Category Archives: Uncategorized

Antifa Still Wants to Punch the Two Dozen Damp, Sad Nazis Who Showed Up at Unite the Right II Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

At this point, the Alt-Right is just the latest wave of “far right” loser groups in the tradition of the Klan and neo-Nazi groups from the 1980s as one of the antifa’s leading “intellectuals” admits. In the less than 10 years since it began, the Alt-Right has degenerated from a high-brow intellectual movement oriented toward meta-politics and influenced by thinkers such as Alain De Benoist, to becoming a retrograde 1920s style white nationalist movement, to becoming a collection of Internet trolls and Alex Jones-wannabes, to becoming a reworking of 1980s neo-Nazism.

The Alt-Right is dead, not so much through either public opposition or system cooptation, as much as through internal incompetence. For instance, the Antifa counter actions against the Alt-Right are largely the one thing that continues to legitimize the Alt-Right in the eyes of the Alt-Right’s own adherents by simply making Alt-Rightists think they are more important than they actually are.

In reality, far from serving  as a genuine counter force to the “far right” the Antifa-types would be faced with a literal massacre in a genuine showdown with, shall we say, “hard men” (which the Alt-Right are not). And far from coopting the Alt-Right, the Trump presidency has actually marginalized the Alt-Right by seemingly giving a voice to those with overlapping issues (such as immigration opponents) but who do not wish to be associated with the Alt-Right’s extremism. Strategically, it would have been in the Alt-Right’s best interests to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

The story of the Alt-Right is a case study in how NOT to build a revolutionary or radical oppositional movement.

By Joe Seyton

Reason

“I really think we should just ignore them,” counterprotester Glen Hellman told Reason outside the Vienna Metro station this morning, where Unite the Right II rally participants boarded a subway headed into downtown D.C. “We’re validating them, and that is a problem,” he added, describing himself as “torn” over whether to ignore the rally or protest it.

As expected, it was a chaotic scene outside the White House on this rainy Sunday, as white nationalists staged a rally in the nation’s capital.

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The Progressives’ Bark is Worse Than Their Bite Reply

by • Uncategorized

This article makes a point that I have long made, i.e. that the political Left is shooting itself in the ass by pushing the most extreme and fanatical forms of identity politics and cultural leftism on the conventional working to middle classes, and driving “normies” as well as a lot of disaffected people to the Right.

The last two sentences of this article are also the money quote:

“Democrats have a great chance at winning the midterm elections this November. The way to success, however, is by nominating candidates who fit the political, cultural, and economic characteristics of the districts they are running in, not by insisting that the entire country is ready to stampede to the left.”

By Daniel R. Depetris

The American Conservative

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new poster child for the progressive movement, who shocked the nation by clobbering a 10-term incumbent in her New York-area district Democratic primary, has been a woman on a mission. While she is still technically one of hundreds of congressional candidate who need to run and win in November, Ocasio-Cortez has lately spent more time on the trail for progressives in other parts of the country.

While the 28-year-old political newcomer insists she isn’t the spokesman of the Democratic Party’s ascendant grassroots progressive wing, she has acted as though she is. Congressional candidates usually don’t endorse insurgents against establishment Democrats; after all, who wants to ruffle the establishment’s feathers when you have to work them if the voters send you to Washington? Yet Ocasio-Cortez has been crazy enough to do just that, backing challengers to sitting Democratic incumbents in Florida, Massachusetts, Delaware, and Maryland.

Endorsing is one thing, but getting your endorsements across the finish line is very different. The former is painless; the latter impossible if registered Democrats are uncomfortable with the candidate or message. Ocasio-Cortez and her mentor Senator Bernie Sanders learned this the hard way during this week’s volley of Democratic primaries. The progressives and Democratic Socialists may be loud and fired up, but they haven’t yet had much success at winning against the establishment wing of their party.

Neocons and Liberals Join Forces to Fight Populism Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized

The liberal ruling classes circle the wages against revolts by the reactionary peasantry. Shades of the 19th century.

By Paul Gottfried

The American Conservative

For several months, an alliance has been forming between the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP). It’s the sort of kumbaya not witnessed since wartime Washington a decade ago.

A press release from CAP on May 10 blares: “CAP and AEI Team up to Defend Democracy and Transatlantic Partnership.” The same joyous tidings accompanied a public statement issued by AEI on July 31, which stressed that the alliance was meant to resist “the populist assault on the transatlantic community” for the purpose of “defending democracy.”

Although, according to Vikram Singh, a senior fellow at CAP, the two partners “often disagree on important policy questions,” they have been driven together “at a time when the character of our societies is at stake.” This burgeoning cooperation underscores that “our commitment to democracy and core democratic principles is stronger than ever.” Since both documents fling around the terms “democracy” and “liberal democracy” to justify a meddlesome foreign policy, we may safely assume that the neocons are behind this project. Neocons for some time now have prefixed their intended aggressions with “democracy” and “liberal democracy” the way the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs during the 16th and 17th centuries stuck the word “holy” into the names of their wartime alliances. Closer to our time, communist governments favored the use of “people’s democracy” to indicate that they were the good guys. Presumably the neocons have now picked up this habit of nomenclature.

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On the new undesirables of the West Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized

An excellent piece of class/caste analysis from a Marxist/Maoist perspective. This is more or less what I have been saying for decades. Genuine Communists are always so refreshing when compared with the usual SJW/Antifa/IDPol/weenie Leftist types.

Maoist Rebel News

Editor: The following is a post that was written by someone I know who wishes to remain anonymous. We will call him “Comrade M”. It seeks to ask questions regarding NEETS, incels, “forever alones” and the like. Can we consider them a new group of undesirables? What is their relationship to the class structure of the first world?

Jason Unruhe

In the 1800’s, Karl Marx’s ideas were groundbreaking. Even more so than laying the foundations for scientific socialism, Karl Marx described the inner machinations of the capitalist system on both the sociological and economic level better than any previous economist, philosopher or social-scientist.

Even though Marx’s ideas were correct for his day, he lived in a rapidly changing global society. By the time of the Bolshevik revolution, the world had already changed in many ways. So Lenin and the Bolsheviks came along, and devised Marxism-Leninism. They “updated” Marxism, both to be current with the times, and also to encompass the collective experiences of the international communist movement since Marx and Engels passed away. At the time, the majority of the Communist movement belonged to a revisionist grouping called the “2nd international”, which upheld a generally revisionist, chauvinist line. The 2nd Internationale advocated for both social-imperialism and “evolutionary” socialism, or “social-democracy” which would become another stagnant neo-liberal trend in the modern day. At their worst, the 2nd international went as far as to defend the atrocity of Colonialism, eg, in the case of the old Workers Party of Belgium, which proposed the nationalization of land, resources, and people of the Congo for the benefit of the European Proletariat.

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Call Me Nicky 2

by • Uncategorized • Tags:

Introducing our newest contributor at ATS.

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Most of you know me as Comrade Hermit, muckraking shut-in extraordinaire, but my slave name, my name in the straight world, the one on my birth certificate, is Nicholas Adam Reid. Growing up, most people called me Nick and for the most part that was never really a problem. Being a fluid dyke like me is tricky because there are no Barbie dolls or frilly dresses to tip you off that I’m trans. For a long time even I didn’t know. There were no people on TV that looked the way I felt so I just figured that I was a freak and that became my identity- Nick the Freak.

And in many respects I am a freak and I take great pride in that. I’m a Rothbardian-Freudo-Groucho-Marxist-Syndicalist with a library that includes everything from Che Guevara to Ernst Junger. I’m a sado-masochist power bottom with a fetish for quite literally everything. I’m a politically incorrect sex-positive transfeminist who loves nothing better than shouting theater in a crowded fire. I’ve never owned a cellphone. I’ll never own a credit card. I hate social media with a passion leftists usually reserve for Kulaks. And I’ve never eaten a green vegetable. I also have an odd affection for gangsters, outlaws, serial killers, revolutionaries of every stripe, and histories misunderstood super-villains in general. I’m a freak alright. I live for the fringe. Society is just a classy word for totalitarianism and I wan’t nothing to do with it. But my gender identity has nothing to do with my freakdom. I didn’t choose to be a mostly female butch lesbian in a mountain man’s body. Believe me, I’ve tried not to be. I’ve tried to be male. I’ve tried to be female. Both fit me like a leash. I am who I am and Nick just doesn’t feel like an accurate label for that anymore.
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Elections Are a Fraud: If You Vote, You’re Wasting Your Time Reply

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized • Tags:

It is interesting to see a quote from Emma Goldman in an article originally published in Forbes in 2012.

By Lawrence Hunter

Forbes

Elections are a fraud. If you go to the polls, you are wasting your time, or worse, deluding yourself that you are actually making a difference.

From this, it follows that if you are making campaign contributions or donating to front groups who spend your money on behalf of candidates, you’re wasting your money, or worse, diverting your resources away from political action that actually could make a difference. There’s more to political life than elections although you wouldn’t know it from Karl Rove’s brave new world of perpetual campaigns.

Take it from someone who worked as a Republican apparatchik for many years inside the Washington machine, the American political system is an exercise in mass deception and mass delusion. Elections stupefy the people and give political cover to what Will Rogers called “America’s only native criminal class” (viz., Members of Congress) to commit all manner of felonies in the name of the public interest.

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Counting the Dead in Yemen Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Daniel Larison

The American Conservative

Kareem Fahim investigates the war on Yemen’s weirdly static official death toll of 10,000 casualties and finds that it is certainly much higher:

The overall death toll may have reached alarming levels, according to one independent tally. Data collected by ACLED, a group that studies conflicts, puts the death toll at nearly 50,000 people in the period between January 2016 and late July 2018.

That number includes combatants but excludes people not directly killed during the fighting — thousands of civilians who have died of malnutrition or cholera, for instance. Last year, Save the Children estimated that 130 children were dying every day because of “extreme hunger and disease.”

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China says willing to team with Syria’s Assad in push to retake territory Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Asia Times

Photo: Reuters

China’s ambassador to Damascus has reportedly told Syrian media that Beijing is prepared to aid the government’s push to retake territory throughout the country.

Speaking to Syrian pro-government daily Al-Watan, the envoy, Qi Qianjin, expressed China’s support for what he referred to as Syria’s war against terrorists, according to a dispatch from the Middle East Media Research Institute.

stability of our countries. We – China and its military – wish to develop our relations with the Syrian Army. As for participating in the Idlib operation, it requires a political decision.’ He denied that there were military advisers or special Chinese forces in Syria today.”

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Confederation: The One Possible Israel-Palestine Solution Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Bernard Avishai

New York Review of Books

“The two-state solution is over,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told reporters, responding to Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “Now is the time to transform the struggle for one state with equal rights for everyone living in historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.” As The New York Times subsequently reported, Erekat is hardly alone. The “over”-ness of “two states”—albeit with radical disagreements about the character of a hypothetical single state—has been claimed by ideological zealots, severe liberals, and exasperated peacemakers alike.

On the Palestinian side, one hears about the almost 700,000 Israeli settlers’ making annexation an established fact; on the Israeli side, about preventing recalcitrant Palestinian terrorists from firing missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. For those of us living in Jerusalem, just speaking of two states, implying two capitals—but also, vaguely, some redivision of the city—invites skeptical, or pitying, stares from most Jews, as well as from Arabs, over a thousand of whom applied for Israeli citizenship in 2016.

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Charlottesville After A Year—As An Outsider, I Think the Alt-Right Far from Finished 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Paul Gottfried

Unz Review

ryan

We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the fateful Unite The Right Rally, at which the violence that took place was all blamed on the “Alt-Right”, leading to much persecution (deplatforming, firings, conferences cancelled) of people identified with that movement. It’s been said repeatedly that the Alt Right is dead or dying—but it can’t be, if Conservatism, Inc is still trying to kill it.

It seems that Jonah Goldberg has time left over from beating up on Trump and refurbishing his credentials as a leading “conservative” Never-Trumper to hobnob with House Speaker Paul Ryan at Jonah’s stamping grounds, AEI. The two of them agreed recently that the “Alt-Right is about “identity politics.” In what appears to be a mutual congratulation session, the interlocutors proclaimed that “conservatives must reclaim “hijacked” terminology.”

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China is Treating Africa The Same Way European Colonists Did Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Panos Mourdoukoutas

Forbes

The reason China is in Africa is simple; to exploit the people and take their resources. It’s the same thing European colonists did during mercantile times, except worse. The corporations owned by the Chinese state are trying to turn Africa into another Chinese continent. They are squeezing Africa for everything it is worth.

This is the view several African politicians have. The Zambian politician Michael Sata was one of them. At least he was before being elected President of Zambia in 2011. He wrote a paper presented to Harvard University in 2007 that said “European colonial exploitation in comparison to Chinese exploitation appears benign, because even though the commercial exploitation was just as bad, the colonial agents also invested in social and economic infrastructure services Chinese investment, on the other hand, is focused on taking out of Africa as much as can be taken out, without any regard to the welfare of the local people.”

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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire 2

by • American Decline, Uncategorized

By Tyler Cowen

Bloomberg

So what would the decline of America look like? I don’t ask the question because I think it’s happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist should be interested in the dangers, if only to ward them off.

Here’s the cleanest tale of hypothetical decline I could come up with, keeping away from the more partisan or hysterical scenarios, or those involving a catastrophic deus ex machina.

Imagine that the United States gets through the presidency of Donald Trump without a crippling constitutional crisis. Still, the shrill public debate — which will continue well past Trump’s time in office — will continue to prove unequal to the task of addressing the nation’s most pressing problems.

In recent years, the underlying rate of productivity growth often has been about 1 percent, and rates of economic growth are not even half of what they used to be. Meanwhile, America will have to increase taxes or reduce spending by about $2,200 per taxpayer per year to keep the national debt-to-GDP ratio from rising ever higher, and that figure predates the Trump tax cuts. To fund that shortfall, the U.S. will cut back on infrastructure maintenance. At least one-third of this country will end up looking like — forgive the colloquial phrase — “a dump.” The racial wealth gap will not be narrowed.

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Keith Preston: Iran stands in the way of US totally dominating Middle East Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

PressTV. Listen here.

The Islamic Republic of Iran stands in the way of the United States totally dominating the Middle East, according to American political analyst Keith Preston.

Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on a Bloomberg report which has revealed that China has rejected a US demand to cut Iranian oil imports despite Washington’s attempts to bring down the Islamic Republic’s oil sales to zero

Bloomberg quoted informed officials as saying that the US had been unable to persuade China to cut Iranian oil imports and that Beijing’s purchases from Tehran last month remained unchanged.

This is a blow to US President Donald Trump’s efforts to isolate Iran after his withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal with the country, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), they said.

Beijing, however, agreed not to increase purchases of Iranian crude, said the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Preston said that “it appears that what is happening is that the United States is trying to increase the amount of international pressure that is exercised against Iran in particular isolate Iran and impose even stronger economic pressure by trying to prevent Iran by selling oil to China.”

“The United States is doing this because the United States regards Iran as its primary obstacle when it comes to expanding American influence in the Middle East and the influence of America’s chief allies which would be Saudi Arabia and Israel,” he noted.

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The War on Qatar That Almost Happened 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags: , , , ,

By Daniel Larison

The American Conservative

Alex Emmons reports that the Saudis and their allies intended to invade and take over Qatar last year, but pressure from Tillerson prevented this from happening:

The Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster, Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.

If this report is correct, it confirms that the Saudis and Emiratis are even more reckless than we already knew them to be.

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Keith Preston: ‘Arab NATO’ Proposal Unlikely to Get Off Ground Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags:

My latest interview with Tasnim.

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political analyst said an initiative by the US administration to develop an alliance with the Persian Gulf and Arab allies is expected to fail as there are sharp disagreements between the member states of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council on Iran.

“The prospects for the formation of a Middle Eastern Strategic Alliance are hindered by multiple obstacles. There are sharp disagreements between the member states of the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council on Iran,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim.

He added, “It is unlikely that the proposed member nations of a Middle Eastern Strategic Alliance will find that they share enough common interests and common objectives to make such an alliance viable”.

The following is the full text of the interview.

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The Latin Americanization of the United States 2

by • American Decline, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

By Keith Preston

Everyone knows that one of the principal grievances of the right-wing involves the substantial amount of immigration from Latin America to the United States that has taken place in recent decades. The commonly voiced concern is that the traditional “white” (Northern European) majority will lose its majority status, and that persons of Latin American ancestry (combined with people of color generally) will become the demographic majority. Whether this is good or bad is an individual value judgment, but the criticisms often obscure other, perhaps more substantive ways in which the United States is coming to resemble Latin America.

The traditional class system of Latin America is one where the very rich plutocratic elites live in opulence and luxury, and rule over an impoverished working class, an extraordinarily large underclass of the extreme poor and permanently unemployed, and a small middle class of professionals and technocrats. This is precisely the same kind of class system that the United States is developing, particularly in California which is widely considered to be the bellwether of the nation.

In traditional Latin American societies, the elite rule for the sake of pursing their own class interests, without any pretense of interest in the needs of the masses. To the degree that elections are held at all, the candidates are merely functionaries of the plutocracy. US politics is rapidly coming to resemble this model.

The police and the army are the traditionally dominant force in Latin American societies, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the military industrial complex and police state have assumed a comparable role in the United States.

The one noticeable difference is that in many traditional Latin American societies, the Catholic Church hierarchy provided the ruling class with its self-legitimating ideology. In the United States, organized religion is becoming an increasingly marginal force with the new self-legitimating ideology of the state being the totalitarian humanist ideology of the new clerisy.

Interestingly, Latin America has experienced a great deal of liberalization and progress in the past few decades, while the United States has increasingly gone backward. Perhaps Americans need to start emigrating to Latin America.

Image result for latin american dictatorships

The Saint Max Option: Why Libertarian Activism Fails 1

by • Activism, Uncategorized

A Facebook friend sums up why “the libertarian moment” passed with a succinct critique of conventional libertarianism (and I would include virtually the entire anarchist and anti-state milieu in this as well).

“The Libertarian Party is utterly useless. It may have once had some utility as a ‘forum’, but for a long time it’s been a scam to get donors to support the wonkery and time-wasting of party bureaucrats. The Tom Woods show has accomplished more than the LP ever has. The similar (though Republican-branded) Ron Paul Presidential runs are about the same thing. Millions of dollars blown to accomplish ‘outreach’? Most of the people it reached have apparently become SJWs, Bernouts or Trumpkins, anyway. Which just goes to show you that the problem isn’t ignorance, oppression, or government schools. The problem is that normal people are dumb, herdish, gullible, and just not libertarian. This is largely genetic, and also a product of enormous social inertias that are not subject to rational disputation. I generally think most ‘activism’ is a waste of time, especially if it’s activism for anything that makes sense: people have deep-seated, sub-rational reasons for rejecting this stuff.

“But I used to be a Nazi-Communist until I saw the Ron Paul campaign!” someone will say. Anecdotal stuff like this does not move me. Most people who call themselves ‘libertarians’ are useless, and still cowardly middle-classers who don’t dare actually break the law or approve of violence against the police. The Crips do more to actually subvert the law than most ‘libertarians’, because they’re not fat sissies. It’s not just that they’re afraid to declare Jihad on Washington and start selling meth out of their pickup truck, it’s that they’re afraid to even say that this is okay and maybe, just maybe, American soldiers who invade foreign countries deserve to die. This bourgoisie fetish for not offending people and being ‘respectable’ is a disease of the entire culture. This is one reason I’m not as big a fan of the middle class as the PaleoLib, types. They’re the people who gave us the nation-state and the state churches. You may think it is impractical to take on the FBI with your semi-automatic AR15. Fair enough. But the instinctive, herd-like fear of even acknowledging that the FBI would have it coming, tactical efficacy aside, is why American libertarians are weak sauce. I have much more respect for the Sovereign Citizens. I have more respect for the Shining Path and the Mafia than I do for the LP. They might be Commie lunatics and gangsters, but at least they’re not fat pussies begging their slave master for better food.

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Global Warfare. Preparing for World War III? Targeting Iran 4

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research

President Donald Trump confirmed back in May that the U.S. will be pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal as well as reimposing a sanctions regime on Tehran.

This far-reaching decision by the White House was taken following Netanyahu’s staged presentation on Iran’s nuclear capabilities based on so-called “sound intelligence”. The accession of Mike Pompeo to the the State Department was also an important factor. His predecessor Rex Tillerson was known to be largely supportive of the US “remaining on board with the Iran JCPOA nuclear deal – along with other P5+1 countries Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia”. According to Stephen Lendman:

Replacing Tillerson with militantly anti-Iran hardliner Pompeo smooths things for Trump to pursue greater hostility toward the Islamic Republic with a key administration official on board with his reckless agenda.

Under the guidance of secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his new national security advisor  John Bolton, Trump’s decision points in the direction of military escalation. 

Already in December 2017, reports pointed to a so-called “secret plan” to destroy and destabilize Iran, the first step of which would be a color revolution. In this regard, Trump said he would relaunch the economic sanctions regime in mid-May “unless the European powers join Washington in unilaterally rewriting the civil nuclear agreement between Tehran and the world’s great powers.”

This not so secret plan to wage war on Iran has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon since the mid-nineties as outlined in my 2010 article below, written eight months prior to the onslaught of the US-NATO led proxy war directed against Syria in March 2011. 

It should be noted that there are significant divisions within the US-NATO-Israel coalition largely as a result of Turkey’s rapprochement with Russia and Iran. In turn Turkey is fighting US proxy forces in Northern Syria. Moreover, France has significant interests in Iran’s oil industry. 

While the present structure of military alliances (with Turkey sleeping with enemy) does not at this juncture favor the waging of a major military operation against Iran, there are unconfirmed reports that President Trump is currently envisaging a so-called preemptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities as early as next month.

US Defense Secretary James Mattis has casually dismissed the reports that the U.S. is contemplating military action against Iran.

Michel Chossudovsky, July 29, 2018

Global Warfare. Preparing for World War III? Targeting Iran

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research

August 1, 2010

Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. War preparations to attack Iran are in “an advanced state of readiness”. Hi tech weapons systems including nuclear warheads are fully deployed.

This military adventure has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board since the mid-1990s. First Iraq, then Iran according to a declassified 1995 US Central Command document.

Escalation is part of the military agenda. While Iran [in 2010], is the next target together with Syria and Lebanon, this strategic military deployment also threatens North Korea, China and Russia.

Since 2005, the US and its allies, including America’s NATO partners and Israel, have been involved in the extensive deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems. The air defense systems of the US, NATO member countries and Israel are fully integrated.

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In a divided U.S., therapists treating anxiety are hearing the same name over and over: Donald Trump 1

by • Uncategorized

I am generally not one that buys into the usual “our culture is plagued by an excess of decadence” theme that is a favorite of many on the Right. But if I were to make a case that we are indeed in a Kali Yuga moment, this might be Exhibit A in favor of such an argument.

Seriously, I would say that someone that needs a shrink because their preferred candidate lost an election is someone that “has issues,” as they say. Maybe folks like that really do need a shrink, but because of their complete lack of emotional maturity, sense of balance and proportion, obsessive-compulsive fixation, neurosis, or whatever else is wrong them.

I disagree with Trump on quite a few things. I disagreed with Obama on quite a few things. I disagreed with every one of their predecessors on quite a few things. I’ve previously criticized the policies of the US government, and other governments, in about half a dozen books, and countless articles, essays, blog posts, lectures, interviews, podcasts, television and radio appearances, or social media posts. Few people have put more energy into criticizing the political establishment than I have. But someone that needs a therapist simply because Trump is president is simply a weenie, a loser, a drip, a dolt, a dullard, and a dumbfuck. No other way to put it. To folks like that my only advice would be “Get a fucking life, for God’s sake.”

In fact, that so many people seem to seriously believe that Trump is a “fascist” shows how liberal society has become in recent decades. Trump’s foreign policy is Nixonian. His economics are a hybrid Reaganite supply side and Mondale/Gephardt protectionism. He’s indifferent to gay marriage and marijuana. To the degree that he poses as a social conservative at all, it’s obviously just a ruse to hook in the Republican “base.” Immigration is probably the issue that he is most conservative on, which puts him square in line with Ross Perot, and to the left of Eisenhower. The idea that all of this would require “therapy” merely demonstrates that mental health is indeed a serious problem in our society, but not because of Trump.

The majority of my politics trend far, far to the left, though there are a handful of issues where I swing back to the center or right. I tend to think groups like DSA or the Greens are milquetoast weenie suburban liberals and college students, not dangerous left-wing extremists. But the idea that having a de facto Blue Dog Democrat or Rockefeller Republican like Trump as president would require mental health counseling for anyone indicates they really do have mental health issues, but not because Trump is the president.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s name comes up an awful lot when Americans discuss their politics-related anxiety with their therapists. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

By Matt Kwong

CBC News

“Is he gonna blow us all up?”

So inquired one of Elisabeth LaMotte’s patients recently, fretting out loud about the volatility of U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions during a therapy session at her Washington practice.

It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump’s threats of a showdown with Iran this week. But if the question wasn’t meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.

She refers to it as a “collective anxiety” among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be.

“There is a fear of the world ending,” she said. “It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”

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In One Year, MSNBC Covered Stormy Daniels 455 Times, War in Yemen 0 2

by • Uncategorized

This is pathetic. The US media is a joke.

By Adam Johnson

The Antimedia

Why is the No. 1 outlet of alleged anti-Trump #resistance completely ignoring his most devastating war?

(FAIR) As FAIR has noted before (1/8/18, 3/20/18), to MSNBC, the carnage and destruction the US and its Gulf Monarchy allies are leveling against the poorest country in the Arab world is simply a non-issue.

On July 2, a year had passed since the cable network’s last segment mentioning US participation in the war on Yemen, which has killed in excess of 15,000 people and resulted in over a million cases of cholera. The US is backing a Saudi-led bombing campaign with intelligence, refueling, political cover, military hardware and, as of March, ground troops. None of this matters at all to what Adweek (4/3/18) calls “the network of the Resistance,” which has since its last mention of the US’s role in the destruction of Yemen found time to run over a dozen segments highlighting war crimes committed by the Syrian and Russian governments in Syria.

By way of contrast, as MSNBC was marking a year without mentioning the US role in Yemen, the PBS NewsHour was running a three-part series on the war, with the second part (7/3/18) headlined, “American-Made Bombs in Yemen Are Killing Civilians, Destroying Infrastructure and Fueling Anger at the US.” The NewsHour’s Jane Ferguson reported:

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