A Bit Larger than Tweet-Sized Chunks of Apocalyptica

People lend me books to read all the time. It's hard to say no. I have a backlog of three loaners right now. I'll be reading these books probably for the next month, which means that I won't be getting to any of my own reading.

Why, I ask myself, Must people always lend me their books? And I think the answer is that most people don't read books anymore. So when someone finishes a book, he feels an immense amount of pride and joy, and he wants to share that with another person. The problem is that since hardly anyone reads books anymore, nor do many people from what I can tell pick up a newspaper and read actual newsprint -- now people look at their phones as they chew on the morning bagel, a truly dispiriting sight, like something out of Woody Allen's Sleeper -- I, because I read books and have decided to remain single and self-isolated so I can read as much as possible, become a book dump.

People would much rather read tweets.

Here are some little-bit-larger-than-tweet-sized chunks of apocalyptica gleaned from the news over the last week:

About 4 in 10 American adults – or nearly 40 percent – are obese, according to the latest federal government data published last week. Obesity (defined as a body mass index of 30 or more) significantly increases an individual's risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and various cancers, making the condition a major public health concern.

"About 4 in 10 American adults are obese — and it's only getting worse" 

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There's an 80,000-ton monster lurking in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California and it's still getting bigger.

Arguably more frightening than any shark, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a rapidly growing hot spot for ocean plastic, carrying 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in what is now the largest accumulation of ocean debris in the world, according to a new report Thursday in Scientific Reports.

The patch is now two times larger than the size of Texas, with bits of plastic and debris spread over more than 600,000 square miles of water, according to the three-year mapping effort from eight different organizations.

Meanwhile, the annual consumption of plastic is on the rise around the world and currently totals more than 320 million tons, according to the report. 

"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, full of ocean plastic, keeps growing"

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Bacteria resistant to antibiotics turn up in turkey, pork chops and ground beef in the United States; in grocery store chickens in Britain; and at poultry farms in China. Antibiotic residues are found in groundwater, drinking water and streams, and in feedlot manure used as fertilizer.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of American antibiotic sales go to livestock. In addition to the emergence of resistant disease strains, some microbiologists worry that the proliferation of antibiotics, despite their miraculous health benefits, is having a chaotic impact on microbes in the human gut.

"At Hamburger Central, Antibiotics for Cattle That Aren’t Sick"

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This is the key point made in Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century. Here, two things come into play: wealth from the past, and wealth from the future. The former takes the form of inheritance (hence all of the noise we hear about the evils of the "death tax"), and the latter in financial investments and speculations. Combine the power of the two, and you have, by Piketty's law, the tendency for the capital itself to grow much faster than the economy itself. This law is: r > g (the return on private capital is greater than growth of the economy).

When the rate of growth of capital as capital is terribly high—meaning, when cash as cash grows at double or even triple the rate of actual surplus value creation, or the creation of new capital/cash—then expect the size of the middle-income group to contract and the low-income one to expand. And this can happen even without a crisis (though it's certainly accelerated by such events). If not checked by regulations in banking and finance, the r > g law will assert greater and greater downward pressure on those just above or in or just below the middle-income group. Channeling G. W. F. Hegel's bad infinity, Piketty calls this the “endless inegalitarian spiral.” (As Marxist geographer David Harvey has explained in a number of lectures: Hegel's good infinity is like a cycle, or recycling, where a bad infinity is like spiral—as in, spiraling out of control.)

And indeed, the Pew Research Center analysis of government data shows that this is indeed the case. The US is in a bad infinity. Its "middle class lost ground in the vast majority of metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2014..."

"You Need to Make $148,000 to Be Rich in Seattle, and Soon Even That May Not Be Enough"

Julian Assange's Homage to Catalonia

There is a discrepancy between the reporting of The New York Times (Sewell Chan, "Ecuador Cuts Off Julian Assange’s Internet Access. Again.") and RT ("Ecuador cut Assange’s internet over Catalonia crackdown tweet, source close to WikiLeaks tells RT") regarding the severing of Julian Assange's internet where he is sequestered at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

RT is unequivocal -- "The move by the Ecuadorian embassy to cut all communication for Julian Assange was triggered by his critical remark on the arrest of Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, which compared modern Germany to the Nazis, a source says."

The NYT speculates that it might have to do with the poisoning of the Skripals:

The government did not provide specifics, but some speculated that the decision might have been related to the Western nations’ coordinated actions against Russia after the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. In a series of Twitter posts this week, Mr. Assange was critical of Western nations’ expulsions of Russian diplomats.

My guess is that The Times doesn't want to lend credence to the connection between the silencing of Assange and Puigdemont's arrest because then the "newspaper of record" would have to quote Assange's excellent tweet:

In 1940 the elected president of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, was captured by the Gestapo, at the request of Spain, delivered to them and executed. Today, German police have arrested the elected president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, at the request of Spain, to be extradited.

Powerful states and their servants in the corporate press act as if they possess a monopoly on comparisons to Nazis and Hitler.

The last three paragraphs of Raphael Minder's "Arrest of Catalan Leader Tests Spain, Separatists and E.U." foretell a continued unraveling of the European Union:

Mr. Puigdemont, who had traveled to Finland, left that country on Friday, driving across Scandinavia, with officers of Spain’s secret service following him. He was detained after crossing into Germany, whose criminal code, Spanish authorities believe, will allow for his extradition.

Christian Mölling, the research director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said he saw no reason Mr. Puigdemont would not be extradited to Spain.

“If we pass this onto politics, it would be a declaration of bankruptcy for the judiciary,” he said. “We have courts precisely to depoliticize things.”

The Trade Deal with South Korea

The trade deal that Team Trump negotiated with South Korea (see "Trump Secures Trade Deal With South Korea Ahead of Nuclear Talks," by Michael Shear and Alan Rappaport) appears to be a modest victory for the administration. South Korea agrees to a steel export quota and allows more U.S. automobiles to be shipped to its shores:

Through the agreement, South Korea — the third-biggest exporter of steel to the United States in 2016 — is permanently exempt from the White House’s global tariffs of 25 percent on steel. In return, South Korea agreed to adhere to a quota of 2.68 million tons of steel exports to the United States a year, which it said was roughly equivalent to 70 percent of its annual average sent to the United States from 2015 to 2017.

The deal also doubles the number of vehicles the United States can export to South Korea without meeting local safety requirements to 50,000 per manufacturer. However, trade experts said that American companies had not come close to meeting their existing quota last year, and that American carmakers had not done enough to tailor their products for South Korean consumers, who prefer smaller vehicles. The revised agreement does ease environmental regulations that American carmakers face when selling vehicles in South Korea and makes American standards for auto parts compliant with South Korean regulations.

Importantly for the Trump administration, the agreement extends tariffs on imported South Korean trucks by 20 years to 2041. Those tariffs were set to phase out in 2021, which officials said would have harmed American truck makers.

MAGA fans are proclaiming a new day. I've always thought that Trump's viability as a two-term president is pegged on his ability to deliver on trade. His hope for staying in the White House depends upon his success in renegotiating NAFTA and reaching some sort of amicable settlement with China.

But even this might not be enough. Suburban voters appear to have grown exhausted with the president.

Suburban voters have led this page to its two biggest blunders in the last several years: a confident prediction of Hillary's victory in 2016 (based on a belief in a fictitious gender gap) and a confident prediction of Republicans holding Pennsylvania's 18th CD (because a blue dog couldn't juice progressive turnout enough to overcome a 20-point GOP advantage in the 2016 presidential race).

Suburban voters, particularly suburban liberals, are considered free-traders. So Trump's goose might already be cooked.

The Theater of the Big Lie

Read newspapers long enough and you learn to decipher the truth by noting patterns in propaganda. It's like mirror writing, crude, but most big-lie propaganda is crude.

The strong tell that the coordinated expulsion of Russian diplomats throughout Europe and in the United States was an ostentatious display meant to cloak Western perfidy is the repeated morning-after invocation of a previous big lie.

Andrew Higgins in "A New Cold War With Russia? No, It’s Worse Than That" reminds readers that

While denying any part in the March 4 poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal, a former spy, and his daughter, Yulia, both still critically ill in the hospital, Russia in recent years has built up a long record of flouting international norms, notably with its 2014 annexation of Crimea, the first time since 1945 that European borders have been redrawn by force.

Steven Erlanger in "How an Outraged Europe Agreed to a Hard Line on Putin" uses almost the exact wording:

“This is an intelligence operation carried out with intelligence capacity with weaponized, weapons-grade chemical agents,” one senior European official said. “It has taken matters to an entirely different level.”

Alluding to Russia’s earlier aggressions in Ukraine, the senior official added, “Russia keeps violating international law in Crimea and Ukraine and unwritten rules on nonintervention, and now there is the use of nerve agents in Britain.”

To claim that Crimea's vote to join the Russian Federation in 2014 is proof of Russian aggression is absurd. It was purely a defensive move coming close on the heels of the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.

Russian leaders would have been criminal in their neglect if they hadn't engineered a plebiscite to protect the Russian-speaking population of the Crimea, not to mention its major port of Sevastopol.

To defend yesterday's diplomatic expulsions by citing Russia aggression in Crimea immediately casts doubt on assertions of Russian guilt. Furthermore, Higgins says that Russia's annexation of Crimea is "the first time since 1945 that European borders have been redrawn by force." What about Kosovo?

So, as Erlanger makes plain in his story, yesterday's expulsions were merely big-lie theater planned last week over a dinner in Brussels attended by Merkel, May and Macron.

Stormy Monday

There were no great revelations from the Stormy Daniels 60 Minutes interview. In 2006 the adult film star had sex with Trump one time; basically a "down payment" for Trump's efforts to get her to appear on his reality television show, The Apprentice.

In 2011, after a magazine offered $15,000 for Daniels' story, Team Trump swung into action and threatened to sue. The magazine dropped its offer. Around the same time Daniels was threatened to keep her mouth shut about The Donald by a goon in a Las Vegas parking lot.

There the matter rested until shortly before election day 2016 when in exchange for $130,000 Daniels signed a non-disclosure agreement with Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

It is that gag agreement that Daniels is suing Trump to get out of. She has problems with her veracity though because she signed two statements denying that she had intimate relations with Trump. Her legal case seems to boil down to Trump never signed the non-disclosure agreement.

The #NeverTrumpers have a stake in the Stormy Daniels affair because the $130,000 hush money should have been reported under campaign finance law as an in-kind contribution.

All in all I thought Anderson Cooper was much harder on Stormy Daniels than Norah O'Donnell was on Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, which should remind us that our corporate media prefer young genocidal despots to fading porn stars.

That Trump is feeling the heat, not from Stormy so much as Mueller turning his probe to the seamy story of Elliott Broidy selling White House access to convicted pedophile George Nader who acted as a foreign agent on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, should be apparent from the ordered expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats.

Mainstream Media Suddenly Discovers the Threat of War

Fitting that Trump's replacement of Nation Security Adviser Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster with John Bolton comes directly on the heels of the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. If the United States has been tacitly at war with the world, now it is explicitly so; at least that's "morning after" assessment in the prestige press.

Yesterday, before the Bolton bombshell was dropped, Nicholas Kristof penned "Trump’s Talk Worries Me, Like the Talk Before the Iraq War." When I read Kristof I think of him as a situational progressive whose views when they are enlightened usually line up with the "better angels" at Langley. I stopped reading him several years ago when he wrote a few columns from Ukraine championing the Banderites of Pravy Sektor.

The last part of Kristof's column caught my eye:

Looking back, the biggest problem 15 years ago was that the administration was stuck in an echo chamber and far too optimistic, and Democrats and the news media alike mostly rolled over. Journalists too often acted as lap dogs, not watchdogs — and today I fear that we may be so busy chasing the latest shiny object that we miss an abyss ahead.

I also frankly doubt that we as a nation have learned the lesson from Iraq. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent of Americans still believe that invading Iraq was the correct decision.

Hello?

Forty-three percent believe invading Iraq was the correct decision because that is the prevailing wisdom found in the mainstream media. Governments and the corporate media outlets that serve them lie repeatedly. It didn't end with the invasion of Iraq. See Craig Murray's latest post, "Boris Johnson A Categorical Liar."

Suddenly war appears to be imminent when it was front and center the whole time.

Why is Ghouta so Important to the West?

The Western press has achieved Goebbelsesque levels of distortion in its presentation of  the jihadists' loss of their mortar launch pad of eastern Ghouta. I can think of no better example of this than "‘We Were Dying in There’: Thousands of Syrians Flee Rebel Enclave," by Nada Homsi and Nick Cumming-Bruce. (Cumming-Bruce is The New York Times chief propagandist in Geneva. His job is to filter information that comes out of the United Nations offices there, amplifying the humanitarian crimes of official enemies while air-brushing away any U.S. misdeeds.)

Homsi and Cumming-Bruce ostensibly write about the Syrian government evacuation of civilians  held hostage by the Salafi jihadists in eastern Ghouta. But since this is an unalloyed tale of victory for Syria and its Russian ally, Homsi and Cumming-Bruce execute a switch-up and instead discuss the systematic use of rape by the Syrian Arab Army and its militias. There is no hyperlink to the UN Commission of Inquiry report within the NYT story, but here it is.

Homsi and Cumming-Bruce skew the summary of the report in favor of the Salafi jihadists, making it seem as if they were less criminal than their enemies. Judge for yourself:

United Nations investigators said Thursday that Syrian government troops and affiliated militias had raped and sexually assaulted women and men in a systematic campaign to terrorize, humiliate and punish civilians seen as linked to the opposition — actions that amounted to crimes against humanity.

Opposition armed groups had also committed rapes and sexual violence. Although such acts by rebels were “considerably less common,” the investigators said, extremists had carried out executions and harsh punishments to enforce their rigid social order.

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry monitoring Syria’s conflict said it had documented the rape of women and girls in 20 government detention facilities and military intelligence branches between 2011 and 2016, and the same violence against men and boys in 15 branches.

Such attacks were “not isolated incidents but rather part of a pattern observed countrywide,” the investigators said in a 29-page report, which the panel’s chairman, Paolo Pinheiro, said was “based on 454 powerful, devastating interviews” with victims and witnesses.

The panel’s hope, he added, was that the report would serve as “an equally powerful trigger for accountability,” he told a meeting at the United Nations in Geneva. It was “particularly repulsive” that such violence continued to go unpunished, he said.

During house raids searching for opposition supporters in the early years of the conflict, troops and militias raped women and forced family members to watch the assault, the panel said.

In detention centers, guards subjected women to humiliating invasive searches, gang rapes and torture to force confessions and extract information. Low-ranking officers were often the perpetrators, the panel found, but “numerous cases of rapes by high-level officers have also been documented.”

Male detainees, some as young as 11, also suffered a wide range of sexual abuse, including rape, torture and genital mutilation. Investigators said they had documented such abuse in the political security and military intelligence branches in Aleppo, Hama, Idlib, Tartus and Damascus, including the infamous Sednaya Prison, sometimes “seemingly for amusement.”

Rape and sexual violence by armed opposition groups was not systematic, the panel said, but throughout the conflict it had received regular reports of extremist groups attacking people suspected of being gay, including throwing them off rooftops.

Militant groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State had sentenced women accused of adultery to death by stoning, and subjected women who violated their dress codes to lashings. In areas controlled by Islamic State, women and girls as young as 14 were forced to marry fighters.

When I read this over the weekend two things raked up a stench right away. New York Times readers know that to ISIS "marriage" is a euphemism for rape. If  Homsi and Cumming-Bruce would have scrolled to page 19 of the report they would find: "Many women were passed between multiple ISIL fighters, some as many as six or seven times within two years." Rukmini Callimachi has written about "marriages" that last for 45 minutes.

Then, also on page 19, a direct refutation of the "not systematic" claim:

Until mid-2016, ISIL did not allow their members who “owned” Yazidis to sell the Yazidi children separately. This rule was changed in mid-2016 and resulted in the separation of children from their mothers and subsequent sale of young boys as house servants, and girls as young as nine years as sexual slaves. Such children are often then given Muslim names. Identifying their ancestry remains problematic.

Once again, readers of the "newspaper of record" know that ISIS strictly codified a system of sexual slavery. So why is it undercutting all that reporting now with disingenuous stories out of Geneva, stories that make the jihadists sound better than the Syrian government?

Keeping a foothold in eastern Ghouta must really be important to the United States Government. Elijah Magnier explains why in "Will Syria be the Battleground for All-Out War Between Russia and America?":

The US’s anger at the Syrian-Russian attack on al-Ghouta needs to be made clearer here: the US occupation of al-Tanf Syrian-Iraqi borders aimed to create a launching platform for its military operations towards Deir al-Zour in the north and al-Ghouta in the east. The US plan was to occupy the city of Deir al-Zour and al-Qaim north-east and the capital Damascus. But Iran went around the area where the US forces were positioned, isolating these in the al-Tanf pocket, and made a qualitative leap to liberate Deir al-Zour and al-Qaim by defeating ISIS forces, who withdrew towards the US area of influence east of the Euphrates.

Moreover, Al-Ghouta is a clear demonstration of the US’s failed plan to attack Damascus. The strategic military planning and link between al-Tanf and al-Ghouta was possible had the Syrian Army and Russia not intervened on time to surround it and attack jihadists to force these to surrenderer and pull out to Idlib. The US thought to create a real menace against Damascus and at least prevent the parliamentary and presidential elections due next year. By controlling Ghouta, jihadists were supposed to keep up the pace of bombing to render the Syrian capital “unsafe”.

The US and the International community tried to stop the battles of al-Ghouta to no avail. This prompted Washington to exercise its favourite hobby of imposing sanctions on Russia, without succeeding in stopping the Syrian army (fighting without its allies – except Russia) from recovering its control over Ghouta. The answer came immediately from Moscow by bombing Daraa and hitting al-Qaeda’s area of influence in an indication as to where the future theatre of military operations is expected to be.

Again, events are moving very fast: the US response came quickly through its UK ally when Britain took advantage of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergey Skripal in London to accuse Moscow of being behind his assassination. The message here is clear: all means are legitimate for the control of the Middle East, specifically Syria.

Israel followed by demanding the return of the UNDOF troops, withdrawn in August 2014 following the abduction of 47 UN peacekeepers by al-Qaeda (the ransom for their liberation was paid by Qatar). The Israeli demand coincided – I have learned from well informed sources – with the gathering of forces of Syria’s allies, including Hezbollah, in Daraa, in preparation for future wide scale military operations. The US considers that the battle of Daraa is directly against itself and its Israeli ally, especially as it is party, along with Russia and Jordan, to the agreement to reduce the escalation there, to serve Israel and secure its security in southern Syria.

In this tense political climate it requires no imagination to link the issue of the Russian former spy to the aggressive statement of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials who threatened to use military force against the US and any other country in Syria if necessary.

The Syrian war is far from being a normal one. It is THE war between two superpowers and their allies, where US and Russian soldiers are directly involved on the ground in a war of domination and power. The lack of victory in the US eyes is worse than losing a battle. Even more, the victory of Russia and its allies on Syrian soil in any battle is therefore a direct blow to the heart of Washington and its allies.

Russia understood the US, UK and NATO’s message, including that of the mainstream media, and had no other choice but to escalate the pace of war in Syria as harshly as possible.

The superpowers are on the verge of the abyss, so the danger of falling into a war of cosmic proposition is no longer confined to the imagination or merely a sensational part of unrealistic calculations.

Will Damascus be the door of a major war that destroys everything? Asking the question is very important : but it is a very difficult question to answer.

Return of the Deep State

UPDATE: I just saw a tweet from Monday by Julian Assange where he quotes a Monmouth University poll showing that 74% of Americans believe that national policy is directed by a deep state.

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It seems to have been several months since the legacy media has denied the existence of a functioning U.S. deep state. (I am thinking of last year's "What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist," by Max Fisher, as a prime example.) But it was back on the front page with John Brennan's absurdly sanctimonious weekend "[Y]ou will not destroy America" tweet, amplified in its absurdity by the Samantha Power's double tap "[N]ot a good idea to piss off John Brennan."

And the press harangues Trump for being gauche.

What I wondered upon reading of Brennan's tweeted outrage is whether in the history of the United States any former CIA director had attacked a sitting president in a similar fashion. For instance, did John McCone, Kennedy's Director of Central Intelligence, harangue Nixon during the Watergate constitutional crisis?

 I doubt it.

So the deep state is back, front and center, and Ray McGovern, in his delightful "Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared," thinks a resolution to the current constitutional crisis might be right around the bend:

Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons — not for domestic political purposes. Congressional committees have questioned why Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power (as well as his national security adviser Susan Rice) made so many unmasking requests. Power is reported to have requested the unmasking of more than 260 Americans, most of them in the final days of the administration, including the names of Trump associates.

Deep State Intimidation

Back to John Brennan’s bizarre tweet Saturday telling the President, “You may scapegoat Andy McCabe but you will not destroy America … America will triumph over you.” Unmasking the word “America,” so to speak, one can readily discern the name “Brennan” underneath. Brennan’s words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media — exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years.

Later on Saturday, Samantha Power, with similar equities at stake, put an exclamation point behind what Brennan had tweeted earlier in the day. Power also saw fit to remind Trump where the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is “not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday’s lead article conveys the intended message: “Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. ‘This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,’ said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. ‘You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.’” [sic]

The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline “Trump escalates attacks on FBI” as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday’s lead article.

Putting Down a Marker

It isn’t as though Donald Trump wasn’t warned, as are all incoming presidents, of the power of the Deep State that he needs to play ball with — or else. Recall that just three days before President-elect Trump was visited by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers, Trump was put on notice by none other than the Minority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. Schumer has been around and knows the ropes; he is a veteran of 18 years in the House, and is in his 20th year in the Senate. 

On Jan. 3, 2017 Schumer said it all, when he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, that President-elect Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told Maddow. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer’s theorem stand.

With gauntlets now thrown down by both sides, we may not have to wait very long to see if Schumer is correct in his blithe prediction as to how the present constitutional crisis will be resolved.

The Crime of the Century

I read Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of Islamic State (2015) over the weekend. I've had a copy of the book for several months, but what motivated me to pick it up on Saturday and dig in -- it's a quick read -- was a story in The New York Times by Catherine Porter, "Canada Struggles as It Opens Its Arms to Victims of ISIS," about how refugee agencies in Canada have been overwhelmed by 1,200 Yazidis who were victims of ISIS.

This seems to me to be the crime of the century, the whole Timber Sycamore fiasco of the Obama administration -- the covert war against Syria which uses Al-Qaeda-type groups, as Cockburn prefers to call them, of which ISIS was one, which is to say, Salafi jihadists financed by the Gulf monarchies, as proxies.

As Glen Ford noted last week in "Going Down With the Bad Ship U.S.A.":

“Do you realize now what you’ve done?” Vladimir Putin demanded of the Americans, at the United Nations, in 2015. “It is hypocritical and irresponsible to make loud declarations about the threat of international terrorism while turning a blind eye to the channels of financing and supporting terrorists, including the process of trafficking and illicit trade in oil and arms. It would be equally irresponsible to try to manipulate extremist groups and place them at one's service in order to achieve one's own political goals in the hope of later dealing with them or, in other words, liquidating them.”

“The U.S. and its junior partners could only project power in the region through an alliance with Islamic jihadist terror.”

Washington’s jihadist strategy has rapidly unraveled ever since. The empire was unmasked in the world’s most public forum, revealing the utter depravity of U.S. policy and, more importantly, the weakness of Washington’s position in the region. The mighty fortress of global capital, the self-appointed defender of the world economic “order,” was revealed as, not just in collusion with head-chopping, women-enslaving, sectarian mass-murdering terrorists, but militarily dependent on the very forces it claims to wage a twilight, “generational” battle to destroy. The U.S. has been spouting The Mother of All Lies, and most of humanity knows it. Deep down, most Americans suspect as much, too.

I read Cockburn's book on ISIS hoping that he would document the links between foreign intelligence agencies and the Salafists. He does, but not in an exhaustive or explicit fashion. He simply asserts that foreign intelligence agencies play an outsize role in Al-Qaeda-type organizations. He mentions the "moderate rebels" canard, which is where pro-Western opposition militias were dummied up to act as pass-throughs for sophisticated weapons, like anti-tank missiles, to the jihadists.

It is all appalling, and the devastated, traumatized Yazidis that Canada is dealing with are just one example. How about the European refugee crisis? The devastated cities of Iraq and Syria? The hundreds of thousands of dead?

What is the appropriate punishment for this covert war? With the Vietnam War at least there was the spectacular humiliation of a super power defeated militarily by a people's army; that acted as a check on U.S. hubris for a decade. So far there has been nothing of the sort in Syria.

The U.S. cannot risk another such defeat in a global environment where the Washington Consensus is shattering and the Dragon and the Bear are on the rise.

So jihadist proxies are what it is going to have to be for the foreseeable future: contrived chemical weapons attacks, punitive U.S. cruise missile strikes, and Salafi foot soldiers.

The defeat of the YPG/YPJ Kurdish militia at the hands of the Turkish Army and its FSA re-branded remnants of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra is both a blessing and a curse for the United States. A blessing because the Syrian Kurds have been exposed as critically dependent on U.S. air power. The battle for Kobani that  the YPG/YPJ won against ISIS, handing the caliphate its first significant battlefield defeat the fall of 2014, and which marks the end of Cockburn's book, appears in retrospect to have been singularly dependent on the U.S. Air Force. And a curse because the retreat from Afrin deflates the myth of the Syrian PKK's martial prowess, much as ISIS's attack on Iraqi Kurdistan dealt a blow to the peshmerga, a blow which I don't think it ever recovered.

The U.S. is stymied. It is in this environment that a major blunder could be made. (See Bill van Auken's "Threat of US attack on Syria grows amid fall of 'rebel' stronghold." The best thing I've read on the war in Syria in a while.)

The one hope I harbor is that though U.S. elites are out of touch, they are not so out of touch to think they can embark on another major military escalation in the Middle East without there being a punishing political correction.

The problem here though is that the Democrats are just as hawkish as the GOP now.

Nalavny Will Now be Discarded by Western Intelligence Agencies

An exhausted hostility is on display in Neil MacFarquhar's two post-election pieces, "Putin Wins Russia Election, and Broad Mandate for 4th Term" and "Russia Credits the West for Putin’s Big Victory"

The goal of The New York Times/USG was to inflate the boycott candidacy of Alexei Navalny and keep turnout in the presidential election below the Kremlin target of 70%.

MacFarquhar had to eat crow. From the first four paragraphs of the first story:

MOSCOW — Russian voters gave President Vladimir V. Putin resounding approval for a fourth term on Sunday, with nearly complete figures from the Central Election Commission showing him winning more than three-quarters of the vote with a turnout of more than 67 percent.

The Kremlin had initially projected that Mr. Putin would get at least 70 percent of the vote with a 70 percent turnout, and the results with 99.84 percent of the ballots counted were in line with that assessment.

Mr. Putin won 76.6 percent of the vote, and the turnout of 67.47 percent was higher than the 65 percent participation rate in the last presidential election, in 2012. More than 56 million of Russia’s 110 million eligible voters backed Mr. Putin.

A poor showing by the already fractious opposition prompted a bitter public dispute between the two most high-profile liberal politicians, with one denouncing the other as a Kremlin stooge even before the polls closed.

As I read the story I found myself wishing that polling sites in the U.S. could be as festive on election day as they were in Russia:

Local governments tried various efforts to get out the vote, not least trying to turn the entire event into a carnival. There was music, discounted food for sale and games for the children. At one Moscow polling station a woman dressed as a clown shouted out historical questions and rewarded right answers with a chocolate bar.

The region of Omsk offered free iPhones for voters who turned up in the best costumes, prompting a parade of voters who came as Santa Claus or a Roman legionnaire. One family was a hockey team.

The most satisfying aspect of MacFarquhar's report is the admission, in so many words, of the fraudulence of the Navalny phenomenon:

For some who supported Mr. Navalny, the outcome was a stark disillusion.

Ilya Amutov, a 26-year-old software engineer and longtime Navalny supporter, served as an election observer for the Sobchak campaign. He was taken aback watching elderly voters at his polling station off Leninsky Prospekt kissing Mr. Putin’s pictures on the official poster listing all eight candidate and crossing themselves, he said. That is how the Russian Orthodox faithful treat religious icons.

“They cherish and love Putin,” he said. “This is a big cultural shock. Of course the election was like a circus, but it was not rigged by our authorities. It was rigged by our people. This is extremely depressing.”

Mr. Navalny tried to put the best face on it, telling reporters at his headquarters that at least the boycott seemed to keep turnout below 2012 levels. [Which was not the case.]

There were scattered reports of the usual election irregularities, with a few observers harassed or beaten and video cameras catching some ballot-box stuffing. There was also a discrepancy in some places between the turnout numbers tallied by Mr. Navalany’s organization, which fielded more than 30,000 observers, and the official numbers.

There was no real need for extensive rigging, however, because of Mr. Putin’s genuine popularity.

The result set off immediate, bitter infighting within the already divided liberal opposition.

Ms. Sobchak, who just organized a new political party, came sweeping into Mr. Navalny’s headquarters proclaiming that they should unite. “We have common goals,” she said. “They are more important than our differences, regardless of how unjust the government has been to you.”

What came next was like a scene from “House 2,” the reality television show based on “Big Brother” that Ms. Sobchak hosted before she became a political journalist.

Mr. Navalny verbally bashed Ms. Sobchak, calling her a tool of the Kremlin and releasing the anger evidently pent up since she stepped forward to claim the liberal banner in the election.

“It was a grandiose fraud and you were part of it,” he shouted, accusing her of undermining the boycott. “You are part of this lie, this falsification.”

Navalny, after this performance, will be discarded by the Western intelligence agencies that are his primary support.

CBS Rolls Out the Red Carpet for MBS

Preceding his visit to the United States CBS rolled out the red carpet for the 32-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), in the form of a coddling interview with Norah O'Donnell.

The Saudi crown prince needs all the positive PR he can get. A rare display of congressional push-back is developing with regards to the U.S. military's opened-ended commitment to the kingdom's ongoing war in Yemen. Raytheon is seeking to sign a $1 billion deal to provide missiles to al-Saud.

Little in the CBS interview was said about the war Yemen. It was framed as a conflict with the Persian Third Reich. MBS pleaded for understanding, asking, in so many words, "What would America would do if Mexico was firing missiles at Houston  and New York?" Of course, the few missiles the Houthis have managed to launch into Saudi Arabia have been in response to saturation bombing of civilian areas.

Nothing was said in the interview about the war in Syria and the kingdom's role in funding all the Salafi jihadists there.

Nothing was said about the civil suit against Saudi Arabia by families of 9/11 victims.

The interview was one soft pitch after another. MBS was even allowed to claim unchallenged that the decades-long export of extremist Wahhabism was the work of the Muslim Brotherhood!

Craig Murray Exposes Shoddy Propaganda on Skripal Poisoning

It is interesting that the column inches published on the Skripal poisoning have plummeted this weekend. No doubt it has something to do with Craig Murray's efforts to expose government pressure put on scientists at Porton Down to say the nerve agent used on the Skripals was made in Russia.

As Murray notes in several blog posts (for instance, "Boris Johnson Attempt to Refute My Sources on Porton Down the Most Hilarious Fail"), the refusal of scientists to knuckle under has led to the awkward wording “of a type developed by Russia."

The inability to move beyond this wording has exposed PM May's ballyhooed performance in parliament last week as yet another high stakes dog and pony show.

As Murray explained in a post yesterday:

Several million people have now read my articles on the lack of evidence of Russian government guilt for the Salisbury attack. That’s over 300,000 unique visitors on this little blog alone so far, and it has been repeated on hundreds of sites all over the internet. My own tweets on the subject have been retweeted over 12,500 times and received 8 million impressions. I know that journalists from every mainstream media outlet you can mention have seen the material, because of numerous tweets from them none of which address any of the facts, but instead call me a “Conspiracy nutter” or variants of that, some very rude.

Yet what I wrote has not been refuted. It would be very easy to refute were it not true. The government would just have to say “Porton Down have stated that they have definitely identified the nerve agent as made in Russia”. They have not said that. Most extraordinarily, not one mainstream media “journalist” has asked a minister the question: “You keep using this phrase the nerve agent is “of a type developed by Russia”. Are you able to confirm it was actually made in Russia?” .

There is no excuse for this. Literally hundreds of mainstream media “journalists” have slavishly reproduced the propaganda phrase “of a type developed by Russia” without a single one of them every querying this rather odd wording, or why it is the government always uses that precise wording again and again and again.

Russian Ministry of Defense Warns of False Flag Chemical Attack in Syria

Here is Russia's counter, reported in RT, to the incessant chemical weapons (CW) propaganda campaign -- Skripal, Syria -- in the West: A false flag CW attack is being planned, which will be used as justification for a U.S. attack on Syria:

Russia’s Defense Ministry says “US instructors” are training militants to stage false flag chemical attacks in south Syria. The incidents are said to be a pretext for airstrikes on Syrian government troops and infrastructure.

“We have reliable information at our disposal that US instructors have trained a number of militant groups in the vicinity of the town of At-Tanf, to stage provocations involving chemical warfare agents in southern Syria,” Russian General Staff spokesman General Sergey Rudskoy said at a news briefing on Saturday.

“Early in March, the saboteur groups were deployed to the southern de-escalation zone to the city of Deraa, where the units of the so-called Free Syrian Army are stationed.”

“They are preparing a series of chemical munitions explosions. This fact will be used to blame the government forces. The components to produce chemical munitions have been already delivered to the southern de-escalation zone under the guise of humanitarian convoys of a number of NGOs.”

The planned provocations will be widely covered in the Western media and will ultimately be used as a pretext by the US-led coalition to launch strikes on Syria, Rudskoy warned.

“The provocations will be used as a pretext by the United States and its allies to launch strikes on military and government infrastructure in Syria,” the official stated.

“We’re registering the signs of the preparations for the possible strikes. Strike groups of the cruise missile carriers have been formed in the east of the Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf and Red Sea.”

Another false flag chemical attack is being prepared in the province of Idlib by the “Al-Nusra Front terrorist group, in coordination with the White Helmets,” Rudskoy warned. The militants have already received 20 containers of chlorine to stage the incident, he said.

Corbyn on the Skripal Affair

In The Guardian yesterday Jeremy Corbyn penned a defense of his stance regarding the Skripal affair, "The Salisbury attack was appalling. But we must avoid a drift to conflict." His position is more hawkish than is being presented in the mainstream media. For instance, he applauds prime minister Theresa May's expulsion of Russian diplomats, and he calls for cracking down on the many Russian oligarchs who shelter on Britain's shores:

We agree with the government’s action in relation to Russian diplomats, but measures to tackle the oligarchs and their loot would have a far greater impact on Russia’s elite than limited tit-for-tat expulsions. We are willing to back further sanctions as and when the investigation into the Salisbury attack produces results.

The Tory government seems willing to take up Corbyn's idea of seizing Russian tycoon assets, but limiting the seizure to Putin's allies.

What set off the attacks on Corbyn was his statement of the obvious: We don't know who poisoned Skripal and his daughter, and trusting the government in these matters has gone very badly of late:

[T]hat does not mean we resign ourselves to a “new cold war” of escalating arms spending, proxy conflicts across the globe and a McCarthyite intolerance of dissent. Instead, Britain needs to uphold its laws and its values without reservation. And those should be allied to a foreign policy that uses every opportunity to reduce tensions and conflict wherever possible.

This government’s diplomacy is failing the country. Unqualified support for Donald Trump and rolling out the red carpet for a Saudi despot not only betrays our values, it makes us less safe.

And our capacity to deal with outrages from Russia is compromised by the tidal wave of ill-gotten cash that Russian oligarchs – both allied with and opposed to the Russian government – have laundered through London over the past two decades. We must stop servicing Russian crony capitalism in Britain, and the corrupt billionaires who use London to protect their wealth.

[snip]

But if we are to unite our allies behind action that needs taking, we must make full use of existing international treaties and procedures for dealing with chemical weapons. That means working through the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to reduce the threat from these horrific weapons, including if necessary an investigation by chemical weapons inspectors into the distribution of Soviet-era weapons.

There can and should be the basis for a common political response to this crime. But in my years in parliament I have seen clear thinking in an international crisis overwhelmed by emotion and hasty judgments too many times. Flawed intelligence and dodgy dossiers led to the calamity of the Iraq invasion. There was overwhelming bipartisan support for attacking Libya, but it proved to be wrong. A universal repugnance at the 9/11 attacks led to a war on Afghanistan that continues to this day, while terrorism has spread across the globe.

Can't really dispute that. And I think that's what's behind the howls of derision in the tabloids. When you are actively engaged in a "big lie" you can't have someone of prominence stand and state the obvious.

The New York Times, always on the lookout to skewer Corbyn, hopped on the bandwagon with Stephen Castle's "U.K. Labour Leader’s Stance on Russian Ex-Spy’s Poisoning Splits Party." Fortunately Castle lets the sunshine in at the end of his article. The Blairites within Labour can't touch Corbyn:

But one commentator, John Rentoul, suspects that there is more support for Mr. Corbyn’s position outside Parliament where, he wrote, the Labour leader’s “idealistic opposition to warlike words goes down well with much of the general public.” And it remains true that despite the strong circumstantial evidence of Russian involvement, the British police have neither identified any direct link to the Kremlin nor named any suspects.

Whether Mr. Corbyn pays a political price for his stance may depend on how the Anglo-Russian rift develops. His supporters are likely to give him the benefit of the doubt, and most of his internal critics are already well-known opponents. While his comments gave plenty of ammunition to the right-wing press, many analysts, pointing to last year’s elections when the tabloids vilified the Labour leader, concluded that he might wear their criticism as a badge of honor.

The Italian elections, May's shuckin' and jivin' on Brexit, Trump's apparent longevity all point to the neoliberal center Washington Consensus in serious trouble. For those in power the solution is to lock in a New Cold War. Stifle dissent. Cement in narrow boundaries for political discourse.

It's a long shot. It will buy the discredited neoliberal center some more time. How much more is the question. But inevitably there will be a correction.

It's Back to the Future with the New Cold War

An interesting post by Caitlin Johnstone yesterday, "MSM Keeps Running Stories About Space Aliens All Of A Sudden, And It’s Weird," which I read on Niqnaq, hypothesizes about the efflorescence of UFO stories recently in the corporate media:

So we’ve got UFO footage suddenly being released with the approval of the Pentagon, and a bit of an odd uptick in reports about space aliens in general being promoted in surprising places like NBC News. I don’t know why this is happening. But I do know that the last Cold War with the Soviet Union was accompanied by a UFO panic, and that the US and its allies are well into a new cold war with Russia.

A 2002 study by British researchers combed through thousands of previously secret government documents about UFO phenomena, and concluded that the UFO craze was most likely attributable to Cold War paranoia and not visitors from the stars. It also found that defense and intelligence agencies had taken a great interest in manipulating the UFO panic to gain an advantage over the Soviets. A Guardian article about the study reports the following:

“But Clarke and Roberts, whose research is to be published this week in a book called Out of the Shadows , did uncover evidence that the American Secret Service, with the possible connivance of the British, looked at ways of using the public panic over UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Russians.

"In CIA memos marked ‘secret’ and seen by The Observer, top officials consider exploiting the UFO craze. ‘I suggest that we discuss the possible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes,’ wrote CIA director Walter Smith in 1952.

‘Shortly after that meeting the CIA sent a delegation to Britain to discuss UFOs. It is hard to imagine that they did not discuss the psychological warfare aspects of it with their British counterparts,’ Clarke said.”

So we’ve been here before, and we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that all these exciting new UFO revelations suddenly being covered in mainstream outlets are nothing more than new cold war manipulations of some sort by the CIA and the Pentagon. I don’t really know what’s going on with all this, but I do know it’s not normal, and I know that truth is the first casualty of war. This most certainly includes cold war, where psyops play a much larger role than in conventional hot warfare.

We know of the strong connection between the SciFi craze of the early 1960s and the Cold War from our exploration of Where Monsters Dwell, the most recent post of which was last month.

Pennsylvania's 18th CD Special Election Results: The Blue Dog Can Still Hunt

Democrats are declaring victory in last night's special election in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district though there are still absentee and provisional ballots to count. Democrat Conor Lamb leads Republican Rick Saccone by 641 votes.

FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich in "The Pennsylvania 18th Result Tells Us What Everything Else Has Been Telling Us For A While: We get it! Republicans are in deep trouble.," explains why Lamb's lead will hold:

The exact margin will likely change, but it’s going to be very difficult for Saccone to make up that deficit. The only votes left to be counted are around 200 absentee ballots in Greene County (expected to be announced on Wednesday) as well as a handful of provisional and overseas ballots, which may take days to finalize. There may not even be 641 ballots left to count.

Nor is a recount likely to change the final result. Although it would be pretty easy for Republicans to request a recount should they want one, recounts typically don’t shift election margins by that much. That’s especially true in Pennsylvania, where most voting is done on electronic touchscreens; a recount would only reveal errors in the small population of paper ballots.

But as we’ve told you from the beginning, for those of us who don’t live in the Pennsylvania 18th, it doesn’t really matter who wins if what you’re mainly interested in is the 2018 midterms. The takeaway for November’s elections will be the same no matter whether Lamb wins by a fraction of a percentage point or Saccone wins by a fraction of a percentage point: Tuesday represented yet another huge Democratic overperformance in a Trump-era special election.

Even if the GOP were somehow to produce a missing box of a thousand provisional ballots all marked for Saccone it wouldn't change the fact that there was a 20-point swing for the Democrats in a district that was safely Republican and that was Trump terra firma. It's huge and very dire for the GOP.  As Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns summarize in "Pennsylvania House Race, in a District Trump Won by 20 Points, Is Too Close to Call":

Republicans concede that they will be unable to keep the 2018 battlefield limited to a few dozen districts, mainly in coastal suburbs where Mr. Trump is intensely unpopular. With a deepening mood of pessimism and fear in Washington, they may be hard-pressed to tackle additional contentious legislation this year.

Even before the returns were counted, Republican officials began criticizing Mr. Saccone’s candidacy in a district where the anti-abortion Republican previously holding the seat, Tim Murphy, was forced to resign after a woman with whom he was having an affair said he pressed her to have an abortion.

But three months after suffering an embarrassing defeat in the special Alabama Senate election, Mr. Trump and his administration once more put their prestige on the line on friendly terrain. By continuing to aggressively compete even as Mr. Lamb was surging, Republicans tested the potency of two of their most fearsome political weapons for the midterm campaigns: their fund-raising advantage and the deep unpopularity of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.

Outside organizations sought to derail Mr. Lamb with attacks on his record as a federal prosecutor and claims that he would, as one ad put it, merely be a sheep for Ms. Pelosi.

But the spending did not put the race away, in part because Mr. Lamb pre-emptively inoculated himself against the Pelosi offensive by stating early in the campaign that he would not support her for leader.

Along with his military service and support for gun rights, Mr. Lamb’s opposition to Ms. Pelosi, which he highlighted in a TV ad, helped him win over some of the voters who were raised Democrats but have drifted to the Republican Party in this heavily unionized district.

His approach may signal to other Democrats that they can pursue more moderate swing voters without sacrificing the support of the party’s liberal base, at least in districts that will tolerate deviations from party orthodoxy.

I have to apologize because nearly everything I said about this race on Monday turned out to be wrong. I said that there weren't enough white-collar liberals in Allegheny County to overcome Trump's advantage in rural precincts. A passage from Rakich's article reveals how wrong I got this:

Lamb outperformed Hillary Clinton’s margins by a nearly identical 19 points in white-collar Allegheny County and in Trump-loving, blue-collar Washington and Westmoreland counties. However, Lamb outperformed then-President Obama’s 2012 margin by 23 points in Allegheny while doing so by only 9–12 points in the district’s other three counties. Perhaps because Lamb assumed some socially conservative positions and cozied up to blue-collar workers, the Pennsylvania 18th is often portrayed as just another Midwestern working-class district. In fact, though, it is both wealthier and better-educated than the nation as a whole. As the numbers show, Lamb won this election not in “Trump country,” but in the Allegheny County suburbs.

My analysis hinged on the rationality of an average liberal voter. Why would you go to the polls on a cold late-winter day to vote for a gun-toting, anti-$15-Now blue dog? Many would stay home I thought, muttering "A pox on both your houses," and turnout in Allegheny would not be enough to counteract the droves of MAGA voters in Westmoreland, Washington and Greene counties. That was wrong. The liberal is superficial and doesn't bother with contradictions. The liberal is energized by a profound disgust for Trump.

The takeaways: The Blue Wave might yet appear (2006 redux); Biden will probably run for the Democratic nomination; and the blue dog can still hunt.

The U.S. has been Warned

From a Reuters story, "U.S. warns it may act on Syria as onslaught against Ghouta grinds on," by
Michelle Nichols and Suleiman Al-Khalidi:

The Observatory, said on Monday the death toll in the civil war had passed half a million people.

It has confirmed the deaths of 511,000 people, it said, and has the names of more than 350,000 of them. About 85 percent were killed by government forces and their allies, it said. [Putting to one side the veracity of the 85% claim, how many would have died if the former colonial powers along with their allies in the GCC hadn't underwritten one of the largest covert wars in history?]

Eastern Ghouta has been besieged for years after many of its residents joined the initial protests against Assad’s rule in 2011 that triggered the slide into civil war. The United Nations says 400,000 people live in the enclave, already suffering shortages of food and medicine even before the massive assault began in mid-February.

Assad says the assault on eastern Ghouta is needed to end the rule of Islamist insurgents over the civilian population and to stop mortar fire on nearby Damascus. [Perfectly reasonable. Any head of state would take the same position.]

The United Nations has warned of dire shortages of food and medicine, where international deliveries have long been erratic and often obstructed before they could reach the enclave.

The expulsion of the rebels from eastern Ghouta would represent their biggest defeat since they lost their enclave in Aleppo in December 2016. They still control large areas in the northwest and southwest and a few scattered pockets elsewhere but have been driven from most major population centers.

From a CNBC story, "Russian military threatens action against the US in Syria," by Holly Ellyatt:

The Russian military has threatened action against the U.S. if it strikes Syria's capital city of Damascus, according to multiple news reports.

The threat, by Chief of Russia's General Staff Valery Gerasimov, was widely reported by Russia media sites such as state news agency RIA and Tass. It said Gerasimov said Russia had "reliable information" about militants preparing to falsify a government chemical attack against civilians.

He continued by saying the U.S. would then use this attack to accuse Syrian government troops of using chemical weapons. He added that the U.S. would then plan to launch a missile strike on government districts in Damascus.

"In several districts of Eastern Ghouta, a crowd was assembled with women, children and old people, brought from other regions, who were to represent the victims of the chemical incident, " Gerasimov said, according to RIA.

Gerasimov said Russia would respond to a U.S. strike on Syria if the lives of Russian servicemen were threatened, targeting any missiles and launchers involved.

"In case there is a threat to the lives of our military, the Russian Armed Force will take retaliatory measures both over the missiles and carriers that will use them," he said. [About as clear a warning as you can get.]

The U.S. Department of Defense urged Russia to "stop creating distractions" and "enabling the Assad regime's brutality" in a statement sent to CNBC responding to the allegations. [When has the brutality of an allied regime ever distracted the United States?]

The chemical weapons canard has lost all bearing to reality. Official organs of the prestige press like Reuters, The New York Times and the Washington Post don't even try to make sense of why the Syrian government would use a weapon that would invite an attack from the U.S. given that as, the NYT reports in its Tuesday briefing,

The Syrian government and its allies managed to split the rebel-held enclave of eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, into three blocs, each surrounded and besieged.

The fracturing of one of the last major rebel-controlled areas could be a turning point in a relentless scorched-earth campaign that had been backed by Russian airstrikes.

Some residents are demanding that rebels leave, hoping that their departure would eliminate the main reason for the bombings.

Chemical weapons are the agreed casus belli. All that's needed is a fiction, a concoction of some sort, and the Tomahawks will fly. That's why Gerasimov's statement is so significant. He is stating categorically that U.S. carriers will be hit if there is another Khan Sheikhoun.

My guess is Trump is smart enough not to start a shooting war with Russia. Let the Tories try that one on for size.

Tillerson and the Doomsday Clock

Tillerson's ouster has been in the works for some time. The fact that on his plane ride back to Washington, D.C. he chose to lend his voice to Theresa May's bombastic theatrics with regards to the Skripal poisoning ("Ex-spy Skripal poisoning 'clearly came from Russia' & 'will trigger response' – Tillerson") is proof that he didn't follow orders from the White House (because the White House has danced around the Skripal episode).

Trump is on the verge of putting Russiagate and the Mueller probe behind him. The last thing he wants is another manufactured Russia crisis.

The #NeverTrumpers are on the verge of getting buried and need something big quickly -- any old Russia crisis will do -- because they are losing control of the narrative. The problem here for the rest of us is the Doomsday Clock is already only two minutes to midnight. Ginning up crises with Russia is going to usher in midnight.

Pennsylvania's 18th CD Special Election: Another Democratic Loss is Coming

There is a special election tomorrow in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district. It is another one of these special election referenda on Trump. The district, concentrated in the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh, will soon disappear because of the court-ordered remapping of Pennsylvania's over-the-top GOP gerrymander, but that hasn't stopped outside money from pouring in.

The outcome of the race in the 18th is considered predictive of future partisan fundraising, the 2018 midterms and possibly even the Democratic presidential nominee.

The race pits a young, handsome former Marine blue dog Democrat, Conor Lamb, against Republican state representative Rick Saccone. The prior occupant of the 18th, Tim Murphy, a staunch pro-life Republican, resigned his seat in disgrace when it became public that he had forced his mistress to have an abortion.

Good reporting has been produced on this race. Last week's "Why G.O.P. Is Spending Millions on a Soon-to-Vanish Seat in Trump Country" by Jonathan Martin illustrated the contortions of the young Lamb -- anti-Pelosi, pro-gun, anti-$15 minimum wage -- and how the Republicans have exploited these contortions.

Trip Gabriel in "My Union or My President? Dueling Loyalties Mark Pennsylvania Race" describes talking to rank'n'file union members, upon whom Lamb's campaign purportedly rests, outside of a steel pant in the district and the impression one gets is distinctly partisan Republican:

The divide between union leaders and the rank and file is real, in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Outside the gates of an Allegheny Technologies steel plant in Washington, Pa., deep in the 18th District, workers coming and going during the changeover to the afternoon shift almost all said they had voted for Mr. Trump.

Most said they still approved of the president’s job performance, and for some, that support extended to Mr. Saccone as well. A number took at face value the flood of TV attack ads that outside Republican groups had been airing, trying to tie Mr. Lamb to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, whose social positions make her unpopular here.

“If he’s a Nancy Pelosi supporter, I’m not going to vote for him,” Brad Phillips, 45, said.

Mr. Lamb has said repeatedly that he would defy Ms. Pelosi. But a Republican attack ad insists that he, like Ms. Pelosi, favors cuts to Medicare — a hoary accusation based on the Affordable Care Act’s reduction of payments to health providers. (Republicans in Congress retain those same reductions in their bills to repeal the health law.)

Mr. Phillips seemed to cite that attack ad as evidence of Mr. Lamb’s duplicity. “Some of the things she’s supported, he’s backed her,” he said.

Ironically the wellspring of support for Lamb is in the white-collar suburbs of the district:

Within the party, there is a boisterous faction that argues that the Democrats’ future lies with college-educated suburbanites and minorities, and that trying to win back white working-class voters may be a lost cause.

One reason Mr. Lamb seems poised to exceed expectations for a Democrat in his district is the anti-Trump fervor of progressive voters concentrated in the white-collar suburbs close to Pittsburgh.

These voters have swamped the polls in nearly every election of the past year, from Virginia to rural Wisconsin, and Democrats have been outperforming their November 2016 results in race after race.

Chuck Moser, a sales director for Cisco who held a fund-raiser for Mr. Lamb at a private club in Sewickley, an affluent suburb, waited in a long line last week to hear former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaign for Mr. Lamb.

“I haven’t previously stood out in chilly weather waiting to go to rallies,” he said.

He and his wife, Barb, 40, described themselves as more liberal than Mr. Lamb.

Mr. Moser said voters like them would make an important difference on Tuesday.

Herein lies the problem for Democrats: There aren't enough of these white-collar suburbs to beat Trump. Trump flies in and packs a hangar; Biden walks a rope line. That's a big difference. Lamb's base voter is more progressive than his candidate. Lamb is just a vehicle for spite, disdain for Trump.

The blue dog is hocus pocus, The blue dog might have worked for Pelosi in 2006. People were tired of Bush by then. But 2018 is different. Trump's supporters haven't tired of him. Lamb can't be expected to carry a district Trump won by 20 points in 2016 when nothing much has changed since then. Saccone is going to win this race.

One silver lining though -- Lamb loses and Joe Biden's presidential aspirations will be dimmed.

The Emerald City is Going to Shit

From yesterday's Significant Digits:

5,400 people
That’s the number of people in Seattle who live on the street, according to one 2017 survey, about half of whom live in their vehicle. A judge ruled in favor of a Seattle man whose vehicle, where he also lived, was impounded to pay for parking debts, saying that the vehicle was covered under the 123-year old Homestead Act. That law says the government cannot force people to sell their homes to pay for a debt. [KIRO 7 News]

And this from Wednesday's Charles Mudede post, "Seattle Housing Prices Continue to Soar, as Congress Prepares to Deregulate Banks":

Two important pieces of news to consider this afternoon. The first, reported by the Seattle Times, is that the median for single-family-home prices in Seattle has reached an astounding $777,000. That is an increase of $20,000 from the last peak, which was reached in January. As for the Eastside, the median cost is almost $1 million. As expected, the explanation provided for these ever-rising prices is not speculation, but a hot jobs market.

From Seattle Times:
The hyper job market in the Pacific Northwest continues to outpace almost every metro area in the nation, and thus our housing market is booming; for now, there is no end in sight,” Mike Grady, president and COO at Coldwell Banker Bain, said in a statement.

The reporter, Mike Rosenberg, felt that the opinion of this Bain banker settled the matter. Rosenberg did, however, mention that while incomes are rising in the Seattle area, home prices are "still increasing much faster." 

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., several Dems in alliance with lots of Republicans are preparing to remove significant rules that were imposed on the banking industry after it destroyed the global economy in 2008. These rules are a part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

I live near downtown Ground Zero of all this. Homelessness is visible everywhere in spite of an atypically harsh winter (part of the polar vortex thing). The nuts and bolts are this: a small business, like a gym or neighborhood saloon, move into a storefront and then closes after not too many months. The main reason? Can't afford the high rent. So the storefront goes vacant and the homeless move in and squat. There has been one a couple blocks from my apartment building for a year now.

Another aspect of living in the hottest job market/real estate market is the massive amount of dog shit on the sidewalk. Maybe it's human shit. I don't know. I assumed it was from a dog based on the large number of people I see walking their precious pooches. More so than at points in the past. More condos and high-end multi-story apartment buildings have shot up in my neighborhood and they cater to the single professional who usually shares her living quarters with a canine pet.

Rampant homelessness, no doubt far worse than that documented by the quote at the top of the post, and sidewalks slathered in shit that's what you get in this iteration of "as good as it gets" neoliberalism.

And now comes the news that Michael Bennett has been traded to Philadelphia and that Richard Sherman will be cut today  The Emerald City is definitely going to shit.

****

POSTSCRIPT: There is a really good piece by Brian Floyd, "A Seahawks fan’s elegy for the Legion of Boom," on what appears to be a done deal -- Richard Sherman will be cut today. It is definitely the end of an era:

The history of the Legion of Boom is full of trials and errors, huge mistakes and amazing successes. In the 2013 playoffs, the Seahawks defense gave up a last-second field goal to the Falcons in the divisional round, ending their season. The next year, with the 49ers driving in the NFC Championship, Richard Sherman tipped a Colin Kaepernick pass to the end zone to Malcolm Smith to seal a Seahawks win. Failure, a lesson learned, and a success. What happened two weeks later was a foregone conclusion and a victory lap for the Seahawks defense. The Legion of Boom had a ring, and the experiment worked.

The question is always how long will it keep working. Getting the experiment off the ground is half the battle. In the NFL, the window is short and so is the shelf life for players. And it’s a contact sport so injury luck is involved.

It wasn’t hard to spot the seams. The blowups on the sidelines became more frequent, and there was more tension. Age catches up and the margin for error on defense goes down. Injuries happen, including freak ones like a leg whip from Chancellor, which ended Thomas’ season in painful and devastating fashion. The wear and tear later caught up to Chancellor, and he may never play football again. Playing at the speed and level the Legion of Boom did takes its toll.

The realization that it was over came as Sherman laid on the turf during a brutal Thursday night game against the Cardinals. His Achilles was ruptured, and had been just barely hanging on all season anyway. The Legion of Boom was aging and injured, and the Seahawks had to make some decisions. The seams had been showing, and this was the last gasp before they, too, burst.

Sherman will be released, and may or may not be back. Michael Bennett is gone and Cliff Avrilmay never play again. The Seahawks are moving players around left and right, signaling a large-scale roster shakeup. Earl Thomas may be the only remaining member of the Legion of Boom. Seattle’s defense will look different, and sound quieter.

The Seahawks will try to rebuild, and try to recapture what the Legion of Boom created. There are holdovers, and new faces will emerge. But it’s impossible to re-create what the LOB became because it was an experiment all along: careful scouting, some patience, an environment they could flourish in, a scheme that fit their skills to a perfectly, and a whole lot of luck. What you’re left with is the end of an era and attitude, and a whole bunch of fun memories.

Those Seahawks teams from the 2012 season through the Super Bowl loss that capped the 2014 season were some of the greatest of all time. It's a shame that Carroll and Bevell didn't let Marshawn Lynch run the ball into the end zone against the Patriots. Back-to-back Super Bowl wins would have memorialized the team's greatness. Now it's being junked as a matter of routine business.