Backers

On March 21, first-term Congressman Ro Khanna sent a letter asking the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate TransDigm, an aerospace supplier he accused of cornering the market on proprietary parts for military aircraft and then jacking up the prices. The letter rebounded across Washington and Wall Street. TransDigm stock dropped over 10 percent in two days. ... But by April 11, TransDigm stock was back up to $236.48, virtually the same level it was at the day before Khanna’s letter. ... It appears that the hedge funds, Wall Street banks, and highly paid executives cashing in on the scheme are confident that they can use the power and influence that comes with big money to prevent public outrage or government investigations from ruining their party.

TransDigm, based in Cleveland, is more of a private equity-style conglomerate than an aerospace company. The company uses borrowed money to buy companies that make aerospace parts used in both military and civilian aircraft. About 30 percent of its revenue comes from military sales. And according to TransDigm’s 2016 annual report, “about 80% of our sales come from products for which we believe we are the sole-source provider.”

Because the parts are required for aircraft, TransDigm can raise prices after acquisition without any expected loss in sales. For example, it bought a company that makes motor rotors from GE in 2013. After renaming the subsidiary Whippany, TransDigm raised the rotor’s price ninefold, from $654 to $5,474. Similarly, a vibration panel from Aerosonic rose from $67 to $271. A cable assembly from Harco jumped from $1,737 to $7.863. While the increases are large, they’re not enough to meaningfully affect the total cost of an aircraft, allowing TransDigm’s profiteering to fly below the radar.

The government has rules preventing price gouging from sole-source contractors, by forcing the business to provide information on the cost of production. But TransDigm circumvents this, Khanna and critics allege, through “a network of captive distributors” that create a fake market. Defense procurement officers think they’re choosing between distributors to purchase the part, but the distributors fail to disclose that they all have the same corporate parent: TransDigm. Therefore, government officials don’t know to ask for additional cost information.

CIA director brands WikiLeaks a 'hostile intelligence service'

Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, has branded WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service,” saying it threatens democratic nations and joins hands with dictators. In his first public remarks since becoming chief of the US spy agency in February, Pompeo focused on the group and other leakers of classified information like Edward Snowden as one of the key threats facing the United States.

“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence... And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organisations,” said Pompeo. “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Pompeo compared WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange to leakers of the pre-internet days like former CIA official Philip Agee.

On Wednesday, Assange published an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which he said his group’s mission was the same as America’s most respected newspapers: “to publish newsworthy content. WikiLeaks’s sole interest is expressing constitutionally protected truths,” he said, professing “overwhelming admiration for both America and the idea of America.”

Lawmakers Who Championed Repeal of Web Browsing Privacy Protections Raked in Telecom Campaign Cash

The two lawmakers most responsible for rolling back landmark internet browsing privacy protections were richly rewarded by telecommunication giants. ... Verizon, AT&T, Cox Enterprises, the U.S. Telecom Association, and CTIA, the trade association for the major cell phone carriers, appeared to single out the original sponsors of the repeal resolution — Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. — for particularly generous campaign contributions.

A Verizon political action committee filing shows that most lawmakers received between $500 and $1,000 from the firm during the first three months of this year. But Flake received $8,000 and Blackburn received $4,500. Blackburn received $5,000 from the CTIA, the most of any House member. Speaker Paul Ryan only received $2,500 from the group during the same time period. The U.S. Telecom Association, which includes CenturyLink and Verizon, also singled out Blackburn for more donations than any other lawmaker in the beginning of this year, providing $3,000 to her campaign account.

On Contact: The Failing Education System with Nikhil Goyal

Texas ordered to revisit case of murderer sentenced to death based on racial testimony

When Duane Buck was sentenced to death for a double murder in Texas 20 years ago, a psychologist had testified that Buck was especially dangerous because he was black. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals decided that Buck is entitled to a new sentencing trial, to being taken off death row — and maybe even to being released. Buck, who is now 53 and has been on death row since 1997, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals denied his appeal, arguing that his defense at his original trial was inadequate. ...

In February, the Supreme Court ruled in Buck’s favor, saying the 5th Circuit had erred in denying his appeal and sending the case back to the lower court for reconsideration. Texas has 180 days to decide Buck’s fate. Under Texas law, prosecutors must persuade jurors of a defendant’s future dangerousness in order to get the death penalty, and the jury needs to unanimously agree. The Supreme Court’s opinion says the decision by Buck’s attorneys to ask the psychologist about his race played an important role in his death penalty conviction.

“No competent defense attorney would introduce such evidence about his own client,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. ... One of the two lawyers defending Buck was Jerry Guerinot, known for losing every single one of his 21 capital punishment cases in Harris County, Texas. He has been described as “the worst lawyer in the U.S.”

Trump Caves to Big Business in Epic “Bank of Boeing” Flip-Flop

The Export-Import Bank is a big corporate welfare program that likes to keep a low profile. But in the past few years, the anti-establishment Republicans of the House Freedom Caucus and a handful of progressive Democrats including Bernie Sanders turned it into a rousing populist issue, first refusing to re-authorize the bank, then blocking nominations of new board members.

The bank dishes out billions of dollars of taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to a few U.S. corporations who use the subsidies to sell their goods abroad. Critics have dubbed it the “Bank of Boeing” because the aerospace giant receives more assistance than any other single firm; in 2014, $7.4 billion in long-term guarantees — 68 percent of the total made by the Ex-Im Bank — were for Boeing.

Candidate Donald Trump was strongly on the side of the reformers. [See article for details. - js] But what Trump said then is no longer operative. As on many other issues, it turns out either Trump didn’t mean what he said, or he’s been manipulated into changing his mind, or both. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Trump put the question to rest.

“It turns out that, first of all, lots of small companies are really helped, the vendor companies,” Trump told the Journal, now giving lip service to precisely the kind of deceptive rhetoric he once mocked. He also justified his about face by saying other countries also subsidize exports. “But also, maybe more important, other countries give [assistance]. When other countries give it we lose a tremendous amount of business.”

Former Trump adviser Carter Page held 'strong pro-Kremlin views', says ex-boss

A former adviser to Donald Trump who is at the centre of an FBI investigation was exhibiting “strongly pro-Kremlin” ideology almost two decades ago, his former employer has told the Guardian.

Carter Page, who was reportedly being monitored by the FBI last summer because of suspicions about his ties to Russia, was hired in 1998 by the Eurasia Group, a major US consulting firm that advises banks and multinational corporations, but left the firm shortly thereafter.

The account of Page’s abrupt departure from the Eurasia Group suggests that concerns about Page and questions about his links to Russia were known in some professional circles for nearly two decades and long before Page joined Trump’s successful presidential campaign. Now Page – who has denied all wrongdoing – is at the centre of overlapping FBI and congressional investigations into possible cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

The former Merrill Lynch banker, who was relatively unknown in politics before he was touted as being a foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign, has steadfastly declined to comment on how he got involved in the Republican campaign. He told ABC News on Thursday that he would not disclose the name of the person who recruited him into the campaign because it would fuel conspiracy theories and have their “lives disrupted”.

Ian Bremmer, the influential president of the Eurasia Group, on Thursday used Twitter to call Page the “most wackadoodle” alumni of the firm in history. Bremmer told the Guardian that Page had worked at Eurasia for three months.

The Democratic party is undermining Bernie Sanders-style candidates

In a special election triggered by Trump’s tapping of Mike Pompeo for CIA director, a Berniecrat named James Thompson came painfully close to winning a Kansas Congressional seat that had been red for over two decades, and his party didn’t even try to help him. ... After beating an establishment Democrat in the primary, Thompson promised to take on Trump and the Republicans, as well as the state’s unpopular Republican governor Sam Brownback and Kansas-headquartered oligarchs the Koch brothers. ...

While his candidacy initially seemed like a long shot in a district that had re-elected Pompeo just last year with 60.7% of the vote, in the weeks before the election, the race grew unexpectedly close. ... Given our current political climate, you’d think the Democrats would have jumped at the chance to take back a Congressional seat and demonstrate opposition to Trump, but you’d be wrong. While Thompson managed to raise $292,000 without his party’s help, 95% of which came from individuals, neither the DNC, DCCC, nor even the Kansas Democratic Party would help him grow that total in any substantial way. His campaign requested $20,000 from the state Democratic Party and was denied. They later relented and gave him $3,000. (According to the FEC, the Party had about $145,000 on hand.) The national Democratic Party gave him nothing until the day before the election, when it graced him with some live calls and robo-calls. He lost by seven percentage points.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Perez confirmed the DNC would not be giving Thompson a dime. “We can make progress in Kansas,” he said. “There are thousands of elections every year, though. Can we invest in all of them? That would require a major increase in funds.” Fact check: the DNC has a fund just for Congressional elections, of which there are just ten this year. Contrast this with what Perez said just a few months earlier when he promised “a 50-state strategy” complete with “rural outreach and organizers in every zip code.” In a post-victory interview with NPR, he specifically name checked Kansas as a place Democrats could win. Wither the sudden about face?

In defending their decision, party mouthpieces have taken the absurd line that giving Thompson money would have actually hurt his chances of winning, because then everyone would have known he’s a Democrat, and Kansans hate Democrats. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate these are the same people who keep saying the party doesn’t need a new direction.)

Scott Pruitt hails era of environmental deregulation in speech at coal mine

Scott Pruitt, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, heralded a new era of environmental deregulation on Thursday, in a speech at a coal mine that was fined last year for contaminating local waterways with toxic materials.

Pruitt said the new “back to basics” agenda for the EPA would focus on devolving oversight of clean air and water to individual states, and bolstering jobs in industries such as coal, oil and gas.

This new agenda for the EPA, bitterly opposed by many of the agency’s staff, was unveiled at the Harvey mine in Sycamore, Pennsylvania, on Thursday. Pruitt, who was presented with an honorary mining helmet, said the federal government’s “war” on coal was over in a speech to assembled miners.

“The coal industry was nearly devastated by years of regulatory overreach, but with new direction from President Trump, we are helping to turn things around for these miners and for many other hardworking Americans,” said Pruitt.

“Back to basics means returning EPA to its core mission: protecting the environment by engaging with state, local, and tribal partners to create sensible regulations that enhance economic growth.”

New study shows worrisome signs for Greenland ice

For ice-shelf collapse, there’s a complex process that occurs at the bottom of the ice. Part of the ice is floating out over water and part of it is grounded on land. Warm water can get underneath the ice, lift it up, and melt the ice from below. The bedrock underneath the ice sheet is not flat or gradually changing. There are undulations that rise and fall and change the water-ice-ground connection. Topology called “retrograde” can make it easier for ice to melt and can increase the rate of ice shelf collapse. So, scientists have a real interest in learning about the topology of the land underneath ice sheets so they can better predict ice collapse and sea level rise.

This brings us to a new study published by the American Geophysical Union in a journal called Geophysical Letters Review. The scientists use gravitometry to obtain a high-quality picture of the land underneath a very fast moving part of Greenland ice called the Jacobshavn Isbrae. ... They found that the trough underneath the ice was not symmetrically shaped; the northern part of the trough was deeper than the southern part. Further, the trough was estimated to be 300-400 meters deeper than previously thought. They also showed that the trough is retrograde, which means that it favors a fast retreat of the glacier in the coming years and decades. ...

Greenland by itself has enough ice to cause many meters of sea level rise. If you live near the coast, the question of “when” is really important. This paper suggests that “when” may be sooner than we hoped.

Noam Chomsky: The Prospects for Survival

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Trump Lurches into Chaos and Conflict

What Have We Done: Executive Power, Drones, and Trump?

Doubling Down on America’s Misadventure in Yemen

F the USA

The Strangers Who Got Snowden’s Secrets in the Mail

Roaming Charges: Love at First Strike

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A Little Night Music

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Okie Dokie Stomp

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Atomic Energy

Clarence Gatemouth Brown - Boogie Rambler

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - I've Been Mistreated

Freddy King and Clarence Gatemouth Brown - Funky Mama

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Piney Brown Blues

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Taking My Chance

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Guitar in My Hand

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Pale Dry Boogie Pt1

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Pale Dry Boogie Pt2

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Boogie Uproar