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“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

-- Blaise Pascal

News and Opinion

Pundits And Politicians Are Tacitly Admitting That They Lied About Russia

It has been nearly three weeks since The Nation pushed an explosive memo from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity into mainstream consciousness with an article detailing the evidence that the DNC leaks last year could not have been the result of a Russian hack. By continuing to ignore it, the US intelligence community and all the pundits and politicians who have advanced the Russian hacking narrative are tacitly admitting that they lied. ...

This is unacceptable. You don’t get to lie to the American people for nine months, terrify them with fact-free ghost stories that their nation has been taken over by a hostile foreign body, use their terror to manufacture support for a new cold war, and then change the subject to Nazis and Joe Arpaio as soon as evidence emerges that you’ve been reporting blatant falsehoods. That is not a thing. You need to either thoroughly refute every single argument against the narrative you’ve been spinning or admit publicly that you’ve been catastrophically wrong. You need to either (A) prove that you have not knowingly and/or unknowingly deceived the world, or (B) do everything you can to fix the damage that you have done.

Until the US intelligence community, the mainstream media, and the politicians who’ve been advancing this Russian hacking narrative do one of these two things, their silence on the matter should be interpreted as a tacit admission that they’ve been lying to us this entire time. After Iraq there was already no reason to give these institutions the benefit of the doubt, and since the VIPS report there is every reason in the world to believe that they’ve been lying to advance domestic and foreign agendas. They either refute the VIPS report in its entirety, or we must treat their refusal to do so as a tacit admission of nothing less than a crime against humanity.

Ha Ha.

Lurid Trump allegations made by Louise Mensch and co-writer came from hoaxer

Explosive allegations about Donald Trump made by online writers with large followings among Trump critics were based on bogus information from a hoaxer who falsely claimed to work in law enforcement.

Claude Taylor tweeted fake details of criminal inquiries into Trump that were invented by a source whose claim to work for the New York attorney general was not checked, according to emails seen by the Guardian. The allegations were endorsed as authentic and retweeted by his co-writer Louise Mensch. The source’s false tips included an allegation, which has been aggressively circulated by Mensch and Taylor, that Trump’s inactive fashion model agency is under investigation by New York authorities for possible sex trafficking.

The hoaxer, who fed the information to Taylor by email, said she acted out of frustration over the “dissemination of fake news” by Taylor and Mensch. Their false stories about Trump have included a claim that he was already being replaced as president by Senator Orrin Hatch in a process kept secret from the American public. “Taylor asked no questions to verify my identity, did no vetting whatsoever, sought no confirmation from a second source – but instead asked leading questions to support his various theories, asking me to verify them,” the source said in an email.

Clinton is an @AGschneiderman witness against Trump. #PIMPOTUS #humantrafficking pic.twitter.com/m6uiEYJIBR

— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) August 6, 2017

Mensch denied using the bogus information and said her allegations about Trump’s model agency came from her own sources. Asked why she had retweeted Taylor’s false posts, Mensch said: “I don’t think anybody can vet anybody else’s sources.” ... Thousands of people have reposted the false claims tweeted by Taylor, a former staffer in Bill Clinton’s White House. Mensch, a former member of parliament in the UK, retweeted at least 18 posts by Taylor that were based on the hoaxer’s false information, spreading them further afield.

Top Trump Organization executive asked Putin aide for help on business deal

A top executive from Donald Trump’s real estate company emailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s personal spokesman during the U.S. presidential campaign last year to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress on Monday.

The request came in a mid-January 2016 email from Michael Cohen, one of Trump’s closest business advisers, who asked longtime Putin lieutenant Dmitry Peskov for assistance in reviving a deal that Cohen suggested was languishing. “Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote to Peskov, according to a person familiar with the email. “Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled.

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

Cohen’s email marks the most direct outreach documented by a top Trump aide to a similarly senior member of Putin’s government. Cohen told congressional investigators in a statement Monday that he did not recall receiving a response from Peskov or having further contact with Russian government officials about the project. The email, addressed to Peskov, appeared to have been sent to a general Kremlin press account.

More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda

There is an inherent danger of news organizations getting infected by “confirmation bias” when they want something to be true so badly that even if the evidence goes in the opposite direction they twist the revelation in fit their narrative. Such is how The Washington Post, The New York Times and their followers in the mainstream media are reacting to newly released emails that actually show Donald Trump’s team having little or no influence in Moscow. On Tuesday, for instance, the Times published a front-page article designed to advance the Russia-gate narrative, stating: “A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.”

Wow, that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying together the loose and scattered threads of the Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election story. Here you have a supposed business deal in which Putin was to help Trump both make money and get elected. That is surely how a casual reader or a Russia-gate true believer would read it – and was meant to read it. But the lede is misleading. The reality, as you would find out if you read further into the story, is that the boast from Felix Sater that somehow the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow would demonstrate Trump’s international business prowess and thus help his election was meaningless. What the incident really shows is that the Trump organization had little or no pull in Russia as Putin’s government apparently didn’t lift a finger to salvage this stillborn building project. But highlighting that reality would not serve the Times’ endless promotion of Russia-gate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep in the story, after a reprise of the “scandal” and the Times hyping the significance of Sater’s emails from 2015 and early 2016. ...

Deeper in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts: “There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.” The Times added: “The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later. … The emails obtained by The Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails.”

In other words, the Russia-gate narrative – that somehow Putin foresaw Trump’s election (although almost no one else did) and sought to curry favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump’s pockets with lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he could to help Trump win – is knocked down by these new disclosures, not supported by them.

North Korea’s latest missile just flew over Japan

North Korea launched a ballistic missile that flew over Japan in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Pentagon confirmed, adding that it is still assessing the launch.

Though Japan didn’t attempt to shoot down Kim Jong Un’s latest provocation, the missile’s trajectory still spooked its government: It sent an alert early Tuesday morning urging citizens in the country’s north to head to a sturdy building or underground area to prepare for a possible missile strike from Pyongyang. ...

Pyongyang’s Tuesday morning missile test comes less than 72 hours after North Korea launched three short-range missiles into the East Sea, and just 24 hours after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. would continue to apply “peaceful pressure” with the aim of bringing “Pyongyang to the negotiating table.”

North Korean missile over Japan - Why now?

Donald Trump on North Korea: 'All options are on the table'

Donald Trump has said “all options are on the table” after North Korea launched a missile designed to carry a nuclear payload over Japan, and vowed the US and Tokyo were committed to increasing pressure on Pyongyang.

The mid-range missile, which passed over Japan just after 6am local time, was one of the most provocative launches yet by North Korea and sent a clear message to Washington just weeks after Kim Jong-un threatened to target the US Pacific territory of Guam with similar weaponry. Officials in South Korea said the missile may have flown further than any other tested by North Korea.

“The world has received North Korea’s latest message loud and clear,” the US president said in a written statement. “This regime has signalled its contempt for its neighbours, for all members of the United Nations, and for minimum standards of acceptable international behaviour.

“Threatening and destabilising actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world. All options are on the table.”

Trump Forges Ahead on Costly Nuclear Overhaul

During his speech last week about Afghanistan, President Trump slipped in a line that had little to do with fighting the Taliban: “Vast amounts” are being spent on “our nuclear arsenal and missile defense,” he said, as the administration builds up the military.

The president is doing exactly that. Last week, the Air Force announced major new contracts for an overhaul of the American nuclear force: $1.8 billion for initial development of a highly stealthy nuclear cruise missile, and nearly $700 million to begin replacing the 40-year-old Minuteman missiles in silos across the United States.

While both programs were developed during the Obama years, the Trump administration has seized on them, with only passing nods to the debate about whether either is necessary or wise. They are the first steps in a broader remaking of the nuclear arsenal — and the bombers, submarines and missiles that deliver the weapons — that the government estimated during Mr. Obama’s tenure would ultimately cost $1 trillion or more.

While Mr. Trump is moving full speed ahead on the nuclear overhaul — even before a review of American nuclear strategy, due at the end of the year, is completed — critics are warning of the risk of a new arms race and billions of dollars squandered.

The critics of the cruise missile, led by a former defense secretary, William J. Perry, have argued that the new weapon will be so accurate and so stealthy that it will be destabilizing, forcing the Russians and the Chinese to accelerate their own programs.

India and China agree to end border standoff

India and China have agreed to an "expeditious disengagement" of troops in a disputed border area where their soldiers have been locked in a stand-off for more than two months, India's foreign ministry said on Monday.

The decision comes ahead of a summit of the BRICS nations - a grouping that also includes Brazil, Russia and South Africa - in China beginning on Sunday, which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend.

Indian and Chinese troops have been confronting each other at the Doklam plateau near the borders of India, its ally Bhutan, and China, in the most serious and prolonged standoff in decades along their disputed Himalayan border.

The Indian ministry said the two sides had agreed to defuse the crisis following diplomatic talks.

Flouting International Law, Netanyahu Says West Bank Settlements Will Remain 'Forever'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a speech on Monday that Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank will remain "forever," remarks many critics characterized as an explicit statement of a longstanding commitment to maintaining and expanding settlements that have been deemed illegal under international law.

"There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel," Netanyahu said. "We will deepen our roots, build, strengthen, and settle."

"Israel finally admits it will never remove illegal settlements from occupied West Bank," wrote AlterNet reporter Ben Norton in response to Netanyahu's remarks, which were made during an event "commemorating the 50th anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank."

Others argued that, given Netanyahu's public remarks and actions, any hope that a two-state solution is a viable option is badly misplaced.

"The 'two-state solution' is a blatant and obvious farce that has no purpose other than to allow liberals to justify their support for Israel," concluded The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, pointing to Netanyahu's speech.

Stormfront: 'murder capital of internet' pulled offline after civil rights action

One of the oldest and largest neo-nazi sites on the internet, the white supremacist chatroom Stormfront, has been thrown off the open web by its hosting provider.
Stormfront has been described by the anti-hate group Southern Poverty Law Center as the “murder capital of the internet”. The group pointed out that “registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the past five years alone, Stormfront members have murdered close to 100 people.”

As of Tuesday morning, Stormfront.org was unavailable, with the site’s domain registry recording that its hosting provider Network Solutions had issued a “hold” on the address.

Stormfront’s removal comes a week after a letter, informing Network Solution’s parent company Web.com of the neo-nazi site’s infractions of the its usage policy, was sent by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights organisation formed at the request of John F Kennedy in 1963.

The group, which has been writing to Web.com repeatedly since early July, repeated its request of the company to take “immediate action” against Stormfront. ...

The move follows the downfall of the Daily Stormer, a far-right news site which was dropped by multiple service providers after it published an article smearing the victim of a far-right terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Eventually, the site was forced to move to the so-called dark web due to the lack of companies willing to work with it publicly.

Antifa successfully push right-wing group out of Berkeley

On Sunday, hundreds of counterprotesters — including dozens of black-clad antifa — filled Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Park in downtown Berkeley, California. They were there to protest a weekend of right-wing rallies — in particular, one organized by Patriot Prayer, a small right-wing group headed by 33-year-old Joey Gibson.

As it turned out, the rallies had actually been canceled by their organizers before the weekend even began. But local left-wing activists showed up anyway. ... Not long after, Gibson showed up with a few other members of Patriot Prayer, and walked right into a crowd of masked protesters where an argument broke out. Gibson was pepper-sprayed and hit by members of the group, forcing him to retreat out of the park and down the street, where a group of heavily armed police detained him and another Patriot Prayer member and led them away from the crowd. ...

This time around, the left-wing protesters overwhelmingly outnumbered right-wing protesters. But the weekend was more of a warm-up — in September Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Ann Coulter are scheduled to speak at Berkeley, all but guaranteeing a clash between their right-wing supporters and the people who plan to protest them.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Draft “Sanctuary” Bill Creates New Routes for ICE in California

After Donald Trump's election, California Gov. Jerry Brown pledged to lead the resistance to the president’s anti-immigrant policies. “You don’t want to mess with California,” he said in March, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding if California became the first “sanctuary state.” “I’m not going to just turn over our police department to become agents of the federal government as they deport women and children and people who are contributing to the economic well-being of our state, which they are.”

Now, California is moving toward “sanctuary state” status. Senate Bill 54 — designed to bar local law enforcement from using resources to aid federal immigration agents — is moving through the legislature. But a draft of amendments to the bill authored by Brown’s office and obtained by The Intercept indicate that the hope of defending California’s immigrant population, the largest in the nation, from Trump’s long reach may be in danger.

Brown’s amendments in the draft step away from the guarantees that advocates had praised in SB 54. Instead, the governor’s version of the bill opens up new lines of communication between Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and local jails — pathways toward deportations that aren’t in the tabled version of the bill and don’t exist in California today because of constitutional challenges to ICE policy. While claiming to uphold the vision of creating a so-called sanctuary state in California, Brown’s draft instead puts many immigrants in the criminal justice pipeline — those in the country without authorization, as well as green card holders, including minor offenders — at risk.

Lizbeth Mateo, who works with DreamActivist and has seen a copy of the amendments, said that if Brown’s changes were to be incorporated into SB 54, the legislation would not be seen as affording immigrants the necessary protections. “The bill will not be anything close to what can comfortably resemble a ‘sanctuary’ bill,” she said.

The institutions of the 1% are ready to get back to business-as-usual.

The GOP is not looking for the next Donald Trump

The GOP and its congressional affiliates are busy recruiting candidates ahead of the 2018 midterms, but in both style and substance, most of the people Republican officials consider strong candidates look more like the 16 other Republicans in last year’s presidential primary than the populist brawler who took the White House.

In fact, almost none of the declared or potential candidates for Senate in 2018 endorsed Trump during last year’s primary, instead opting for more traditional Republicans like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio. Most of these 2018 hopefuls look, sound, and talk like the upper-middle-class, free-trade, chamber-of-commerce Republicans who’ve been the bedrock of Republican politics for decades. ...

In other words, the Republican Party post-Trump is acting a lot like the Republican Party pre-Trump. Publicly, the GOP from the national level to the local level is loyal and supportive of the president, but their actions suggest that they see Trump’s surprise victory as a one-off, a reality TV–created black swan event rather than a sign of a fundamental shift in the American electorate.

Naomi Klein has a good article up on The Intercept. Here's a taste:

Harvey Didn’t Come Out of the Blue. Now Is The Time to Talk About Climate Change.

Now is exactly the time to talk about climate change, and all the other systemic injustices — from racial profiling to economic austerity — that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes. Turn on the coverage of the Hurricane Harvey and the Houston flooding and you’ll hear lots of talk about how unprecedented this kind of rainfall is. How no one saw it coming so no one could adequately prepare.

What you will hear very little about is why these kind of unprecedented, record-breaking weather events are happening with such regularity that “record-breaking” has become a meteorological cliché. In other words, you won’t hear much, if any, talk about climate change.

This, we are told, is out of a desire not to “politicize” a still unfolding human tragedy, which is an understandable impulse. But here’s the thing: every time we act as if an unprecedented weather event is hitting us out of the blue, as some sort of Act of God that no one foresaw, reporters are making a highly political decision. It’s a decision to spare feelings and avoid controversy at the expense of telling the truth, however difficult. Because the truth is that these events have long been predicted by climate scientists. Warmer oceans throw up more powerful storms. Higher sea levels mean those storms surge into places they never reached before. Hotter weather leads to extremes of precipitation: long dry periods interrupted by massive snow or rain dumps, rather than the steadier predictable patterns most of us grew up with. ...

It’s also worth noting that the coverage of Harvey has been highly political since well before the storm made landfall. There has been endless talk about whether Trump was taking the storm seriously enough, endless speculation about whether this hurricane will be his “Katrina moment” and a great deal of (fair) point-scoring about how many Republicans voted against Sandy relief but have their hands out for Texas now. That’s politics being made out of a disaster — it’s just the kind of partisan politics that is fully inside the comfort zone of conventional media, politics that conveniently skirts the reality that placing the interests of fossil fuel companies ahead of the need for decisive pollution control has been a deeply bipartisan affair.

Dr. Robert Bullard: Houston’s “Unrestrained Capitalism” Made Harvey “Catastrophe Waiting to Happen”

Why are the crucial questions about Hurricane Harvey not being asked?

It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of climate change; it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why, though the links are clear and obvious, most reports on Hurricane Harvey have made no mention of the human contribution to it. In 2016 the US elected a president who believes that human-driven global warming is a hoax. It was the hottest year on record, in which the US was hammered by a series of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes. Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been blotted from the public’s mind.

This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the subject because they have an instinct for avoiding trouble. To talk about climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire political and economic system. It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel the present, that demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. It is to challenge the very basis of capitalism; to inform us that our lives are dominated by a system that cannot be sustained – a system that is destined, if it is not replaced, to destroy everything. ...

When Trump’s enforcers instruct officials and scientists to purge any mention of climate change from their publications, we are scandalised. But when the media does it, without the need for a memo, we let it pass. This censorship is invisible even to the perpetrators, woven into the fabric of organisations that are constitutionally destined to leave the major questions of our times unasked. To acknowledge this issue is to challenge everything. To challenge everything is to become an outcast.

Hurricane Harvey: Zip Code & Race Determine Who Will Bear Burden Of Climate Change

Houston dam begins to overspill as Harvey triggers unprecedented impact

A vital dam in suburban Houston that protects the central city began overspilling on Tuesday, and officials said the rainfall from Harvey is so unprecedented they do not know what the impact on surrounding communities will be. Water levels in the Addicks reservoir have reached 108ft, said Jeff Lindner, a Harris County flood control district meteorologist. He warned that neighbourhoods in the spillway zone would begin to see street and possibly structural flooding.

“We have never faced this before. We have uncertainty in how the water is going to react as it moves out of the spillway and into the surrounding area,” Lindner told a news conference on Tuesday. “We are trying to wrap our heads around what this water will do.” ... Another major dam and reservoir nearby, Barker, is also enduring exceptionally high water levels, and some residents in streets to the west of it are under voluntary evacuation orders. They also face the possibility that their roads could be rendered impassable just as the storm’s precipitation appears to be decreasing in intensity.

Addicks and Barker were constructed in the 1940s by the US army corps of engineers, which maintains them. The dams are designed to control the flow of water into the Buffalo bayou, a river that stretches for dozens of miles and goes through the heart of the city, depositing water in the ship channel to the east.

Harvey Triggers 'Unbearable' Pollution as Refineries Spew Cancer-Causing Chemicals

As the catastrophic flooding brought about by Hurricane Harvey continues to devastate Texas, reports of "unbearable" smells are beginning to emerge from the state, sparking growing concerns of the long-term health effects that could result from toxic waste and fumes being spewed from temporarily closed oil refineries.

"At least 10 refineries on the Texas coast have shut down," notes the Huffington Post's Ryan Grenoble. "And whenever a refinery has to be closed or restarted, especially in emergency situations, its emissions far exceed what's typically allowed."

Environment Texas, a citizen-based environmental advocacy project of Environment America, said in a statement on Monday that Houston oil industry is likely "releasing more than 1 million pounds of harmful pollution into the air, according to its initial reports to Texas regulators."

"Air pollution is one of the unseen dangers of the storm," Dr. Elena Craft, senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund, told Environment Texas. "Poor air quality puts the most vulnerable among us, like children and seniors, at risk for asthma, heart attacks, strokes, and other health problems.”

Long before Harvey made landfall, environmental groups and scientists had been warning of the disastrous effects that could result from a massive storm like Harvey hitting Texas, the heart of the U.S. petrochemical industry. Now, judging by first-hand reports from the state, some of these concerns are coming to fruition.

As The New Republic's Emily Atkin noted on Monday, "residents of Houston's industrial fence-line communities are reporting strong gas- and chemical-like smells coming from the many refineries and chemical plants nearby." On several occasions, as reports late Monday indicated, Texans have been ordered to "shelter in place" amid reports of chemical leaks.

Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’

Trump's tough new sanctions will harm the people of Venezuela

Cambodia Exposes, Expels US Network

Oklahoma isn't working. Can anyone fix this failing American state?

Turkey's 12,000-year-old Hasankeyf citadel faces obliteration

A Little Night Music

Roy Gaines - Fly Away to Glory

Roy Gaines and Friends - Never Trust A Woman

Roy Gaines - Sweet Pig Porker & Bluesman For Life

Roy Gaines - Isabella, Gainesville

Roy Gaines - Right Now Baby

Roy Gaines - Loud Mouth Lucy

Roy Gaines - Alabama Sue

Roy Gaines - You're Right, I'm Left

Roy Gaines - Annabelle

Roy Gaines - I Got a Break Baby

Roy Gaines - Heavy Load

Roy Gaines - Black Gal

Roy Gaines - Superman

Roy Gaines - Okie Dokie Stomp

Roy Gaines - Jump In My Cadillac