Saturday, January 6, 2018

Taking vitamins during pregnancy reduces risk of autism by 73%, improves baby’s overall health, new study shows

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Autism-Foam-Letters-Kids-Children.jpg (Natural News) Taking vitamin supplements before, during, and after pregnancy may reduce the risk of autism spectrum disorder and significantly improve the baby’s overall health, according to a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry. A team of researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel followed 43,500 Israeli children born between 2003...


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Fueled by social media, America’s news outlets have really gone off the rails with Russiagate

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russia-social-icons-video-compressor

AlterNet
For several months we’ve been hearing a crescendo of outcries that Russia used social media to sway the 2016 presidential election. The claim has now been debunked by an unlikely source: one of the most Russiagate-frenzied big media outlets in the United States, the Washington Post.

Far away from the media echo chamber, the Post news story is headlined: “There’s Still Little Evidence That Russia’s 2016 Social Media Efforts Did Much of Anything.”

The article focuses on “what we actually know about the Russian activity on Facebook and Twitter: It was often modest, heavily dissociated from the campaign itself and minute in the context of election social media efforts.”

The ballyhooed Facebook ads were notably not targeted to be seen in swing states, the piece by Post journalist Philip Bump reports. As for the much-hyped tweets, they were smaller than minuscule in quantity compared to overall election-related tweets.

But don’t expect the fervent story about Russian manipulation of social media to fade away anytime soon. At this point, the Russiagate atmosphere has become so toxic, with incessant propaganda, credulity, fear-laced conformity and partisan opportunism, that basic logic often disintegrates.

One of the weirdest aspects of claims that Russia undermined the election with social media has involved explaining away the fact that few of the ads and posts in question actually referred to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or the election. Instead, we’re told, the wily Russians tried to help Trump by inflaming social divisions such as racial tensions. It’s a rampant storyline (rendered here by NBC News political director Chuck Todd) that’s reminiscent of the common claim during the civil rights movement that “outside agitators,” such as Russian-directed reds, were inflaming and exploiting racial tensions in the South.

From there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to smearing Americans who dissent from U.S. orthodoxies as useful idiots who serve the interests of plotters in the Kremlin.

Of course, history is not exactly repeating itself, but it’s rhyming an awful lot. There are real parallels between the McCarthy era and today’s anti-Russia fervor in the United States. Despite all the information and analysis that have strengthened progressive understanding in this country during the last few decades, fixating on Russia as culpable for the election of Trump has been widely irresistible. Perhaps that fixation is less upsetting than deeper realization of just how rotten the U.S. corporate system of injustice has become, and how the forces that brought us the horrors of the Trump presidency are distinctly homegrown.

Narratives scapegoating Russia now have an extremely powerful grip on the USA. The consequences include heightened U.S.-Russia tensions that absolutely mean heightened risks of nuclear war and worsening threats to democratic discourse at home.

The conditioned reflex to label as somehow “pro-Putin” any opinion that overlaps with a Kremlin outlook is becoming part of the muscle memory of much of the American body politic. Countless journalists, pundits, activists and politicians have fallen under the Russiagate spell. They include the liberal primetime lineup on MSNBC, where, as the media watchdog group FAIR pointed out last month, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes routinely bypass stories of great importance in order “to lead with minutiae from the ongoing Russia investigation that has consumed MSNBC‘s coverage like no other news event since the beginning of the Trump presidency.”

Across most of the media landscape, the meme that Russians attacked American democracy with social-media posts has been treated as self-evident.

In a typical exercise of the conformity that afflicts the national press corps, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine, David Corn, wrote this fall that the House intelligence committee needed more staff to investigate, in his words, “how”—not whether—“a foreign adversary attacked American democracy.” His piece breathlessly declared that “the Trump-Russia scandal” was “expanding—it now includes new revelations regarding Moscow’s use of social media in the United States to influence the 2016 campaign.”

That kind of stenography for powerful spin may snag cable TV appearances and lucrative book contracts, but it’s a notable disservice to journalism and democracy.

Meanwhile, most Democrats on Capitol Hill are eager to engage in such rhetoric. So, it was just another routine appearance when Senator Richard Blumenthal went on CNN a week before Christmas and declared “there is increasing evidence that the Russians are continuing their attack on our democracy.” He said: “The Russian attack on our elections in 2016 was endlessly ingenious and inventive, using all kinds of social media, all kinds of intermediaries, sources of information for them.”

To put it mildly, that sort of bombast gains vastly more airtime than discussing the urgent need for détente between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow has climbed with her ratings to great mass-media acclaim, while advancing herself from the outset of the Trump presidency as one of the most prominent and irresponsible Russia baiters in U.S. media. At this rate, when Maddow retires (if she and the rest of us are lucky enough to avoid a nuclear holocaust), she can look back on a career that deteriorated into an obsessive crusade against Russia that increased the chances of World War III.

In this poisonous media environment, it’s fitting that Maddow, time after time after time, has devoted so much of her program to the illusory Russian assault on democracy via social media.

That’s the way it goes in the propaganda-polluted land of Russiagate.



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Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Trump's 'lock her up' for Huma called 'political'

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Hillary Clinton with top aide Huma Abedin.

Hillary Clinton with top aide Huma Abedin.

After eight years of a politicized Washington “swamp,” where the IRS under Barack Obama openly targeted conservatives and Christians, where Islamists were invited to set policy for the nation’s law enforcers, where the president himself actively ridiculed police officers trying to protect the public, now there’s a claim that the Department of Justice is being politicized.

The claim comes from an official with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which calls itself a Muslim civil-rights organization.

The move was prompted by President Trump’s call for the law to be enforced regarding Huma Abedin, a Muslim who was a top aide to Hillary Clinton while she was U.S. secretary of state.

Trump’s social-media statement, noting Abedin allegedly jeopardized classified information by putting it on a laptop belonging to her now-ex-husband Anthony Weiner, suggests that the law be followed for all.

Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

Trump’s statement Tuesday morning to call for Hillary Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin to be jailed.

That, claimed Robert McCar, the government affairs chief for CAIR, is just wrong.

“Calling for the imprisonment of political rivals is a clear attempt by President Trump to further politicize the Department of Justice. Every American who values the constitutional guarantee of due process should be outraged by the president’s statements.”

The president’s tweet, however, highlighted a double standard for punishments when it comes to handling classified materials, as U.S. Navy Petty Officer Kristian Saucier was charged and convicted of a felony for taking pictures of a confidential propulsion system as a keepsake of his service. He was ultimately sent to prison.

Saucier himself noted Hillary Clinton stored information of a far more classified status on an unsecure server, and yet she was not charged for her negligence.

Saucier claimed this is evidence of how powerful people are exempt from the same laws which were used against him.

Trump’s use of the term “Deep State” reflects an awareness of this network of mutual protection which seemingly covers government insiders.

His suggestion to the Justice Department to investigate and possibly jail Abedin is also a way for the president to take the offensive in some of the legal battles which have been hampering his presidency, and strike back against adversaries such as former FBI Director James Comey.

Sign the precedent-setting petition supporting Trump’s call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton!

Comey testified in a May Senate hearing Abedin had forwarded hundreds of thousands of emails to her husband Anthony Weiner so they could be printed out. Some of the emails, recently released thanks to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, were marked classified.

President Trump’s action shows the commander-in-chief evidently agrees with Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton’s recent plea for a “serious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s obvious violations of law.”

As WND recently reported, the politics have permeated the case.

For example, the decision by former director James Comey not to charge Abedin or Hillary Clinton with a crime was heavily influenced by FBI agent Peter Strzok, a vocal opponent of President Trump who until recently was serving as part of Robert Mueller’s team in the “Russian collusion” investigation.

Abedin also made misleading statements about the mishandling of national secrets, but unlike former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, faced no consequences.

The Daily Caller reported Tuesday Huma Abedin sent sensitive State Department emails, including the passwords to government systems and the PIN number to access a secure State Department website, to her personal Yahoo account.

In 2013, Yahoo was hacked, and the company stated “all Yahoo user accounts were affected.”

Among the information sent to an unsecured account was the name and email address of the person who obtains the classified Presidential Daily Brief. Other emails contained classified information regarding American counter-drug operations in Mexico, notes about a possible confrontation between the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and correspondence related to the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Besides possibly criminal conduct in mishandling classified information, new records obtained by Judicial Watch show Abedin removed five boxes of “physical files” out of the State Department, including records described as “Muslim Engagement Documents.”

Hillary Clinton was also allowed to remove personal correspondence and certain binders which may contain evidence related to accusations of a a pay-to-play scheme in which donations to the Clinton Foundation led to influence over policy.

Abedin did not only enable foreign adversaries to obtain American secrets but could possibly pose a security threat herself, reports suggest.

For several years, Abedin edited the journal for the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), an organization established by the government of Saudi Arabia. Abedin’s mother, an Islamist activist and academic, was even permitted to edit the content of a speech which was to be given in Saudi Arabia by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Other members of Abedin’s family have also been prosecuted by the Justice Department for conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud.

However, President Trump evidently believes the Justice Department, or at least a significant part of it, has allowed Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin to escape any consequences for their crimes.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated Tuesday President Trump “obviously” does not believe the “entire” Justice Department is part of the “Deep State,” but that there are fundamental issues about the rule of law involved.

“The facts of the case are very disturbing and I think the president wants to make clear that he doesn’t feel that anyone should be above the law,” Sanders told reporters.

Sign the precedent-setting petition supporting Trump’s call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton!



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Monday, January 1, 2018

44 Numbers From 2017 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

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2017 went by way too quickly.  Donald Trump’s first year in the White House shook up the entire planet, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.  Personally, as 2017 began I was still having a hard time actually believing that Trump was going to be our president.  Once he was finally inaugurated on January 20th I was able to relax a little bit, but at that point I had no idea that I would soon be running for Congress here in Idaho as a pro-Trump candidate.  As 2018 begins, I think that it would be good to look back and remember some of the most important things that happened over the past 12 months.  The following are 44 numbers from 2017 that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 During Donald Trump’s first year, ISIS lost 98 percent of the territory that it gained while Barack Obama was in the White House.

#2 The price of Bitcoin rose more than 1,300% during 2017.

#3 According to the Washington Post, one out of every ten young adults in the United States has been homeless at some point over the past year.

#4 The United States has lost more than 70,000 manufacturing facilities since China joined the WTO in 2001.

#5 On Donald Trump’s first full day in office he was 70 years, 7 months and 7 days old, and it happened in year 5777 on the Hebrew calendar.

#6 The all-time record for the number of retail store closings in the U.S. was absolutely shattered in 2017.  According to the latest figures, a total of 6,985 store locations were shut down last year, and we are expected to break the record again in 2018.

#7 Incredibly, the number of retail store closings in 2017 was up 229 percent compared with 2016.

#8 When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, the federal government was about one trillion dollars in debt.  Now we are 20 trillion dollars in debt with no end in sight.

#9 Prominent names in the financial world such as John McAfee and James Altucher are predicting that the price of Bitcoin will eventually reach one million dollars.

#10 According to the most recent numbers that we have, 41 million Americans are currently living in poverty.

#11 A recent CNN poll found that only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

#12 Ever since the beginning of April, Congress has had an average approval rating of less than 20 percent.

#13 The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up more than 5,000 points in 2017, and that absolutely shattered the previous record of 3,472 points in 2013.

#14 At one point in 2017, the total market cap for all cryptocurrencies combined (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, etc.) surpassed the half a trillion dollar mark.

#15 Wildfires burned an astounding 9,791,062 acres over the past year.

#16 It is being reported that less than 50 percent of all third, fourth and fifth grade students in the state of California meet minimum standards for literacy.

#17 At one very poorly performing elementary school in California, 96 percent of the students are not proficient in either English or math.

#18 Back in 1960, an average of $146 was spent on healthcare per person for the entire year, but today that number has skyrocketed to $9,990.

#19 Thanks to Obamacare, an appendectomy is ten times more expensive in the United States than it is in Mexico.

#20 Thanks to Obamacare, a family of four in Virginia is now facing the prospect of paying $3,000 a month for health insurance.

#21 It is being projected that the average rate increase for Obamacare plans will be 37 percent in 2018.

#22 In 2017, we found out that 264 cases of sexual harassment involving members of Congress have been settled for a grand total of $17,250,854 since the start of 1997.

#23 Economic growth is starting to pick up under President Trump, but the U.S. economy only grew at an average rate of just 1.33 percent over the 10 years prior to 2017.

#24 It is being reported that homelessness has become so pervasive in ultra-liberal Seattle that “400 unauthorized tent camps” have popped up around the city.

#25 One survey that was conducted in 2017 discovered that 78 percent of all full-time workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

#26 According to the Federal Reserve, the average U.S. household is now $137,063 in debt, and that figure is more than double the median household income.

#27 A staggering 59.8 percent of younger Millennials (18 to 25) are now living with relatives, and overall an all-time record 38.4 percent of all Millennials are currently living with family.

#28 Boston University professor Larry Kotlikoff says that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 210 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.

#29 According the National Center For Health Statistics, nearly 40 percent of all U.S. adults are now officially obese. That is an all-time record.

#30 Our obesity epidemic is now costing us 190 billion dollars a year.

#31 Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and Warren Buffett now have more money than the poorest 50 percent of the U.S. population combined.

#32 At this point, 20 percent of all U.S. households have “either zero or negative wealth”.

#33 U.S. stocks have have increased in value by more than 5 trillion dollars since Donald Trump was elected.

#34 For the season, NFL television ratings were down about 9 percent, and many believe that the anthem protests were the primary cause for the ratings decline.

#35 One very disturbing survey found that less than one out of every four Republican members of Congress support building Trump’s border wall.  This is just one reason why we need to vote out the RINOs and replace them with pro-Trump candidates that will support President Trump’s agenda.

#36 Another survey discovered that 50 percent of all Americans favor a pre-emptive strike on North Korea even though many of them cannot even find North Korea on a map of the world.

#37 Last year criminals were able to hack into Equifax and make off with the credit information of 143 million Americans.

#38 Venezuela, the 11th largest oil producing country in the entire world, decided to stop using the petrodollar in 2017.  This was one of the biggest news stories of the entire year, and yet the mainstream media in the U.S. didn’t want to talk about it.

#39 It has been reported that only 25 percent of all Americans have more than $10,000 in savings right now.

#40 A study conducted by the Federal Reserve found that 44 percent of all U.S. adults do not even have enough money “to cover an unexpected $400 expense”.

#41 In the early 1970s, 70 percent of all men in the United States from the age of 20 to the age of 39 were married, but today that number has fallen to just 35 percent. Instead of getting married and starting families, a lot of our young men are still living at home with their parents. Today, 35 percent of all young men from the age of 21 to the age of 30 “are living at home with their parents or a close relative”.

#42 In 2017, the federal government spent more than 4 trillion dollars for the first time ever.

#43 Our government continues to waste money in some of the most insane ways imaginable. For example, in 2017 we learned that the U.S. military actually spends 42 million dollars a year on Viagra.

#44 One survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans now “prefer socialism to capitalism”, and so we have much work to do if we intend to have any chance of turning this country around.

Michael Snyder is a pro-Trump candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.



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Forecast 2018 — What Could Go Wrong?

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Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

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Markets

If you take your cues from Consensus Trance Central — the cable news networks, The New York Times, WashPost, and HuffPo — Trump is all that ails this foundering empire. Well, Trump and Russia, since the Golden Golem of Greatness is in league with Vladimir Putin to loot the world, or something like that.

Since I believe that the financial system is at the heart of today’s meta-question (What Could Go Wrong?), it would be perhaps more to the point to ask: what has held this matrix of rackets together so long? After all, rackets are characterized by pervasive lying and fraud, meaning their operations don’t add up. Things that don’t comport with reality are generally prone to failure so sooner or later they have to implode.

Financial markets have been surging supernaturally on “liquidity” since 2009 — and by “liquidity” I mean “money” (digital credit from thin air) supplied by the Federal Reserve, in rotation with the other sovereign central banks, BOE, ECB, BOJ, PBOC, from whence it pings ‘round the world, wherever the lure of the main chance sparkles. Trillions wafted into the stock and bond markets, levitating them as a sort of stage-managed misdirection from the sickening spectacle of wobbling real stuff economies. In 2017, The Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded an astounding 5,000 point year-on-year upzoom, with 12 months of gains and no loser months, and a string of 71 record highs.

America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, acted as if pumping up the stock markets was the only thing that mattered. The result was a Potemkin economy, a glittering Wall Street false-front with a landscape of “flyover” squalor and desolation behind. The Fed now works at cross-purposes with itself by raising the Fed Funds rate a quarter-point every few months, and supposedly “shrinking” (ha!) their balance sheet — dumping bonds onto the market plus “retiring” termed out bonds, which allows the Fed to disappear the principal paid by the borrowers, namely the US Treasury, or the quasi-governmental werewolf called Freddie Mac (The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), which bundles all kinds of janky mortgages into giant bonds the Fed buys in order to artificially pump up the real estate market. Did your eyes glaze over yet? That’s the great thing about finance: it’s bewildering, so that when shit goes wrong, nobody notices until its way too late.

What could go wrong with that program? Well, if you dump billions of bonds on the market, you will change the supply-and-demand equation in the direction of too much supply, and interest rates will have to rise when there isn’t enough bid from the demand side — especially if the US Treasury is creating ever more new bonds to make up for ever-greater deficit spending at the same time the Fed dumps bonds into the market. And if, for instance, the interest rate on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond goes up past 3.00 percent, well that may be all she wrote for the US government’s ability to service its monstrous debt. And it may be tits up for the real estate sector, too, because mortgage rates will rise, and fewer people will buy houses. The Fed’s latest actions boil down to a lame attempt to have some maneuvering room to once again lower interest rates and refill their balance sheet via a QE-4 orgy when the economy heads south in a way that even the US Bureau of Labor Statistics can’t obfuscate.

The ECB and the BOJ have already made noises about curtailing their vacuuming up of securities, so the liquidity rotation may end altogether. The new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has at its centerpiece the lowering of corporate income tax from 35 to 21 percent. The hidden agenda may be to hope this can act as a substitute for the dwindling central bank liquidity injections. The tax cuts and other new gimmicks would increase the federal debt by at least $1 trillion over a ten year period (and, by unofficial estimates, probably much more) paving the road to national bankruptcy with good intentions. But, of course, quite a few wise men in this culture have declared that deficits don’t matter. My own view is that they don’t matter until they do, and then you’re pretty screwed.

In the background of all this is an array of perilous real world events playing out that include especially potential conflict around North Korea and the Middle East. China’s banking system is a fun-house of scams and dodges that don’t add up anymore than ours do. The whole wicked pottage of EU / Brexit issues simmers away, along with the EU’s fatal flaw of lacking any fiscal discipline among member nations, so government spending has no relation to sovereign borrowing. NATO’s aggressive military posturing on Russia’s borders is pointless, stupid, dishonest, and provocative. Nobody knows what kind of gambit Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia will try next. Iran demands to be recognized as the regional hegemon. And our dear exceptional nation, with its restless Deep State black box “assets,” is capable of all sorts of mischief at home and abroad.

Any of these things could shove American markets into criticality, as if they don’t have enough built-in fragility already. Manipulation of the markets by the Fed and its water-carrying Too Big To Fail partners have deprived the markets of their chief function: price discovery, the ability to discern what things are really worth. Markets are therefore functionally useless and their uselessness is a giant hazard. No society that depends on money can work for long if nobody knows the true value of things, including the value of money itself. The price of attempting to live in a culture of pervasive dishonesty is that a re-set is inevitable. When it happens, it will be hugely destabilizing.

I expect the DJIA to move down sharply before the third quarter, rebound a little, and eventually bottom at 14,000 or lower by this time next year. I’ll call the S & P to settle in under 1,000. The NASDAQ may be the weakest, since its FAANG members — Facebook , Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google (aka Alphabet)— are among the most mis-valued stocks, and the most based on vaporous products and services. Call NASDAQ to land at 2,700. Calling for a US dollar index (DXY) of 79 by December. Calling for gold $2,500 and silver $60 twelve months from now. There it is, like so much meat on the table.

Bitcoin and other cryptos have a superficial appeal as a wealth safe haven supposedly out-of-reach of avaricious governments — if you don’t consider everything else that’s wrong with it. (Yesterday, Dec 31, Australia’s biggest banks froze the accounts of Bitcoin investors.) I think the safe haven idea will prove fallacious. Governments are already finding ways to interfere, using taxation schemes and shutting down exchanges. Bitcoin’s other claims on “moneyness” look bogus as well. It’s too unstable to be a medium of exchange, and too difficult to even access when need to sell, and you certainly can’t price anything in it as it shoots up and crashes every day. Bitcoin went way up because people — or maybe just algorithms — saw it going way up, so they hitched a ride. The rush to the exits will be brutal. It’s final resting place will be zero, but perhaps not without a trip or two to nosebleed levels in 2018, especially as other markets wobble in the first half of the year. Bitcoin $50-K wouldn’t surprise me. But I’m not among the buyers. Enjoy the show.

2018 is the year that fragilities in the shale oil industry challenge the narrative of the “miracle.” The industry hasn’t made a net red-cent since it ramped up ten years ago. It’s been running on debt, a lot of it junk financing (high-yield, high-risk, covenant-lite). The producers have been fracking and pumping all-out for several years to maximize their cash flow to service their loans. But these shale wells deplete by 80 percent on average after the first three years, and have to be replaced by expensive new wells, which require ever more debt financing. The truth is that shale oil and other “unconventional” oils just don’t pencil out economically. Their success in recent years was part-and-parcel with the central bank credit flood. As that credit flow gets choked down in 2018, oil companies will go out of business at an impressive rate. If the price of oil goes up to $80-a-barrel, as a result, it will be very damaging to what remains of the US economy of real stuff.

US Politics

 Donald Trump survived in office a whole year. Imagine that! After the 2016 election, I figured that the top military brass would give him the bum’s rush inside of three months, in short a coup d’état. Their action actually has been much more subtle: they just ring-fenced him with generals. Since he seems to regard them as his generals (“my generals”), then he’s apparently okay with that, like a boy in the nursery with his toy soldiers. And apart from the fact that the constitution calls for civilian control of the military and not vice-versa, I’m okay with that… for now. He’s got chaperones, at least. This is admittedly not the ideal disposition of American political power.

I did not vote for the Golden Golem, and I don’t esteem his abilities, but the incessant and rather hysterical attacks on his legitimacy, especially by members of Consensus Trance Central, display a mendacity out of George Orwell’s direst dreams. I never believed in the ludicrous Russian collusion fantasy, and find it difficult to believe that the editors of The New York Times do. So far, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted two high-profile grifters (Manafort and Gates) on financial shenanigans involving business dealings in Russia dating from years before the 2016 election, plus one National Security Advisor (Michael Flynn) for speaking with the Russian Ambassador (who, exactly, are foreign ambassadors supposed to speak to if not government officials? And otherwise what are they here for?), and one entry-level foreign policy wonk (George Papadopoulos) who never even met Trump. I believe the grave and solemn Mueller is on a fishing expedition. Aficionados of DOJ tactics know that prosecutors can always fetch up the proverbial ham sandwich to indict, if there’s nothing else at hand.

Then there is the very troubling behavior of FBI employees (Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe), plus some members of Obama’s inner circle (Susan Rice, Samantha powers) in the twilight months of his term. And remember, Robert Mueller has been the erstwhile James Comey’s mentor and true-blue friend going way back. It just looks flat-out like a bunch of Deep State lifers were out to get the Golden Golem. The so-called “optics” are terrible.

Since crashing stock markets are liable to turn Trump into a mad bull, at the same time that Mueller will have to put up or shut up, I predict that long about the vernal equinox Mueller will come up with some Mickey Mouse charges against Trump, or his people, and be promptly fired by the president. General Flynn and the baby foreign policy wonk will be pardoned, and perhaps others. Probably not Manafort and his chum (though their prosecution might fail.) Democrats will go apeshit and batshit both, with talk of impeachment and constitutional crisis, but I don’t think any of that will stick. Congress may have more to worry about with tanking markets and other symptoms of an incipient economic train wreck. The effort to dump Trump would aggravate the tanking markets.

It is also plausible after the disclosures of recent months that the Russian meddling investigation could blow back on Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, Clinton allies, and possibly even some of Obama’s people (maybe even the former president himself). The evidence for Obama-era FBI involvement in the Christopher Steele file is already out there. There is yet to be a satisfactory elucidation of the Loretta Lynch / Bill Clinton Phoenix tarmac meet-up, nor to the circumstances around HRC’s lost emails and private server, nor the Anthony Weiner laptop, nor to the Uranium One matter. The casual observer sees much more circumstantial criminality in these matters so far than any Trump collusion-with-Russia hypothesis provides.

I venture to predict that ex-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigns her House seat in disgrace as the case of her Pakistani grifter IT aide, Imran Awan, moves into the courts.

Trump firing Mueller will drive his Dem-Prog adversaries to new heights of hysteria but their wrath may be so ineffectual that they will fall back on their stock-in-trade, ginning up more sexual panic. This calls into question the pathetic state of the Democratic Party leadership. It’s so sclerotic these days that it makes the Whigs of 1856 look dynamic. They have no program for the compound emergencies the nation faces. The party machinery is in the hands of bought-and-paid-for errand boya, gender crybabies, and race hustlers. Their allies at The New York Times and CNN look ever more ridiculous peddling daily paranoid fantasies and styling themselves as advocates for “the Resistance.” Their cadres in the Ivy League outposts have turned into the most shamelessly illiberal gang of intellectual despots since Mao’s Red Guard roamed the earth.

I’m not persuaded that the Dems will necessarily stomp Trump’s Republicans in the 2018 congressional and state races, as seems to be widely assumed for the moment. I’ll predict, rather, that in 2018 we get the first stirrings of a new party forming to battle both tired old clubs. Trump now “owns” the fate of the stock market and the economy it wags, having bragged on it all year. He and the Republicans will be blamed if it falls out of bed. But my gut feeling is that the voters are even more sick of the Democrats and their victim-mongering. Their coffers are empty, despite jumping through every hoop that Wall Street held out for them. (Did all the money disappear into the maw of the Clinton Foundation?) Finally, on a personal note, I blame them for driving a stake through Garrison’s Keillor’s heart with their reckless sexual witch-hunting, and I don’t forgive them for that, no matter how many tits he may have tried to touch backstage.

Elsewhere on This Planet

Economic savant and international man-of-mystery James Rickards says that Trump and his generals are going to whap North Korea upside its big chunky head soon after the winter Olympics are concluded in South Korea on February 25. But as Trump averred in the election campaign, he is not inclined to state in advance exactly what we might do in a military situation. Maybe the rumor is true that we have interesting new weapons capable of turning Little Rocket Man into a Post Toastie without harming the mass of innocent North Koreans. I’d have to give 50 percent odds that whatever we do in Korea turns out to be an epic illustration of Murphy’s Law, since our track record in foreign military adventures since VJ day in 1945 is pretty scant in the “win” column. The Balkan War, maybe… Bush One’s Gulf War sort of… Grenada (for Godsake)… what else…?

Kim Jung-un may not be able yet to deliver an atomic blast to Rodeo Drive, but he can likely lob one into Tokyo on a five minute flight path. Look at the map. The Japanese must be nervous about it. They were once a world-class military power, in case you don’t remember the banzai era. Prime Minister Shinz? Abe wants to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution — engineered by US advisors during the post-war occupation — to allow for a robust military. I wouldn’t be surprised if something lethal jumps out of a lacquered black bento box in the direction of Pyongyang around the same time the US goes for that whap upside NK’s head.

And there’s Seoul, of course, less than 20 miles from the DMZ and within range of a supposedly huge array of North Korean heavy artillery. The theory is we have a slim window of opportunity to deal with this rascal before he equips himself to do some major mischief in the world. I don’t believe this is just a bunch of shuck-and-jive cooked up by the arms merchants and their friends. It’s real and existential and very messy. Something is going to happen there.

China has a pretty firm mutual defense treaty with North Korea, and perhaps reason to want to keep the regime up-and-running as a buffer zone. But do they really want to jump feet first into World War Three defending Kim? I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, China’s president Xi Jinping has got enough on his plate trying to safely land the high-flying, but wobbling, debt-saturated Chinese economy. Odds are that it’s going to be a rough landing. In which case, maybe war is the answer, as a way of distracting the Chinese public’s attention. But what sort of war? Cyber-sabotage? EMP blackouts? Good old-fashioned mutual nuclear destruction? Grinding old-school land campaigns? Naval battles? It’s a dangerous game and Xi does not look like a risk junkie — more like prudent ole Uncle Xi. So I’ll predict that whatever blows on the Korean Peninsula, China will try to stay out of it, even if it makes faces and jumps up and down a bit.

Russia can only benefit from steering clear of war, though its recent offer to act as an intermediary between Kim and Trump was a smart move. (Maybe they remember how Teddy Roosevelt negotiated a peace settlement in the Russo-Japanese War of 1907.) They have little to lose and prestige to gain. Despite what you hear about the unholy thuggery of Vladimir Putin, it seems to me that what he wants most of all for his country is to attain the condition of a politically and economically normal nation — after the 75-year-long misadventure with communism. I suspect Putin and others in Russia would have liked the country to become more fully Europeanized in tone and style than it has been allowed to be, with NATO playing war games on Russia’s border, and US monkeyshines in Ukraine, and sanctions against it for really no good reason. So, Russia has been shoved back into its cubbyhole as a nation not quite of Europe, with sinister Byzantine overtones and ancient exotic Mongol influences.

This quasi-isolation has some benefits for Russia, for one, the imperative to develop businesses and industries for import-replacement, that is, for becoming more self-sufficient. Russia has a lot to work worth, with the world’s highest oil production, lots of ores and minerals, untold hydropower, and endless timber. It can make its own stuff, and Russian citizens are free to try starting businesses. The country may even benefit from climate change with expanded croplands. Russia is already approaching food self-sufficiency after the long catastrophe of soviet farm collectivization.

Meanwhile, Europe desperately needs Russia’s oil and natural gas, so they must know that using NATO troops and armor to make threats is a hollow gesture. Notice that Russia is stockpiling gold reserves, where the USA is just selling the stuff off. (China is stockpiling, too. Like mad.) When other currencies implode, there is reason to believe the world will be introduced to a gold-backed Ruble and Yuan, “money” backed by money. They’ll be able to buy stuff they need. Will we? Will a gold-backed currency shove aside the US dollar as world reserve currency? The precursor to that will be China’s effort to establish oil trade in its Yuan.

Europe has stumbled along economically for several years on Mario Draghi’s promise to “do whatever it takes” to keep the EU’s member nations from falling into the black hole of debt deflation, namely, buying every bond that the sovereign governments and corporations issue. That kept the game going, but the structural imbalances in EU banking are now so extreme that it is hard to see a way out besides an EU crackup. The Merkel-led immigration-and-refugee policy looked like a bad bet from the get-go and is liable to get worse when the whatever-it-takes liquidity dries up and the EU member countries fall into recession (or depression) and there’s no more money to pay for all those refugee settlement centers and the social services that have been provided. There won’t be enough gainful employment for Germans, Belgians, Frenchmen, and Swedes, let alone for immigrants and refugees.

I’ll predict that starting in 2018 we’ll see efforts to ramp up deportations of these newcomers. Racist? That will be the knee-jerk hue-and-cry. But the epithet is losing its punch as the effects of Merkel’s open door policy are felt on-the-ground in the obvious hostility, xenophobia, and aggression, displayed by Islamic settlers. The defeat of ISIS on the Middle East battlefields in 2017 suggests that they will be ramping up terror operations to Europe. European nationalism movements will grow in 2018 and gain intellectual respectability as the defense of European culture is taken seriously. Middle European states such as Hungary and Poland have not given in on the EU’s demand to accept immigrants and refugees from Islamic lands. Their example will be followed. Politicians in the rest of Europe will consider the “Just Say No” option.

The United Kingdom enters 2018 especially vulnerable to economic travail. The estimated cost of Brexit at tens of billions of pounds sterling, and the potential loss of business, especially banking, is one mighty headwind. The other, less talked about, is the dwindling of the UK’s oil and gas reserves. The equation is simple: fewer energy inputs equals lower economic activity. The only way around that is the popular central bank strategy of recent years: money-printing and accounting fraud. You can’t base an economy on that, and the truth will become painfully self-evident this new year in Great Britain.

Suddenly this last week of 2017, anti-regime demonstrations are busting out all over Iran. They are said to be protests over poor economic performance and the regime’s squandering of resources sponsoring mischief in other lands (Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, etc). Folks are getting killed in the streets. The Revolutionary Guard — the zealots who took our diplomatic personnel hostage in 1979 — have promised to squash the protest. Many Iranians must be good and goddam sick of mullahs and ayatollahs running the joint.

Otherwise, it’s beginning to look like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia (KSA) would like to rumble with Iran to beat back their influence outside their borders in the region. Iran has had plenty of opportunity to play with its military hardware in recent decades: in the Iran-Iraq War, arming Hezbollah to battle Israel, in support of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, and lately in Yemen’s civil war. KSA, on the other hand, has been buying jet planes and bombs from the US for decades, with nary a chance to put them to use. MBS seems eager to test-drive this schwag.

A real dust-up between the principals would put a lot of the world’s oil supply at risk if oil tanker shipping in the Persian Gulf were interrupted. China and Japan would bear the brunt, but the whole world would feel it. Kicking the clerics out of government in Iran might tone down the unnecessary religious hostilities between Sunni and Shiites that has played such a big part in the creation of failed states throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Iran has plenty of economic problems inside its own borders.

The disarray in other areas of the vast MENA region will continue in 2018, whether regime change in Iran happens or not. Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan are permanently failed states, with Egypt ever on the verge. Syria will stabilize as a much smaller economy, propped up by payments from Russia for hosting naval and air bases there. This part of the world has suffered ruinous population overshoot in the industrial age, especially the states that produced oil. The desert ecology can’t support all these people as the industry falters and shrinks. Even as the situation worsens, the swollen populations will generate more children. When they can no longer decant themselves into Europe, the real misery starts.

You may have forgotten there is a place called South America. Its many nations have been a pleasant political coma for a decade or so, except Venezuela, which is in cardiac arrest, organ failure, and brain death. There will be a bloody revolution there this year, and Venezuela’s oil industry will be crippled, adding to the world’s oil supply problems.

The Closing of the American Mind

2017 was a spectacular year for intellectual collapse among the political Left, but especially for its subsidiaries on campus. The trauma of Donald Trump’s election victory put this faction into a fugue state in which no opportunity for coercion and persecution of imagined enemies could be missed. The victim-oppressor politics spawned by the critical-theory-for-lunch-bunch has produced an ideology in which “inclusion” means segregated dorms, racially separate graduation ceremonies, and (at Harvard) closing down age-old men’s and women’s voluntary social associations. And “diversity” means as long as you express the exactly same ideas we do. The presidents, deans, and faculty of colleges around the country have turned into the most obdurate enemies of free thought since the Spanish Inquisition, a gang of cowards and villains who disgrace the meaning and purpose of higher Ed.

Highlights of the year in Social Justice Warrior Land include the violence around Charles Murray’s lecture at Middlebury, the Antifa riots at UC Berkeley, the “Day of Absence” ritual at Evergreen U in Washington State where white people were banished from campus, and the Lindsey Shepherd star chamber tribunal at Laurier University in Toronto (I know, that’s outside the USA). In all of these cases, college presidents, deans, and faculty acted contemptibly, supporting coercion, persecution, antipathy to due process of law, the willful betrayal of common decency, and a folio of shockingly stupid ideas — such as the proposition from the chair of the Purdue University Engineering Department (one Donna Riley) that academic rigor is a symptom of “white male heterosexual privilege.”

As it happens, higher education is approaching its own state of implosion, since college has become, most of all, a money-grubbing racket tuned to the flow of exorbitant student loans for exorbitant college costs. Higher Ed’s fate is tied to the financial sector, especially the bond market, since college loans are lately being bundled into janky bonds just like the NINJA mortgages of 2007 were. The entire US college industry has been in a hypertrophic blow-off for decades, and the gross expansion of facilities, programs, and costs has developedan inverse relationship to the value of a college education. I predict that a shocking number of small four-year colleges will go out of business this year. Students who had not completed their degree requirements will just be shit out of luck.

Concluding Thoughts

2018 will be a tumultuous year of shake-outs and loss. The watchword for the year should be “lean.” Individuals will be shoved into leaner modes of living. Companies will suffer despite the new lower tax. Financial rewards will be lean. Nations will have to seriously start planning to get by on less, to downscale, and jettison programs that don’t jibe with the mandates of reality. 2018 is the year that the world comes un-stuck from the past ten years of pretending that it’s possible to get something for nothing. For 2018, it’s full speed ahead into the long emergency.


New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017


Great Winter Reading… JHK’s new book!

“Simply the best novel about the 1960s.”

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The post Forecast 2018 — What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on Kunstler.



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The 10 Worst Helicopter Parenting Moments of 2017

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1. MOM ARRESTED FOR TRYING TO GET HER BABY OUT OF THE CAR

An Omaha woman taking her niece out of an SUV when the wind blew the door shut and the car locked with her keys and the child inside. The mom, the aunt and two other relatives tried frantically to open the door using a hanger and screwdriver, and when they couldn't, they called 911. The cops arrived, broke the window, and got the child out, safe and sound. Then ticketed mom on "suspicion of child abuse by neglect."

2. DAD FORCED TO INFANTILIZE HIS KIDS

Vancouver dad Adrian Crook taught his kids 7, 8, 9 and 11 how to ride the city bus to and from school and that's what they had done, without incident, for the past two years. Then someone reported these "unsupervised" kids to the Ministry of Children and Family Development, which informed Crook that children under 10 years old cannot be unsupervised in or outside the home, for any amount of time. The 11-year-old didn't count as a chaperone. The kids can no longer ride the bus—or even walk to the corner store—without an adult accompanying them.

3. CARTOONIST ORDERED NOT TO DRAW ALIENS WITHOUT LIFE VESTS

Cartoonist Nick Confalone released a list of the changes demanded by the "Standards and Practices" lawyers at his television job. These included: "When we first see the aliens waking up on the beach, we should see that they are clearly wearing life jackets." "Please ensure all daredevil tight-ropers are only a few feet off the ground and wearing appropriate safety gear." And "Both characters should be wearing helmets while riding the T-Rex."

4. STUDENTS DENIED ANNUAL D.C. TRIP BY SCAREDY-CAT ADMINISTRATORS

The North Ridgeville Academic Center in Ohio cancelled its annual three-day student trip to Washington, D.C. because of the threat of terrorism. Never mind that the terrorists might not know the exact dates and places on the school's itinerary. the students were visiting. "As you know, the safety of our students and staff is our main priority," the principal wrote to parents, "and we feel that the risk of travel to Washington, D.C., is not worth the potential for tragedy." Not only are the odds of dying in a terrorist attack astronomically low, they are far lower than the odds of dying in a car ride to the school. As one commenter asked, "Are there no math teachers at this school?"

5. NEWSPAPER RUNS "ABDUCTION" STORY THAT MOM MADE UP

A Reno mom posted on Facebook she was almost certain she, her husband and kids were about to be kidnapped and sex trafficked, because when they went into the parking garage, there was another car there with four people already in it. One had a device in his ear! The mom added: "Just because it didn't happen to us that night doesn't mean it couldn't happen." Which is technically correct…about everything. Not only was her post was shared thousands of times, the Reno Gazette Journal ran an article about the mom's intuition, accompanied by a map pinpointing where the abduction did not occur. (But could have!) David Finkelor, head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, reports that not only is snatching young children from their parents in a public place for sex trafficking purposes rare, he has never heard of such a crime.

6. DAD TACKLES MAN TRYING TO HELP HIS TOT

When a Good Samaritan noticed a little girl wandering by herself near a softball game in Lakeland, FL, he assumed she was lost and started taking her around, trying to help her find her family. Alerted by bystanders that a stranger was walking toward the playground with his daughter, the dad punched the man out. "What would you do?" the father told NBC affiliate WFLA in a phone interview. "I wanted to kill him!" Even after the police explained the stranger had truly been trying to help, the dad went on social media to say: "So, I guess in Lakeland, you can kidnap a child and get away with it," and called the Samaritan a "child predator." The Samaritan fled town, fearing for his life.

7. NEW APP LETS PARENTS PROGRAM THEIR KIDS

A new app available for pre-order will allow parents to log the food their child eats each day and compare it to the child's perspiration and activity levels. The company's website explains, "the Kiddo app compares consumed calories against those burned through exercise and recommends appropriate activities to help them maintain a healthy weight." At last you can program your child like a robot. A skinny robot.

8. NEW "BUDDY SYSTEM" REQUIRES A BUDDY FOR THE BUDDY

A mom reports that at her daughter's Y Camp over the summer, the girls were told they had to take two buddies with them anywhere they went, including from the pool to the lockerroom. "My daughter complained that she nearly had to pee in the pool because she couldn't find two other girls to go to the locker room with her," one mother said. Worse, if they had to go to the bathroom at night, they had to wake two buddies AND a counselor.

9. FATHER ASSUMED TO BE TRAFFICKER

A dad returning from Mexico with his 3-year-old daughter was suspected of sex trafficking her, despite his having his passport, her passport, AND a notarized letter from the mom saying that she gave them her permission to travel. Authorities felt compelled to act upon a "tip" that was nothing more than a passenger's hunch. The authorities finally allowed the dad and daughter to carry on after reaching mom, who confirmed the dad was the dad, their kid was their kid and the notarized letter was, indeed, notarized.

10. SCHOOL BANS GRANDMA FROM PROM

Bryce Maine invited his beloved grandma to be his date to the Eufaula High School prom. The principal said no, because, "Safety of students and staff is the first and most important of the many tasks of a school administrator. For the 10 years I have been high school principal, we have denied requests each year from students asking to bring older dates to prom. We do not chance leaving any stone unturned when it comes to safety." A local restaurant invited Bryce and his grandmother to dine at their place, on the house, instead. We can only hope the other diners ate safely, in the general area of a grandma.



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Here are the most important, but CENSORED, news stories of 2017

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Censored-News-Anchors.jpg (Natural News) Professional journalism took a major hit this past year as one establishment media outlet after another became afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome and spent the better part of the past 12 months manufacturing one story after another. Normal confirmation of information through multiple, independent sources was one of the biggest casualties of the...


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7 Huge News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About In 2017

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2017 was a chaotic year filled with violent protest, threats of nuclear war, ongoing Cold War-style accusations of collusion with ‘the Russians,’ and widespread allegations of sexual harassment.



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Sunday, December 31, 2017

Take it from the insiders: Silicon Valley is eating your soul | John Harris

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Former Google and Facebook executives are sounding the alarm about the pervasive power of tech. Will we listen?

One source of angst came close to being 2017’s signature subject: how the internet and the tiny handful of companies that dominate it are affecting both individual minds and the present and future of the planet. The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring, and is in retreat.

If you want a sense of how much has changed, picture the president of the US tweeting his latest provocation in the small hours, and consider an array of words and phrases now freighted with meaning: Russia, bots, troll farms, online abuse, fake news, dark money.

Continue reading...

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Washington DC’s Role Behind The Scenes In Hollywood Goes Deeper Than You Think

http://bloomsmag.com/washington-dcs-role-behind-the-scenes-in-hollywood-goes-deeper-than-you-think/

Washington DC’s role behind the scenes in Hollywood goes deeper than you think: On television, we found more than 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005

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The US government and Hollywood have always been close. Washington DC has long been a source of intriguing plots for filmmakers and LA has been a generous provider of glamour and glitz to the political class. But just how dependant are these two centres of American influence? Scrutiny of previously hidden documents reveals that the answer is: very. We can now show that the relationship between US national security and Hollywood is much deeper and more political than anyone has ever acknowledged.



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The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown Continues Unabated

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Featured image: Satellite image shows damage at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (via ecowatch.com).

Dr Helen Caldicott explains recent robot photos taken of Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear reactors: radiation levels have not peaked, but have continued to spill toxic waste into the



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