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"Democrats, who almost universally backed the torch-bearing fascists in Ukraine, have been grousing about Trump’s use of the term Alt-Left. But the president swiped it from Democratic Party operatives such as Neera Tanden, Joan Walsh and Joy Reid, who have been using the expression to smear Bernie Sanders and his rag-tag gang of Sandernistas as left-wing zealots bent on taking over the Democratic Party.

These same liberal functionaries are now demanding that Trump fire Steve Bannon to prove he’s serious about confronting racists. By the same measure, shouldn’t the Democrats expel all of their own members who voted for the racist Clinton Crime Bill, which has arguably inflicted more damage on black America than any legislation since the Fugitive Slave Act? (This would, of course, include Bernie Sanders, who remains unrepentant about his vote.)"

-- Jeffrey St Clair

News and Opinion

U.S. forces to stay in Syria for decades, say militia allies

Washington's main Syrian ally in the fight against Islamic State says the U.S. military will remain in northern Syria long after the jihadists are defeated, predicting enduring ties with the Kurdish-dominated region. The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of militias dominated by the Kurdish YPG, believes the United States has a "strategic interest" in staying on, SDF spokesman Talal Silo told Reuters.

"They have a strategy policy for decades to come. There will be military, economic and political agreements in the long term between the leadership of the northern areas (of Syria) ... and the U.S. administration," Silo said. ...

The SDF and YPG dominate a swathe of northern Syria where Kurdish-led autonomous administrations have emerged since the onset of the Syrian conflict in 2011. The YPG and its allies hold an uninterrupted 400-km (250-mile) stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border. ...

"They (recently) referred to the possibility of securing an area to prepare for a military airport. These are the beginnings - they're not giving support just to leave. America is not providing all this support for free," Silo said. He suggested northern Syria could become a new base for U.S. forces in the region. "Maybe there could be an alternative to their base in Turkey," he added, referring to the Incirlik air base. The head of the YPG said last month the United States had established seven military bases in areas of northern Syria controlled by the YPG or SDF, including a major air base near Kobani, a town at the border with Turkey.

Settlement Reached in C.I.A. Torture Case

A settlement in the lawsuit against two psychologists who helped devise the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal interrogation program was announced on Thursday, bringing to an end an unusual effort to hold individuals accountable for the techniques the agency adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lawyers for the three plaintiffs in the suit, filed in 2015 in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., said the former prisoners were tortured at secret C.I.A. detention sites. The settlement with the psychologists, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, came after a judge last month urged resolving the case before it headed to a jury trial in early September.

The plaintiffs — two former detainees and the family of a third who died in custody — had sought unspecified punitive and compensatory damages. The terms of the settlement are confidential, and it is unclear whether a financial payout was involved. The parties agreed to a joint statement in which the psychologists said that they had advised the C.I.A. and that the plaintiffs had suffered abuses, but that they were not responsible.

In a phone interview, one of the plaintiffs, Mohamed Ben Soud, said through a translator: “I feel that justice has been served. Our goal from the beginning was justice and for people to know what happened in this black hole that was run by the C.I.A.’s offices.”

US Begins Korea War Games, Not Peace Talks

North Korea: Tillerson rejects Bannon claim that military strike is off table

The US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has insisted that Washington is still considering using force against North Korea, in a public challenge to claims by the White House’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, that “there is no military solution” to the nuclear crisis.

Following talks with Japan’s foreign and defence ministers in Washington on Thursday, Tillerson said the US was seeking a peaceful solution to the standoff with Pyongyang but reserved the right to use military force if political and economic pressure failed to curb the regime’s nuclear ambitions.

The US was “prepared militarily” to respond, he said.

In an interview with The American Prospect published on Wednesday, Bannon said of North Korea’s nuclear threats: “There is no military solution, forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

Tillerson declined to respond directly to Bannon’s remarks but said he and the defence secretary, James Mattis, had Trump’s full support in keeping the military option open.

The World Trusts Putin More Than Trump on Foreign Affairs

Russian President Vladimir Putin inspires little confidence when it comes to handling world affairs, a Pew Research Center survey showed. But he still outshines his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump.

“Although confidence in Putin’s handling of foreign affairs is generally low, in many countries he is more trusted than American President Donald Trump,” Pew wrote in a survey focused on Russia’s power and influence. Pew is a Washington-based non-partisan research group.

A median 60 percent of people in 37 countries, including the U.S., said they lack confidence in the Russian leader’s actions in world affairs, versus 26 percent who said he’s doing a good job. Pew didn’t provide matching statistics for Trump in a survey focused on Russia, but of the 36 countries canvassed on who they trust more, 22, including Germany, France and Japan, trust Putin more than Trump, according to the pollster’s 2017 spring survey.

The survey was conducted Feb. 16 to May 8, before Trump set global markets on edge in August by tweeting threats to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea should the hermit regime threaten U.S. territory with any of its intercontinental ballistic missiles.

An excellent essay, here's a taste:

Welcome to the Post-American World

We were the sole superpower, Earth’s hyperpower, its designated global sheriff, the architect of our planetary future.  After five centuries of great power rivalries, in the wake of a two-superpower world that, amid the threat of nuclear annihilation, seemed to last forever and a day (even if it didn’t quite make it 50 years), the United States was the ultimate survivor, the victor of victors, the last of the last.  It stood triumphantly at the end of history.  In a lottery that had lasted since Europe's wooden ships first broke out of a periphery of Eurasia and began to colonize much of the planet, the United States was the chosen one, the country that would leave every imperial world-maker from the Romans to the British in its shadow. ...

As Bush put it in a speech at West Point in 2002, “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” In that year, the U.S. National Security Strategy similarly called for the country to "build and maintain" its military power “beyond challenge.” What a soaring dream it all was!  In response to the destruction of part of the Pentagon and those towers in New York City, a small group of top officials in Washington, long waiting for just such an opportunity, were determined to impose their version of order and democracy, military-first, on significant parts of the planet and no one would be capable of resisting. Not for long anyway.

Almost 16 years later, you know how that dream of domination turned out, but to Washington’s power players at the time it all seemed so obvious. Except for a few retrograde Muslim rebels, it was clearly no one else’s planet but ours to organize as we wished. The Soviet Union was already an instant historical memory, its empire scattered to the winds, and Russia itself largely immiserated. The Chinese had a capitalist economy of no small means (even if run by a Communist Party), but as a military force, as a great power, they were anything but impressive. And if you looked at the rest of the world, there were no other potential great powers, no less superpowers, on any imaginable horizon.

Given the history of the Global War on Terror and of the stunning inability of the U.S. military to impose Washington’s will, no less its planetary dreams, on more or less anyone, it took an awful long time for such thinking to begin to die.  And before it did, the political class, in a fervor of defensive exaggeration, began insisting in a mantra-like way on the “indispensability” and “exceptionality” of... well, us.  It was as if the sense of decline most Americans had started feeling in their bones wasn’t happening.  Of course, the constant invocation of the country’s singular specialness should itself have signaled just how wrong things were, because when you're truly indispensable and exceptional you don’t need to repeatedly say so (or even say it at all). 

It took a reality TV star with a curious comb-over who had run a set of casinos into the ground to pick up a Reagan-era slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and bodysurf it into the White House.  He did so in part on the widespread sense in the American heartland that, a quarter-century after the Soviet Union imploded, the U.S. was indeed in decline, even heading for the exit at a creep, not a gallop.  The “again” in that slogan was the telltale signal that the billionaire “businessman” (and classic American huckster) had an intuitive handle on an American world of failed war-making and raging inequality about which both his Republican opposition and his Democratic opponent in election 2016, all still priming the pump of indispensability and exceptionality, seemed clueless. 

Assange meets US congressman, vows to prove Russia did not leak him documents

Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.

Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.

“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year's presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails."

Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump.

“Julian also indicated that he is open to further discussions regarding specific information about the DNC email incident that is currently unknown to the public,” he said.

Our cover this week pic.twitter.com/lYD3HLXvSC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 17, 2017

An early look at next week's cover, "Blowhard," by David Plunkert: https://t.co/VuBXtwJCUQ pic.twitter.com/zsDHVOBBQO

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) August 17, 2017

Unpublished Trump cover sketch art from 2016 pic.twitter.com/qrBFzAhq4p

— David Plunkert (@plunkert) August 13, 2017

Trump's evangelical panel remains intact as others disband

Donald Trump was forced to disband two business advisory councils and an infrastructure panel after some of America’s most prominent business leaders fled their posts, protesting against Trump’s statements appeasing white nationalist marchers at the weekend rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Finally a leader in WH. Jobs returning, N Korea backing down, bold truthful stmt about #charlottesville tragedy.So proud of @realdonaldtrump

— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) August 16, 2017

But the president’s religious evangelical advisory board, a mix of radical born-again preachers, televangelists and conservative political influencers, still stands pristine. Not only have members avoided criticism of the president, while occasionally scolding the violence in general – some have been openly supportive of Trump’s statements assigning blame “on many sides” and slamming those who turned up to oppose the militant neo-Nazis.

Anne Frank Center: Trump's Personal Twitter Account Amplifies Hate and Should Be Suspended

'Deconstruction of the Administrative State' on Hold? Steve Bannon Out, Say Reports

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's chief strategist, is reportedly out at the White House, according to multiple sources.

Axios's Jonathan Swan initially reported Friday that a decision on whether Bannon would keep his job was "imminent," and subsequent reports indicate that Bannon is departing.

It is unclear whether Bannon resigned or if Trump, who has of late been under pressure to remove the "nationalist wing" of his administration, ultimately decided to fire him.

Steve Bannon's work is done. Donald Trump can fire him now

While reports suggest that Bannon’s job as chief strategist is in the balance amid external calls for his dismissal and internal rivals pushing for his ouster, he has remained, largely because of the power he wields as a symbol of the “alt-right” movement inside the Trump administration.

The New York Times has reported that Congressman Mark Meadows, leader of the House’s Freedom Caucus, warned the president that he would lose his base without Bannon. The result is a stalemate. Bannon has managed to hold his following over the head of Trump, and so he has stayed his own execution.

In fact, polls suggest a hard core of unwavering support for Trump that will not suddenly abandon him with the loss of a strategist, whom Trump once uncharitably called “a guy who works for me”. If Bannon is sacked, Trump will still have the alt-right credentials the two built together to mobilize and transform the Republican base.

There’s another reason why firing Bannon wouldn’t be a huge loss: his work is largely done. ... For white communities with nationalist grievances, the Trump administration’s list of “achievements” looks like this:

• 24 January 2017: Withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
• 25 January: Heightened immigration enforcement and broadened the category of people subject to deportation.
  
• 25 January: Ordered the construction of a border wall and the tripling of border agents.
  
• 25 January: Ordered the removal of funding from so-called sanctuary cities.
  
• 26 January: Ordered a weekly list of crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities.
  
• 27 January: Suspended the US Refugee Admissions program.
  
• 27 January: Ordered a ban of people from seven Muslim-majority countries.
  
• 6 March: Ordered a ban of people from six Muslim-majority countries.
  
• 18 May: Triggered the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
  
• 19 July: Convened a commission on voter fraud that will demand voter data from states, at the risk of disenfranchising minority voters.
  
• 1 August : Ordered an investigation of “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions”.
  
• 2 August: Supported bill to cut all documented immigration into the US in half.
  
• 15 August: Declined to specifically condemn neo-Nazis and white nationalists after terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia.
  
• 17 August : Criticized the removal of “beautiful” Confederate monuments in the American south.

Weekend Update: Tina Fey on Protesting After Charlottesville - SNL

To See or to Nazi: Trump’s Moral Blindspot is America’s

We’ve have entered the time of mock outrage. The press was shocked that armed neo-Nazis were marching through the streets of Charlottesville shouting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” Republicans were aghast that many of these thugs were wearing Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps. Democrats were indignant that Republicans didn’t call for Trump’s head on a platter. Everyone felt very good about how bad they felt.

In this national psychodrama, Trump plays the role of the Great Revealer. Trump has pulled back the curtains on the cesspool of American politics for the inspection of all but the most timid. Trump speaks the forbidden words that many other Americans secretly think. Trump utters these heresies self-righteously and without shame. Therefore he must be punished for putting the system at risk. He must be lashed for his shamelessness. He must be castigated for exposing the sickness at the heart of the American project. ...

Trump is a familiar character to most of the world. He is the unvarnished embodiment of the American bully, who has stalked the planet for the last century taking what it wants and leaving corpses and ruin in its wake. There is in Trump no pretense to the humane, no guise of benevolence or cloak of empathy. He is the threatening figure he appears to be, which is, of course, exactly how you want your adversary to appear.

The poor recognize Trump for what he is: he’s the guy who collects the rent, who turns the water and electricity off, who spits at you when you ask for money for food, who sends your kid off to war while his goes big game hunting, who snitches your mom out to the cops for her Oxycontin habit. They don’t need any false words from Trump to heal their shock about the evil rampage in Charlottesville. They aren’t shocked by Charlottesville. They’ve lived that reality most of their lives. And they aren’t startled that the perpetrators have sympathizers in the government.

Now middlebrow America is getting a glimpse of itself through the mirror of its own bombastic, vindictive and racist leader. He has fractured the rituals and conventions that desensitized most Americans from what our system is really all about. The elites fear Trump because he gives the game away. He personifies the reality they’ve been working for decades to conceal. The role of most presidents has been to comfort the nation when it recoils at a sudden view of its own depravity, from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib, assuring the citizenry that the system isn’t as malign as it appears. Trump pours acid on the wounds, as when he impertinently reminded the country that its two most revered founders where big time slave-owners.

Texas Women Will Now Be Forced to Take Out 'Rape Insurance' for Abortion

On Tuesday, August 15, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 214 into law while flanked by the bill's primary champions in the state legislature. As one might guess from their rictus grins, this law concerns one of Texas Republicans' favorite punching bags: reproductive rights.

Nicknamed the "rape insurance" bill for its cruel lack of exceptions for rape, incest, or fetal abnormalities, HB 214 mandates abortion coverage be removed from all private, state-offered, and Affordable Care Act insurance plans and sold as a separate — and unprecedentedly specific — policy. What this means in theory is that people who want to be covered in the event that they need an abortion will have to purchase extra insurance for it. In practice, it means insurance companies may simply stop covering the procedure altogether, the profitability of an "abortion-only" add-on being questionable at best.

As with many such laws, the state GOP's stated purpose is to "prevent those with moral, religious and philosophical objections from having to pay for the procedure." "As a firm believer in Texas values I am proud to sign legislation that ensures no Texan is ever required to pay for a procedure that ends the life of an unborn child," said Governor Abbott in a press release. "Under this new law Texans will not be forced to pay for elective abortions through their insurance plans." He did not say what Texans who want to subsidize abortions via group health plans are supposed to do, or what religious groups with objections to other legal medical procedures should do to avoid funding them—Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, who are still paying for blood transfusions despite believing it's a sin to take blood from someone else.

Hmmm, elections must be on the way. Democrats are warming up their big "head fake" to the left.

Centrist Democrats Riled as Warren Says Days of 'Lukewarm' Policies Are Over

In a wide-ranging and fiery keynote speech last weekend at the 12th annual Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) relentlessly derided moderate Democratic pundits calling for the party to move "back to the center" and declared that Democrats must unequivocally "fight for progressive solutions to our nation's challenges."

As The Hill's Amie Parnes reported on Friday, Warren's assertion during the weekend gathering that progressives are "the heart and soul of today's Democratic Party"—and not merely a "wing"—raised the ire of so-called "moderate" Democrats, who have insisted that progressive policies won't sell in swing states. ...

Specifically, Warren took aim at a recent New York Times op-ed by Democratic commentators Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, who argued that Democrats must moderate their positions in order to take back Congress and, ultimately, the presidency. Warren ridiculed this argument as a call for a return to Bill Clinton-era policies that "lock[ed] up non-violent drug offenders and ripp[ed] more holes in our economic safety net."

For months media outlets have speculated that Warren is gearing up for a 2020 presidential run, but she has denied the rumors.

As Arctic Sea Ice Disappears, 2,000 Walruses Mob Remote Alaska Beach

A remote barrier island off Alaska's northwest coast has been mobbed by thousands of Pacific walruses in recent weeks in the earliest known "haul out" for the species. Their arrival is tied to shrinking Arctic sea ice and follows one of the hottest months on record. It also comes as Arctic sea ice extent is near a record low for this time of year. ...

Arctic sea ice extent for July 2017 averaged 3.17 million square miles, marking the fifth lowest July in satellite records going back to 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Last month's ice coverage was 610,000 square miles below the long-term average from 1981 to 2010.

Walruses rely on the ice as they hunt for food. They typically dive from floating blocks of ice to feed on clams on the ocean floor. As the ice floes melt, however, this vanishing habitat recedes farther north, beyond the shallow waters of the continental shelf and into Arctic waters too deep for the foraging animals. Then they haul up on shore, crowding together, sometimes in herds of thousands, where deadly stampedes can occur.

Pollution Solutions

We tell ourselves that we cherish efficiency. Yet we have created a transport system whose design principle is profligacy. Metal carriages (that increase in size every year), each carrying one or two people, travel in parallel to the same destinations. Lorries shifting identical goods in opposite directions pass each other on 2000-mile journeys. Competing parcel companies ply the same routes, in vans that are largely empty. We could, perhaps, reduce our current vehicle movements by 90% with no loss of utility, and a major gain in our quality of life.

But to contest this peculiar form of insanity is, as I know to my cost, to be widely declared insane. Look at how advertising is dominated by car companies, and you begin to understand the drive to ensure that this counter-ergonomic system persists. Look at the lobbying power of the motor industry and its support in the media, and you see why successive plans to address pollution seemed designed to fail.

Suggest a neater system, and you will be shouted down by people insisting that they don’t want to live in a planned economy. But in this respect (and others) we do live in a planned economy. These days transport planners make a few concessions to cyclists, pedestrians and buses, but their overriding aim is still to maximise the flow of private vehicles. Rather than encouraging the more efficient use of existing infrastructure, they keep increasing the space into which inefficiency can expand. ...

Electric cars solve only part of the problem. They occupy less air, but just as much road and parking space. The resources required to manufacture them – and the volume of mines and ports and processing plants that wreck rare habitats around the world – might even intensify. While the total carbon emissions and air pollution caused by electric cars will be lower than those the fossil system produces, electricity use will have to rise. If you are among those who support electric cars but oppose nuclear power, you may have to reconsider one of your positions.

So let’s explore some pollution solutions that change this ridiculous system, rather than extending it indefinitely. Why not – through shifting road space from cars to bicycles in the form of safe cycle lanes – aim to make cycling the main form of urban transport? Why not launch a scrappage scheme that trades cars for public transport tokens? Why not implement the ingenious plan proposed by the economist Alan Storkey, for an intercity coach service that’s as fast and convenient as private transport, but uses a fraction of the road space? In other sectors, progress is marked by reducing the volume of a system while enhancing its utility. Why does the same principle not apply to transport?

Leading elephant conservationist shot dead in Tanzania

The head of an animal conservation NGO who had received numerous death threats has been shot and killed by an unknown gunman in Tanzania. Wayne Lotter, 51, was shot on Wednesday evening in the Masaki district of the city of Dar es Salaam. The wildlife conservationist was being driven from the airport to his hotel when his taxi was stopped by another vehicle. Two men, one armed with a gun opened his car door and shot him.

Lotter was a director and co-founder of the PAMS Foundation, an NGO that provides conservation and anti-poaching support to communities and governments in Africa. Since starting the organisation in Tanzania in 2009, he had received numerous death threats relating to his work.

The PAMS Foundation funded and supported Tanzania’s elite anti-poaching National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) which was responsible for arrests of major ivory traffickers including Yang Feng Glan, the so-called “Queen of Ivory” and several other notorious elephant poachers. Since 2012, the unit has arrested more than 2,000 poachers and ivory traffickers and has a conviction rate of 80%. The NTSCIU was recently featured in the Netflix documentary The Ivory Game. In a previous interview, Lotter said he believed its work had helped to reduce poaching rates in Tanzania by at least 50%.

Also of Interest

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

Fight to Win

Imperial Death Spiral

Why Trump Could Be Gone Before 2020

Writings of Obscure American Leftist Drive Kurdish Forces in Syria

WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign

Trump’s arts committee resigns over Charlottesville in a blistering letter

The De-Branding of a President

To understand the US's complex history with slavery, look to Thomas Jefferson

President Trump’s ‘White Blindness’

Silver linings: the climate scientist who records cloud behaviour

Naked Capitalism forced to disable comments due to Charlottesville controversy

A Little Night Music

Tuba Skinny - You Gotta Give Me Some

Tuba Skinny - South

Tuba Skinny - Storyville Blues

Tuba Skinny - Dallas Rag

Tuba Skinny - Dodo Blues

Tuba Skinny - Milneberg Joys

Tuba Skinny - Mean Blue Spirits

Tuba Skinny - At The Jazz Band Ball

Tuba Skinny - Freight Train Blues

Tuba Skinny - Banjoreno

Tuba Skinny - Garbage Man

The Tuba Skinny Jazz Band 2017