World Politics

[blutto]

....just wondering if anyone here knows how much "extra" money Saudi Arabia has made on oil sales since the newest Iraqi troubles started ?....I ask because as I was filling up the car today a fellow fillerer mumbled very annoyed and loudly something about how the rise in gas prices is just paying for another bloody war...

...maybe think of the Enron policy of making money by restricting supply taken to truly Machiavellian levels (look up thread for an article linked by Retro for some good background stuff )...

Cheers

 

[RetroActive]

....just wondering if anyone here knows how much money Saudi Arabia has made on oil sales since the newest Iraqi troubles started ?....I ask because as I was filling up the car today a fellow fillerer mumbled very annoyed and loudly something about how the rise in gas prices is just paying for another bloody war...

...maybe think of the Enron policy of making money by restricting supply taken to truly Machiavellian levels (look up thread for an article linked by Retro for some good background stuff )...

Cheers

Did you mention they could always ride their bike?

 

[blutto]

Did you mention they could always ride their bike?

...didn't think it wise to throw some gasoline on a nicely burning fire...and btw he was as big as a house and already nicely pi$$ed off in the right direction so why interrupt the parade....and further btw he was one of ours and judging from his t-shirt had recently spent some quality time in Afghanistan so he probably knew more about the real score over there than most...and last btw more than a few of our guys refer to Afghanistan as Pipelanistan and they are also not at all proud of the fact they are allied over there with the Northern Alliance, the world's #1 supplier of heroin...

Cheers

 

[blackcat]

I don't know if they are good or not but Lewis is definitely the neocon darlin and constantly refer to a "Judeo-Christian" heritage, refering to the West while the whole "Judeo-Christian" concept - which you are mentioning in another post - in itself is a massive fraud. There's no such thing as "Judeo-Christianism", there's Judaism and Christianism and the two clash with each other. Europe has a Christian and a Hellenistic heritage.

I'm in favour of the return of the Caliphate, though it's not likely to happen. The real one as it had existed until 1925, when the Wahhabits, supported by the Brits, took the Hedjaz, overthrowing the last Sharif. The Wahhabits were a heresy for real fundamental Muslims. NYP obviously won't mention that. It would have disappeared if it wasn't for the Brits. They are not fundamentalists. Actually they aren't officially Muslims since it's a heresy. Real Islam and the real Caliphate was not Wahhabit, was not terrorist and neither Jihadist. Real Islam no longer actually exist, at a political level, today...

how did that judeo-christian thing go in europe with the anti-semitism.

i think what they want you to believe, is the enlightenment, intellectual tradition, royal society newton et al.
freedom, markets, america.

now it is its own talking point, this judeo-christian heretage which is used to mobilise support for the yankee aircraft carrier in the ME. no talk about the subsidies and billions in grants or USS Liberty, nononono

 

[blackcat]

I don't know if they are good or not but Lewis is definitely the neocon darlin and constantly refer to a "Judeo-Christian" heritage, refering to the West while the whole "Judeo-Christian" concept - which you are mentioning in another post - in itself is a massive fraud. There's no such thing as "Judeo-Christianism", there's Judaism and Christianism and the two clash with each other. Europe has a Christian and a Hellenistic heritage.

central/eastern europe, judeo-orthodox. and policy wise, and society wide influence, now it is judeo-christian. heck, see the office of special plans. wurmser, feith, perle, wolfie... not all in the pentagon. but effectively, they were.

 

[blackcat]

The Brutal Logic of a Self-Seeking Empire
Is Open-Ended Chaos the Desired US-Israeli Aim in the Middle East?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06...he-desired-us-israeli-aim-in-the-middle-east/

it was all in the zionist philosopher Ze'ev Jabotinsky theory, read: The IRon Wall for starters

 

[blackcat]

To the bold, you didn't mention that the ISIS monster was generated in Syria. The forces that now arrive in Iraq are of foreign provenance. There's a direct connection between the Syrian civil war and Obama not having intervened at Damascus, which permitted the rise of Sunnite extremism. Furthermore, these are financed by the same as those in Iraq: from rich private citizens of the Persian Gulf, to those in the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Within their strategy Syria and Iraq form a single enlarged battle ground in the conflict with Iran, in a war of recruiting and fighting among terrorists. ISIS is a creature under the direction of the Saudi Bandar, ex-chief of intelligence of Riad.

Bandar was also a great ally of Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. and the artifice of the mujahedin in Afghanistan, who only recently was removed through US pressure, even if his terrorist network is till alive and well-financed. Thus in a stroke of tragic irony before Bush's war in Iraq, terrorism was relatively absent in Syria and Iraq, while now it has spread throughout the territory and is thriving.

Saudi and Qatari affiliates were funding those myriad of diffuse, disperse terrorist groups in Syria.

Libya comes first. And the CIA and State where enabling these terrorists groups in Syria at FIRST.

They wanted to topple Asad.

24 months ago, they were still using Asad and his special branch, for the torture of their special rendition suspects.

you know the aphorism on the CIA, "want them to disappear, send them to Egypt, want them tortured, send them to Syria, want them held, blacksite"

so no, i definitely was not missing that. You were actually missing the antecedents.

and it would have been much more simple, but still extremely difficulty, of controlling them at the source, re: money, arms, backers, in Saud, and Qatar.

And yes, Prince Bandar, aka brother Bush

 

[blackcat]

julian assange stepping it up
http://time.com/2894304/wikileaks-julian-assange-ecuador/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40co4ytq3Gw

wikileaks releasing cold war documents... was this chelsea mannings cache?

 

[blutto]

....kinda funny how the conflict in The Ukraine has drifted off the media radars....but that is not to says that things ain't happenin'....find below an article that looks at some of the plays that are and could be made in the economic parts of that conflict....much of it is hypothetical but a lot does have some sense to it ( much of it goes back to a line from a Pepe Escobar article quoted earlier in this thread...which is that the conflict in The Ukraine is really a battle over an expanding economic Russian relationship with Europe which would eventually leave the US out in the dark..) ....well worth the read....

...the article... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-...ti-dollar-alliance-halt-us-foreign-aggression

Cheers

 

[RetroActive]

....kinda funny how the conflict in The Ukraine has drifted off the media radars....but that is not to says that things ain't happenin'....find below an article that looks at some of the plays that are and could be made in the economic parts of that conflict....much of it is hypothetical but a lot does have some sense to it ( much of it goes back to a line from a Pepe Escobar article quoted earlier in this thread...which is that the conflict in The Ukraine is really a battle over an expanding economic Russian relationship with Europe which would eventually leave the US out in the dark..) ....well worth the read....

...the article... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-...ti-dollar-alliance-halt-us-foreign-aggression

Cheers

I read stuff like that and for no good reason other than that niggling suspicion at the back of (what's left of) my brain wonders how much of this is theatre. If the Russians and Chinese, the BRICS more generally are dumping the dollar as a sincere protest (necessity?)...or something else is afoot. The IMF is actively organizing the SDR to take over from the federal reserve currency (petro-dollar) as the world reserve currency. Meanwhile I'm reading the odd blip here and there about Israel, for ex., experimenting with going to a completely digital currency. It's no secret this is the next logical step.

This is of course buried layers deep beneath domestic politics, geopolitics, credit bubbles and rigged markets but every once in awhile it bubbles up. While the (some anyway) politicians may be playing checkers the bankers and those that have serious pull aren't and they've been playing both sides off the middle for a long time to achieve larger objectives.

If this break-down, which it certainly is, of the world reserve currency could be manipulated (via collapse and consolidate) into a completely digitized world currency it would certainly usher in a new era of control.

Just thinking out loud. I don't know but...sometimes I wonder...sneaky, sneaky. Snakes.

The End Of Anglo-American Hegemony
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/06/19/the-end-of-anglo-american-hegemony/

 

[aphronesis]

....kinda funny how the conflict in The Ukraine has drifted off the media radars....but that is not to says that things ain't happenin'....find below an article that looks at some of the plays that are and could be made in the economic parts of that conflict....much of it is hypothetical but a lot does have some sense to it ( much of it goes back to a line from a Pepe Escobar article quoted earlier in this thread...which is that the conflict in The Ukraine is really a battle over an expanding economic Russian relationship with Europe which would eventually leave the US out in the dark..) ....well worth the read....

...the article... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-...ti-dollar-alliance-halt-us-foreign-aggression

Cheers

Bit of on the ground stuff

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maidan-and-beyond-part-ii-the-cacophony-of-donbas/

 

[blackcat]

....kinda funny how the conflict in The Ukraine has drifted off the media radars....but that is not to says that things ain't happenin'....find below an article that looks at some of the plays that are and could be made in the economic parts of that conflict....much of it is hypothetical but a lot does have some sense to it ( much of it goes back to a line from a Pepe Escobar article quoted earlier in this thread...which is that the conflict in The Ukraine is really a battle over an expanding economic Russian relationship with Europe which would eventually leave the US out in the dark..) ....well worth the read....

...the article... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-...ti-dollar-alliance-halt-us-foreign-aggression

Cheers

pepe escpbar is great. listened to him when scott horton ex-antiwar radio, and now does his own show out of Austin TX.

 

[blutto]

Bit of on the ground stuff

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maidan-and-beyond-part-ii-the-cacophony-of-donbas/

...thank you...news of the on the ground variety has been notable by its absence ( maybe I should look harder but work has sucked a lot of time lately )....

Cheers

 

[Amsterhammer]

Bit of on the ground stuff

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maidan-and-beyond-part-ii-the-cacophony-of-donbas/

An excellent and informative read, Aphro. Thanks for posting.

 

[blutto]

....Pope Dude is at it again and this one is a whopper considering where he is currently residing ....

"SIBARI Italy (Reuters) - Pope Francis on Saturday took on one of Italy's most dangerous organised crime groups, calling it an example of "the adoration of evil" and saying Mafiosi "are excommunicated". "

....from... https://ca.news.yahoo.com/mafiosi-excommunicated-pope-says-151122053.html

Cheers

 

[Merckx index]

Interview with open source advocate Robert Steele:

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world.

But the CIA wasn't happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference. The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog.

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain…

The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on."

So why isn't it happening yet?


"Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one massive fire."

Is this a crisis of capitalism, then? Does capitalism need to end for us to resolve these problems? And if so, how?

"Predatory capitalism is based on the privatisation of profit and the externalisation of cost. It is an extension of the fencing of the commons, of enclosures, along with the criminalisation of prior common customs and rights. What we need is a system that fully accounts for all costs. Whether we call that capitalism or not is irrelevant to me. But doing so would fundamentally transform the dynamic of present day capitalism, by making capital open source. For example, and as calculated by my colleague JZ Liszkiewicz, a white cotton T-shirt contains roughly 570 gallons of water, 11 to 29 gallons of fuel, and a number of toxins and emissions including pesticides, diesel exhaust, and heavy metals and other volatile compounds – it also generally includes child labor. Accounting for those costs and their real social, human and environmental impacts has totally different implications for how we should organise production and consumption than current predatory capitalism."

Despite this unabashedly radical vision, Steele is hugely respected by senior military intelligence experts across the world. As a researcher at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, he has authored several monographs advocating the need for open source methods to transform the craft of intelligence. He has lectured to the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security as well as National Security Councils in various countries, and his new book has received accolades from senior intelligence officials across multiple countries including France and Turkey…

Given his standing as an intelligence expert, Steele's criticisms of US intelligence excesses are beyond scathing – they are damning. "Most of what is produced through secret methods is not actually intelligence at all. It is simply secret information that is, most of the time, rather generic and therefore not actually very useful for making critical decisions at a government level. The National Security Agency (NSA) has not prevented any terrorist incidents. CIA cannot even get the population of Syria correct and provides no intelligence - decision-support - to most cabinet secretaries, assistant secretaries, and department heads. Indeed General Tony Zinni, when he was commander in chief of the US Central Command as it was at war, is on record as saying that he received, 'at best,' a meagre 4% of what he needed to know from secret sources and methods."

So does open source mean you are calling for abolition of intelligence agencies as we know them, I ask.

"I'm a former spy and I believe we still need spies and secrecy, but we need to redirect the vast majority of the funds now spent on secrecy toward savings and narrowly focused endeavors at home. For instance, utterly ruthless counterintelligence against corruption, or horrendous evils like paedophilia.

"Believe it or not, 95% of what we need for ethical evidence-based decision support cannot be obtained through the secret methods of standard intelligence practices. But it can be obtained quite openly and cheaply from academics, civil society, commerce, governments, law enforcement organisations, the media, all militaries, and non-governmental organisations. An Open Source Agency, as I've proposed it, would not just meet 95% of our intelligence requirements, it would do the same at all levels of government and carry over by enriching education, commerce, and research – it would create what I called in 1995 a 'Smart Nation.'

 

[rhubroma]

Bit of on the ground stuff

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maidan-and-beyond-part-ii-the-cacophony-of-donbas/

The betrayal of socialism in the post-Soviet era, has been dominated by an oligarchic and lawless capitalism.

 

[blutto]

Interview with open source advocate Robert Steele:

...hmmm....very hmmm....thanks for that....

.... what he is advocating sounds a lot like what historians do as just a regular part of their job, but in this case more or less in real time ( which admittedly gets much more difficult the closer one gets to more... )...hmmm...very hmmm.....

...historians doing spooky things....sounds like a business plan for a think tank needs to be draw up....?....

Cheers

 

[blutto]

The betrayal of socialism in the post-Soviet era, has been dominated by an oligarchic and lawless capitalism.

The betrayal of The Democratic Dream in the post-Soviet era, has been dominated by an oligarchic and lawless capitalism. ( +/- a few decimal places )?

Cheers

 

[rhubroma]

The betrayal of Trotskyism in the post-Soviet era, has been dominated by an oligarchic and lawless capitalism. ( +/- a few decimal places )?

Cheers

Fixed it for you.

 

[blutto]

Fixed it for you.

...hmmm...this has all the makings of a classic academic food fight....OK, gather up your footnotes and references... we meet at dawn....Oxford Rules apply ( beer optional )........

Cheers

 

[aphronesis]

Fixed it for you.

Oh Leon, we hardly knew thee.

The exportation and proliferation of democracy as an accession based on discretionary and continuous consumption has meant its ultimate betrayal via ever more blatant and simultaneously hidden (or manifest and latent) compulsory methods of primitive accumulation +/- the immediate but certainly increasing displacement and exclusion of peoples, failed nation states and the social from consensual determination, internal formation of communities and most basic modes of nature.

 

[blutto]

...ok, I surrender, youse guys win ( I think ?)...food fight has officially been cancelled....is it ok to head straight for the refreshments ?...

Cheers

 

[aphronesis]

...ok, youse guys win ( I think ?)...food fight has officially been cancelled....is it ok to head straight for the refreshments...

Cheers

Not the obligatory wine, cheese and fruit spreads....

 

[blutto]

Not the obligatory wine, cheese and fruit spreads....

....ok...ok....if the terms of surrender include "obligatory wine, cheese and fruit spreads " that is what we go with....but it does sound a wee bit hifalutin for just common garden variety food fight, don't it?....but I did say Oxford Rules didn't I...big oooops....

Cheers