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Mt. Shokanbetsu – The Yamaholic
Posted in Hokkaido hikes, tagged hiking, Hokkaido, Japan, Shokanbetsu on July 31, 2018| 1 Comment »
July's Calendar Photo is from Shokanbetsu, so instead of the monthly 'calendar footage' post, I bring you this love-overdue report from the archives:
The sleepy coastal town of Mashike sits snugly against the towering peaks of the Shokanbetsu range, a magnet for frigid precipitation during the winter months, and heavy fog during the green season. Along the main street a row of buildings dating from the early Meiji era stand out among the newer, rust-stained concrete of the post-war structures. An old kimono shop sits idle, the old shell transformed into a local history museum. I wander through the empty rooms, admiring the striations in the glasswork of the windows. A few doors down, the volunteers at the local sake factory distribute free samples to a busload of tourists pausing briefly before heading to the flowery hills of Furano. Near the end of the street, just before the deserted train station and bus stop, an aging, weather-tained facade with arched windows and a recessed oak entrance serves as my accommodation for the evening. The proprietor, a young family of transplants from Osaka, take me in as one of their own, offering not only a warm meal and drinks, but practical hiking advice for my ascent of Shokanbetsu planned for the following morning.
"There are three routes up the mountain", explain my guide, "none of which are particularly easy". With rain spitting down outside, this is not the news I want to hear. Still, I bite my lip and absorb the knowledge, deciding in the end to go with the shortest route up to the summit: a backbreaking 10km one-way ticket to the summit of what the locals have penned 'Mashike Fuji'.
Bright and early, Grace meets me outside of the single-roomed structure that doubles as train station and tourist information center. After exchanging pleasantries, we file up the paved switchbacks to the 500 vertical-meter Hashibetsu trailhead. Thick cloud hangs heavy in the air as we unload the gear. The foliage is still dripping wet from the late night squalls that pushed in from the sea. We have one very long, sticky and sloppy hike staring us right in the face, so procrastination would do no good. Better to dive into it and get on with it.
The path is well trodden and easy to follow, but getting lost is the least of our worries. The humidity forces the sweat from our pores, which attracts the mosquitos and horseflies. Swatting is an exercise in futility, and the only way to avoid the persistent buggers is to keep moving. The trail is framed on both sides by head-tall bamboo grass, concealing the forest floor and the creatures that lie in the murk. After several minutes of tramping, we come across our first bear prints that couldn't have been more than several hours old. Unfortunately it appears that we are tramping along an ursine highway, and Grace's bear spray does little to calm the nerves. If we are lucky we can catch up with the creature and surprise it from behind, but there would be nowhere to go if we met the mighty brown bear head on.
The mountain, like most other volcanoes in this land, is neatly divided into 10 stagepoints which does little to brighten our spirits. In anticipation of the long approach and summer humidity, I had brought along 4 liters of water, but the clouds cool things off enough to have me rethinking my decision. At stage point number 3 (san go-me), I stow away the extra two liters behind the signpost, and notice a much softer prance in my footfalls. My frowns from the previous hours fade away as I sink into a gradual rhythm and enter my tozan zone. The first 4 kilometers of the hike are almost completely flat, and it isn't until the 5th stage point that we start to rise out of the flatlands along a deep gully eroded away by the torrential rains that frequent this dormant volcanic massif.
Grace and I break into conversation now and again as she updates me on her hiking schedule. You see, she is embarking on a rather unprecedented mission to knock off every single one of the 200 and 300 famous mountains left in Hokkaido, a hectic schedule that consists of nearly twenty peaks dominated by long, exposed climbs. Her mountain adventures have earned her the moniker The Yamaholic, a fitting name for the forty something dekasegi who grinds out a living in a factory in rural Toyama Prefecture. If her dream becomes realized, she will be the first foreigner to complete the entire Sanbyakumeizan, so getting these remaining peaks checked off the northern island will go a long way towards meeting her goal. I really admire that kind of spirit and determination, as I had abandoned my own quest long ago when the first stages of asthma set in. Still, I do have an intention of knocking off several of the peaks from that list of mighty 300. From the pictures in my guidebook, I've always had a longing to climb Shokanbetsu, and being able to do it in the company of the Yamaholic is an added bonus.
After another hour of ascending, we finally rise above the thousand meter mark and towards the edge of the tree line. The clouds are playing a game of hide and seek with the surrounding peaks, but in those brief intervals we can just make out the edge of the wetlands of Uryu to the south. Uryu marsh is one of Hokkaido's hidden spots of ethereal beauty. In fact, a lot of visitors actually prefer climbing Shokanbetsu from this southernly approach, as the marshlands teem with wildflowers from June to October. There's only one problem with the Uryu route: it is 23km round-trip to the summit and back, something that even us seasoned veterans can not muster up the stamina for.
At the 7th stage point (nana go-me), the bamboo grass yields to vast gardens of wildflowers of every imaginable shape, color, and size. The Yamaholic breaks into a huge grin, the first of the day after setting out earlier that muggy morning. The terrain morphs to alpine tundra as the views to the south open up. Clouds are moving in swiftly from the sea to the north, however, so our vistas are soon erased by the mist.
10 minutes past the garden we stumble across fresh scat the size of a rugby ball. Luckily the cloud hides the bear from our sights but if there's one good sign to seeing gargantuan bear excrement it's that the creature is very well-fed, meaning it is less likely to seek us out for lunch.
Soon we hit a junction where the two routes from the southern approach turn into one for the final push to the high point. The Shokan route is also a popular route and follows a parallel ridge up the spine to the summit plateau. The weather had kept the other hikers at bay though, and shortly after noon the Yamaholic and I stand next to the small shrine and summit marker affixed to the top. We give each other a high five and dig into our rice balls while waiting for the clouds to clear. Dreadfully, the mist refuses to budge, so we stare at the photos in our guidebook and use our imagination to trace the outline of the sea directly below. Drops of rain begin to fall just as we finish repacking the gear, and soon we find ourselves in the midst of one of those notorious Hokkaido squalls that put your rain gear to the test. We fly out of there like mice fleeing a cat kennel and drop back down into the sheltered coves of the treeline just as the rain peters out.
I pick up the two-liter I had stashed earlier that morning and we continue the descent through a fresh layer of ankle-deep mud. Once back in the flatlands the sun makes a late yet welcomed appearance as we brace ourselves for another blood feast. The mosquitos go to town but the spirits remain high after knocking off one of Hokkaido's toughest day hikes.
The Yamaholic drops me off in Asahikawa as she continues her journey to the next mountain. I, on the other hand, take a well-deserved weekend off by crashing at a friend's place while preparing for the ferry back to Honshu.
Shaken up – part 3
Posted in General on July 15, 2018| 1 Comment »
After the tears dry I pull myself together and look through class materials, knowing that I will have no need for these today but convincing myself that taking my mind of the unfolding catastrophe will somehow help.
The first administrative staff arrive at school but are unable to give an answer to our inquiries regarding class cancellations. The waiting game begins.
The first aftershock rumbles through the building sending our rattled nerves closer to the edge.
Still no official word from the administration, but I know that classes will eventually be cancelled. It's just a matter of whether it will be announced before first period commences at 9am
Not a peep from the higher-ups, so I head to my classroom to find 10 brave students sitting still in class. They were the lucky ones, having either walked from their nearby dwellings or having made an earlier train before the rumbling begins. One student confesses that he was sitting in the classroom having breakfast when the quake hit.
As class 'officially begins', I plug in the laptop and stream NHK on the flat screen TV. I offer the following instructions:
1) There will be no class today. Please work on tasks from other courses or contact your friends and family on Line.
2) If a strong aftershock occurs, duck under your desk and move away from the windows.
An announcement over the loudspeaker confirms that morning classes have been cancelled. Morning classes only. I leave everything in my classroom and head back to the teachers lounge to await further instruction. All train lines have been indefinitely suspended.
I am informed that all classes have been cancelled. With no trains in operation, I head to the cafeteria for an early lunch and to weigh the options.
Still no movement on the trains, so I do a bit of navigating on Google Maps and make a breakthrough discovery. My house is directly over the mountain behind the school. There is no trail to speak of, but a network of paved roads will lead me through the greenery home. Old man Google says it's a 15km walk. So the journey begins.


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A well-known businessman introduces a coaching firm that
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Categories Entrepreneur Tags The Tik Tok Trainer
Jim Smith takes a leadership role at a cannabis company
Hubert Davis career timeline: How the UNC coach went from NBA journeyman to replacement for Roy Williams

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 1937-1980) used to say that he was not a 'career artist', reflecting his wish not to be categorised under an established label. Oiticica's early works were influenced by the Brazilian neo-Concretists and fell within the framework of geometric abstractionism, but his particular political aesthetic regarding the liberation of the viewer, which spurred his interests in the experience of art, set him apart from them. Soon, he was creating works that went beyond the two-dimensional picture plane and addressed ubiquitous social and political realities in his native Brazil. The artist's works are, indeed, difficult to place within any one movement or style, from those he made during the fifties and sixties when he was associated with Constructivism in Brazil and participated in the Grupo Frente and, later, the neo-Concrete group, to the architectural environments he experimented with in the sixties and early seventies, and on to the 'Quasi Cinemas' he developed after having won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1971 and moved to New York.
The son of entomologist, photographer and painter José Oiticica Filho and the grandson of the intellectual anarchist José Oiticica, Hélio was acutely aware of his political environment and deeply engaged with concerns against naturalistic representation of the exterior world. His multifaceted production has challenged curators; most recently, the curators at Tate Modern, who have endeavoured to find a cohesive structure in which to show and discuss his works. The result is two exhibitions: the major retrospective 'Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour' on view at Tate Modern from 6 June to 23 September 2007 and 'Oiticica in London - Tate Collection', which is being shown on the fifth floor of the museum from 19 May to 21 October 2007. Taken together, the two exhibits present a complete portrait of the artist and his works, from the most formalist to the most conceptual.
In 'Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour', Mari Carmen Ramirez, curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the show premiered,1 arranged a view of Oiticica's works distinct from the typical discourses circulating about him in Europe. Ramirez has gathered 150 works and focused on the visual aspects of his creations, particularly Oiticica's expansive handling of colour. In many ways, Ramirez's approach is successful but, however innovative it may be, it tends to eclipse the dimensional complexity of Oiticica's spatial project.
The works in gouache on cardboard explore the relation between geometric forms and chromatic elements. One work from the 'Metaesquemas' series (1959), for instance, consists of a collection of red rectangles combined together. The painted structure is not closed and reveals an irregular, cardboard coloured grid created from the background of the paper and the 'hollows' between the rectangles. The expressive power of this example of 'Metaesquema' (1957-1958) is accomplished by the emptiness in the structure rather than by the physicality of the painted objects.
Following the Metaesquemas series are the 'Bilateral' group of works (1959). In this series, Oiticica's forms and colours can be seen in paintings and in objects suspended in the room in which they are displayed. The artist's gestures are repeated in different dimensions simultaneously: as flat images on the walls as well as in geometric plates of wood that hang from the ceiling and are placed orthogonally to each other, defining different planes and, as a consequence, creating different images. The slight gradation of white and beige conveys the impression of depth and spatial property through the effect of the shading.
The 'Bilateral' group leads into the 'Spatial Reliefs' series (1960). The works here are concerned with geometric forms and colour as well, but are no longer related to Oiticica's paintings. 'Spatial Reliefs' are red or yellow plywood cut in geometric shapes that are, like the works in the 'Bilateral' group, hung from the gallery ceiling. Visitors will be able to walk through the set and affect the space around the works by their personal displacement in the room. Once again, it is not the objects that impart the aesthetic experience, but rather the invisible dimensional structure that exists in relation to them.
It might appear that these works were the next logical step in Oiticica's exploration of spatial relationships through the use of colour, but for him the process was not a matter of merely increasing the number of dimensions. When Oiticica was making his art on paper or canvas, he was already experimenting with expanding spatial potential through colour. In fact, all of his spatial investigations came from a very specific objective: a desire to achieve a sensory experience for the viewer.
One of the most important ideas of the neo-Concretist group was the non-object theory, which defined a non-object as an object that intends to be a pure appearance.4 Under this premise, art manifestation is considered to be a synthesis of sensory and mental experiences. As a member of the Grupo Frente, the most innovative tendency within the Brazilian Constructivist movement, Oiticica embraced this concept. His study of colour furthered this aim. For the artist, any colour was a kind of universal language with which he could 'activate' a space, not only by visual impression, but mainly by highlighting the object's position in space. Oiticica wanted to stimulate other senses that could raise viewers' state of consciousness through their perception of themselves as relevant entities in the space.
In his two-dimensional works, Oiticica manipulated perception by giving space precedence over the singular entities, by conferring rhythm or movement to his forms and by distinguishing his purpose with colour. Later, with the interactive sculpture series 'Bólides' (1963-1965), he provoked bodily faculties, gathering a variety of materials that were to be revealed by the public. When the 'Bólides' were made, they were mostly small boxes constructed with drawers or divisions that could be touched, smelled and sometimes listened to. For example, 'Bólide number 16' is a coloured wooden box containing glass, charcoal and beach shells. At the Tate, the public cannot touch the 'Bólides', but the works are opened to allow viewers to see what each contains.
The last two rooms of the exhibit display Oiticica's 'Grand Nucleus'. This conglomerate of more than 30 pieces of fibreboard in different shades of yellow appears to be floating. Rectangles and squares hung from the ceiling and placed orthogonally to each other are 'drawn' in the air. Like 'Bilaterals' and the 'Space Reliefs', this work employs the position of the viewer as a key to realise Oiticica's purposes. A game of shifting between three-dimensional and two-dimensional images is generated by real physical depth as well as by changes in colour from a lighter to a darker yellow. In the same room, the single example of Oiticica's 'Penetrables' - square, man-sized cabins that one can enter - is not as convincing as it might be; the idea is that once inside the cabin, one can alter the position of the two doors that cross the box.
The display of Oiticica's famous 'Parangolés', colourful capes made for wearing and dancing that became his trademark, is also disappointing. They are in the show but cannot be worn. Consequently, they lose their strength. They are hung on hangers attached to the walls in a room that is also the site of a screening of the 1979 film 'HO', directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Ivan Cardoso, who was a close friend of Oiticica's.5 In 'HO', Oiticica appears dancing wearing the 'Parangolés' and discussing his interests and objectives.
To commemorate the time that Oiticica spent in London, the Tate has prepared, 'Oiticica in London' as an adjunct to the main exhibition. Ramirez's art-historical approach is balanced here by a look at the revolutionary and singular nature of Oiticica's vision. Curated by Guy Brett (a personal friend of Oiticica and co-author of the book Oiticica in London published by the Tate) and Tanya Barson, the exhibit displays works in five rooms, including some in the Tate's collection by artists who participated in the Signals project. Founded in 1964, the Signals project was run by a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals. In the sixties, the gallery was an underground meeting place for British and foreign artists, including: Brazilian artists Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel; Venezuelan artist Jesus Soto; Chinese artist Li Yuan-Chia; and Philippine artist David Medalla. By including these artists with similar aims, Oiticica's aesthetics are connected to what was happening in the late sixties in the UK.
One of the five rooms dedicated to 'Oiticica in London' contains the artist's installation 'Tropicália' (1967), an oasis with sand, coloured parrots, tents and including 'Penetrables' with a television inside exhibiting any TV channel. The work is considered to be the turning point in Oiticica's oeuvre and has just been acquired by the Tate. The installation was made at the start of the Tropicália movement, in which Oiticica participated. A response to political dictatorship, the movement encompassed popular music and the arts in Brazil and was considered to be revolutionary in its scope and aspirations. Although the movement was squashed by the military regime, its influence on music and art has been acknowledged by artists around the world. To view the 'Tropicália' installation, the public must queue up to enter this multisensory experience. If visitors have not, by this point, gained a complete grasp of Oiticica's range as an artist, Tropicália may just open a window onto the artist's vision of total participation gained through liberation from established concepts, labels and perceptions and cultural clichés.
Oiticica died at the age of 43. His passion for art and obsession with colour was matched by his equally strong addictions. The immediate cause of his death, according to his family, was a brain stroke due to high blood pressure. The loss of an artist who dedicated himself to experimentation, the liberation of the viewer and to art as an open-ended conversation raises questions of what he might have done had he lived. Certainly, there is enough in these two exhibits to spark visitors' own imaginations, liberating them as Oiticica might have wished, to see beyond what they see before them.
1. Born in Puerto Rico, Mari Carmen Ramirez is Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where 'Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour' was displayed from December 2006 to April 2007. Ramirez edited the exhibition catalogue, Oiticica: The Body of Colour.
2. At the end of the sixites, Oiticica spent a year in London and, in 1969, was the subject of an exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The largest show ever held for the artist, it was organized as a continuous participatory environment for visitors to interact with his paintings, sculptures and installations.
3. The Brazilian Constructivist Movement had two divergent tendencies. The first one, exemplified by the São Paulo-based Grupo Ruptura, was predominantly influenced by Geometric Abstractionism and the theory of pure visibility. The artists working in this mode had a single style and strict creative process rules. The second group, the neo-Concretists, in Rio de Janeiro, was against strong rationalism, and their techniques were more innovative. Both groups shared as their main aesthetic concern the pictorial elements in art, such as colour, shapes and lines, without figurative references.
4. The non-object theory was first published in 1960 in the Suplemento Dominical, the Sunday cultural supplement of Jornal do Brasil, one of the most important Brazilian newspapers at the time, as a contribution to the second neo-Concretist exhibition. Written by the poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar, the text compiled the main thoughts that were guiding the artistic group.
5. Oiticica worked as actor in minor roles in some of Ivan Cardoso's horror films. In fact, Cardoso shot a second documentary on Oiticica, Meia noite com Glauber, in 1997. Cardoso is developing a third documentary on the artist, focusing on Oiticica's biography.
6. For an in-depth look at Oiticica's exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, see Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo (eds) Oiticica in London (London: Tate Publishing, 2007). The book includes facsimiles of the Whitechapel catalogue, critical essays on the artist and the exhibit, interviews with Oiticica's contemporaries and translations of the artist's writings.


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[ A Review of Book ]
Perspective on Asian Development in 1970–2016: Some Reflections on Nayyar's Resurgent Asia (2019)
Djun Kil Kim
Djun Kil Kim, Visiting Fellow at Institute of Economic Research, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, 08826, Seoul, Korea, Tel: +82 2 401 4853 (djunkil.kim@gmail.com)
Deepak Nayyar, Resurgent Asia: Diversity in Development, Oxford University Press, 2019
This work was supported by Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2018 LAB-1250001).
1. Amsden, Alice Hoffenberg. The rise of "The rest": challenges to the west from late-industrializing economies. Oxford University Press, USA, 2001.
2. Chang, Ha-Joon. The Political Economy of Industrial Policy, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994.
3. Chang, Ha-Joon. "The Hazard of Moral Hazard: Untangling the Asian Crisis." World Development 28 (No. 4, 2000): 775-88.
4. Johnson, Charmers. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.
5. Kim, Byung-Kook, and Ezra F. Vogel (Eds.). The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea, Cambridge, MASS, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011.
6. Kim, Djun Kil. The History of Korea Second Edition, Santa Barbara, CA: The Greenwood Press, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO LLC, 2014.
7. Lee, Keun. Schumpeterian Analysis of Economic Catch-up: Knowledge, Path-Creation, and the Middle-Income Trap. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
8. Lee, Keun, and Hochul Shin. "Varieties of Capitalism and East Asia: Long-term Evolution, Structural Change, and the End of the East Asian Capitalism." Structural Change and Economic Dynamics (2018).
9. Lee, Keun, Hochul Shin, and Jongho Lee. "From Catch-up to Convergence? : Re-Casting Trajectory of Capitalism in South Korea" Korean Studies 44 (No. 1, 2020): 54-79.
10. Maddison, Angus. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
11. Myrdal, Gunnar. Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, Vol. I, II, and III. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1968.
12. Nayyar, Deepak. Resurgent Asia: Diversity in Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
13. Shin, Jang-Sup, and Ha-Joon Chang. Restructuring Korea Inc. London and New York: Rootledge, Curzon, 2003.
14. Thurbon, Elizabeth. Developmental Mindset: The Revival of Financial Activism in South Korea, Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.


Sue Morris, President of Heritage Services, Omaha, is the recipient of The Architectural Foundation of Nebraska's Distinguished Commitment to Architecture Award. She has been involved with numerous campaigns, totaling over $660 million, including the $75 million capital and endowment campaign supporting Joslyn Art Museum and the Durham Museum, and the development of the $104 million Holland Performing Arts Center, as well as TD Ameritrade Park.
Her inspiration to the project team to always support excellence and quality in architecture is legendary. The award, given by the Architectural Foundation of Nebraska, is given to individuals outside the profession of architecture for their activities and accomplishments in the area of professional life, which have notably contributed to the advancement of architecture. The Foundation's mission is to inform the people of Nebraska of the importance of their environment and the value of architecture, and to raise awareness of the long-term impact of architecture as a signature of culture.
Click here for the 2016 recipient, Todd Heistand.
Click here for the 2014 recipient, Larry Glazier.
Click here for the 2012 recipient, James P. Abel.
Click here for the 2010 recipient, Connie Spellman.


Alpenglow – Old Pine Candle Co.
The warm, earthy stillness that puts the world on pause as the sun stretches across the earth to cast its warm glow will help you slow down and reflect.
All of the Old Pine Candle Co. products are small batch and hand-poured with 100% American Soy Wax and phthalate free fragrance oils. Each candle should produce approximately 50hrs of burn time.
Trim the wick to 1/4" before lighting, every time. This will help prevent soot and smoke (aaaah clean burn).
We recommend creating a "burn pool", the first time you burn your candle. To do this, let the wax melt completely to the edges of the container. This will prevent tunneling or uneven wax melt.
Copyright © 2019 Old Pine Candle Co. .


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The Ludwig von Mises Centre
For Property and Freedom
Libertarian Alliance Archive
Essay Prize
Category Archives: Foreign Policy (US)
Mueller And Atta: Fake Intel Runs Through … Prague, Part 1
Posted on 12 April, 2019 by ilana mercer	Leave a comment
By ©ilana mercer
No, the moral of the Mueller inquisition is not that the Left is incorrigibly corrupt and morally and intellectually bankrupt, although this is certainly true.
And, no. It's not that the Republicans are meek, more eager for swamp-creature tenure than to save the country. However much state power flaccid Republicans capture, they quickly come to heel when Democrats crack the whip.
The moral of the Mueller inquisition, at least one of them, concerns the alphabet soup of acronyms that stands for the Permanent Security State—FBI, DOJ, DIA, DHS, CIA, NSA, on and on. That this intractable apparatus' impetus is liberal is hardly new. What is counterintuitive to many is that the Permanent Security State's modus operandi comports perfectly well with both Republican and Democratic administrations, alike.
When it comes to subverting an "America First," sovereignty-centered, populist platform—the duopoly acts as one. Have not fans of Mr. Mueller kept reminding us that the man is a loyal Republican? And he is—Mueller's a Republican stalwart of the managerial class. (By the way, Mueller fans can find "Mr. Mueller-face earrings and Mueller devotional candles on Etsy, the e-commerce equivalent of a hippie grandmother's attic.")
To make sense of the Russia Monomania and the Mueller time we all served, it is essential to grasp the anatomy of American state power.
In particular, to comprehend the mass hysteria that is the war on Trump, it's crucial to trace the contours of that other war, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and the way it was peddled to the American public.
The manufacturing of Fake News by the Deep State, circa 2017, is of a piece with the anatomy of the ramp-up to war in Iraq, in 2003. Except that back then, Republicans, joined by many a diabolical Democrat like Hillary Clinton, were the ones who dreamt up Homer Simpson's Third Dimension in Iraq.
Fact: The Steel Dossier, which launched the Mueller inquisition, was as fantastical a fabrication as were the documents that fed the Bush administration's will to war.
As it is, intelligence report-writing is more art than science; more flare than fact. It's executed by many of the same, tinny, dogmatic, ex-CIA feminists whom we see plonked in CNN studios, ponderously pontificating about Our Russian Enemy.
From the CIA to CNN, the youthful talking heads (and their shapely keisters) have only ever gone from a swivel chair at the Langley headquarters to a seat in a CNN studio, in New York City.
It's not at all unfair to conclude that the "intelligence" these cartoon characters produced as CIA or FBI agents is as intelligent as their commentary in the TV studio.
PRAGUE AGAIN?
Did no one but this writer have PTSD-related flashbacks when Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, was floated during the Mueller madness?
During his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the bewildered Michael Cohen—a tragic figure, really—was asked in all seriousness whether he had liaised with "Kremlin officials" in Prague. "I've never been to the Czech Republic," Cohen shot back.
Curiously, Prague is umbilically linked to another notorious intelligence hoax.
According to manufactured American intelligence, a putative meeting between Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of Sept. 11, and Iraqi intelligence, was said to have taken place in … Prague.
Atta and the Iraqi assets never met in Prague. (At the time, Iraq had been 95-percent disarmed and was in possession of no weapons of mass destruction, an assessment backed by many an expert in strategic studies BEFORE THE WAR.)
The Prague apparition is a thread that runs through the Iraq and Mueller mythology.
Is Prague a figment of an intelligence officer (a female enterprise?) who had just read her first Milan Kundera novel? Inquiring minds have to wonder.
Seriously, Prague is the witches brew you get when you fuse the FBI's highly-strung anti-Trump brigade with Christopher Steele's "research" team.
Certainly, the publicly available CIA reports, offering "irrefutably" incriminating evidence against Iraq—the one I had perused in December of 2002—had novel-like qualities.
UNINTELLIGENT INTELLIGENCE
Hardly sober and scholarly, the bafflegab that convinced Republicans to destroy the balance of power in Iraq and the region went something like, "Saddam will probably"; "Give him time and he will eventually"; "With sufficient weapons-grade fissile material, he'll doubtless"; "He doesn't have the capability to develop enriched uranium or plutonium to fuel a nuclear bomb, but just you wait …"
This is obviously not the letter of the texts that convinced everyone (except a few of us) to destroy Iraq. But it's close enough to its spirit.
How the CIA cobbled together evidence for an "interest in acquiring" or "an effort to procure"—considering that these WMD-related purchases never seemed to materialize—isn't clear. What proof did we have that they were even initiated? None.
I hazard that much of the compositions masquerading as intelligence and continually cited by political actors in privileging their policies are in language that is manifestly intended to exempt the writer from having to substantiate much of the claims.
Be it against Iraq or Russia, the political storyline du jour is manufactured by America's gilded elites. To this—to heading a principate like Rome—Republican Karl Rove famously confessed during the era of Bush II:
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Not coincidentally, Karl is currently urging Republicans to "move on from Robert Mueller," nothing here to see.
To manufacture consent over Iraq, elements in the intelligence community worked with neoconservative counterparts in Bush 43's administration, in particularity with "the Office of Special Plans." And while Fake News babes did wonders to sex up, stateside, the cause of senseless killing—the dissemination of Fake News, vis-a-vis Iraq, was hardly the exclusive province of Fox News. With some laudable exceptions, Big Media all was tuned-out, turned-on and hot for holy war in the cause of democracy, WMD, whatever.
Now, it's all-out war on Trump. Then, the same Machine aligned against Iraq.
Salient in 2003, as in 2017, was the monolithic quality of the cheer-leading coming from the networks; an unquestioning uniformity that spoke to a slutty sell-out throughout the media establishment. For journalistic jingoism, it's impossible to best the coverage of the high-tech media extravaganza known as "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
Embedded with the military turned out to be a euphemism for in bed with the military. Practically all network embeds focused exclusively on the Pentagon's version of events, to the exclusion of reality on the Iraqi ground. Yet reporters who slept with their sources were treated as paragons of truth. Those of us who refused such cohabitation were labeled "unilaterals," deniers, unpatriotic, and worse.
Reporting hearsay as truth and failing to verify stories were all in a day's work on cable and news networks. A Geiger counter that went off in the inexpert hands of a young Marine, stationed in Iraq, became "Breaking News," possible evidence of weapons-grade plutonium. Every bottle of Cipro pills located was deemed a likely precursor to an anthrax factory. Anchormen and women somberly seconded these "finds," seldom bothering to issue retractions.
When you're the most powerful entity in the world, as the U.S. government still is—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What's more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into "sharing" your alternate reality by hook or by crook, abroad or at home.
More than anything, the moral of Mueller is that the Security State is dangerous to all Americans, Republicans, Deplorables—even Democrats.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of "Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa" (2011) & "The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed" (June, 2016). She's on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube
Foreign Policy (US)
Police State (US)
Lies About Putin, Syria And The Alawite Alliance
Posted on 17 July, 2018 by ilana mercer	Leave a comment
By ilana mercer
On just about every issue, in 2016, candidate Trump ran in opposition to Sen. Lindsey Graham. Donald Trump won the presidency; Lindsey Graham quit the race with a near-zero popularity, as reflected in the polls.
The People certainly loathe the senator from South Carolina. A poll conducted subsequently found that Graham was among least popular senators.
No wonder. Graham is reliably wrong about most things.
But being both misguided and despised have done nothing to diminish Sen. Graham's popularity with Big Media, left and right. Thus were his pronouncements accorded the customary reverence, during a July 10 segment, on Fox News' "The Story."
Which is when he told anchor Martha MacCallum that, "Putin is not doing anything good in Syria."
Then again, Lindsey is being consistent. The revival of "one of the world's oldest Christian communities," in Syria, is not something the senator we've come to know and loathe would celebrate.
It's true. "A new Syria is emerging from the rubble of war," reports The Economist, a magazine which is every bit as liberal and Russophobic as Graham and his political soul mate, John McCain, but whose correspondents on the ground—in Aleppo, Damascus and Homs—have a far greater fidelity to the truth than the terrible two.
"In Homs, … the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large crucifix hangs over the main street." 'Groom of Heaven,' proclaims a billboard featuring a photo of a Christian soldier killed in the seven-year conflict. And, in their sermons, Orthodox patriarchs praise Mr. Assad for saving … the Christian communities."
Don't tell the ailing McCain. It'll only make him miserable, but thanks to Putin, Assad "now controls Syria's spine, from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south—what French colonists once called la Syrie utile (useful Syria). The rebels are confined to pockets along the southern and northern borders."
"Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria's victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam from which Mr. Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities." ("How a victorious Bashar al-Assad is changing Syria," The Economist, June 28, 2018.)
A Christian teacher in Homs rejoices, for she no longer must live alongside neighbors "who overnight called you a kafir (infidel)."
The teacher's venom is directed at John McCain's beloved "rebels." Internet selfies abound of McCain mixing it up with leading Sunni "rebels," against whom Putin and Bashar al-Assad were doing battle. Who knows? McCain may even have taken a pic with the infamous "rebel" who decapitated Syrian Franciscan monk Father Francois Murad.
Ignoramuses McCain and Graham had both urged the US to send weapons to the "rebels"—even as it transpired that the lovelies with whom McCain was cavorting on his sojourns in Syria liked to feast on … the lungs of their pro-Assad enemies. A devotee of multiculturalism, Lindsey could probably explain the idiosyncratic cultural symbolism of such savagery.
Infested as it is by globalist ideologues, the permanent establishment of American foreign policy refuses to consider regional, religious, local, even tribal, dynamics in the Middle East. In particular, that the "good" guys in Syria—a relative term—are not the Islamist "rebels," with whom the senior Republican senator from Arizona was forever frolicking; but the secular Alawites.
You likely didn't know that Alawites like al-Assad also "flinch at Shia evangelizing. 'We don't pray, don't fast [during Ramadan] and drink alcohol,' says one."
Under Putin's protection, the more civilized Alawite minority (read higher IQ), which has governed Syria since 1966, is in charge again. Duly, reports the anti-Assad Economist, "Government departments are functioning. … electricity and water supplies are more reliable than in much of the Middle East. Officials predict that next year's natural-gas production will surpass pre-war levels. The railway from Damascus to Aleppo might resume operations this summer. The National Museum in Damascus, which locked up its prized antiquities for protection, is preparing to reopen to the public."
Good thinking. The "rebels" would have blown Syria's prized antiquities to smithereens.
Given that Islamists are not in charge, the specter of men leaving their women and fleeing Syria has had an upside. Syrian women dominate the workforce. Why, they're even working as "plumbers, taxi-drivers and bartenders." Had Sen. Graham, his friends the "rebels," and their Sunni state sponsors won—Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar—would this be possible? Turkey is currently sheltering "Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group linked to al-Qaeda, and other Sunni rebels."
Aligned against the Christian-Shia-Alawite alliance are Israel and America, too. They've formed a protective perimeter around rebel holdouts.
Before the breakthrough, when Sunni rebels were gaining ground, Syria's "women donned headscarves," and "non-Muslim businessmen bowed to demands from Sunni employees for prayer rooms. But as the war swung their way, minorities regained their confidence." "Christian women in Aleppo [now] show their cleavage, the internet is unrestricted and social-media apps allow for unfettered communication. Students in cafés openly criticize the regime."
Contra the robotic sloganeering from Lindsey, Nikki Haley and the political establishment, Russia has been pushing Bashar al-Assad to open up Syria's political process and allow for the revival of "multiparty politics."
Alas, the once bitten Assad is twice shy. His attempts, a decade ago, to liberalize Syrian politics resulted in the ascendancy of Sunni fundamentalism, aka Lindsey Grahamnesty's rebels. (The nickname is for the Republican senator's laissez-faire immigration policies, stateside.)
As has Russia called "for foreign forces to leave Syria," Iran's included. Iran commands 80,000 Shia militiamen in Syria. "Skirmishes between the [Iranian] militias and Syrian troops have resulted in scores of deaths. Having defeated Sunni Islamists, army officers say they have no wish to succumb to Shia ones."
It all boils down to national sovereignty. So as to survive the onslaught of the Sunni fundamentalist majority, the endangered Alawite minority formed an alliance with the Iranian Shia, also a minority among the Ummah. Now, civilized and secular Syrians want their country back. In fact, many Syrian "Sunnis prefer Mr. Assad's secular rule to that of Islamist rebels."
Trump's Phone Call To Putin
Posted on 28 March, 2018 by ilana mercer	One comment
"This is just a truly astonishing moment coming from the White House podium," tweeted MSNBC's Kasie Hunt. Like the rest of the media pack-animals she hunts with, Ms. Hunt had been fuming over President Trump's telephone call to Vladimir Putin, congratulating him on winning another term as president.
Reliably opposed to a truce were party heavies on both sides. Sen. John McCain joined the chorus: "An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections," he intoned.
Another Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley, told a reporter testily that he "wouldn't have a conversation with a criminal. I think Putin's a criminal. What he did in" Iraq, what he did in Libya … Wait a sec? Remind me; was it Putin or our guys who wrecked those countries? So many evil-doers on the world-stage, it's hard for me to keep track.
"When I look at a Russian election, what I see is a lack of credibility in tallying the results," sermonized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "I'm always reminded of the elections they have in almost every communist country."
Actually, what the International Election Observation Mission found in Russia's presidential election of March 18 was far more nuanced. Why, in some ways the Russian elections were very American: In the difficulty dissident candidates have in getting on the ballot, for example.
Ask Ron Paul or all those anonymous, aspiring, independent, third-party candidates about the US's "restrictive ballot access laws and the other barriers erected" by the duopoly to protect their "de facto monopoly in America," to paraphrase Forbes.com.
As for jailing journalists, frequently for life: Not Russia, but an American ally, Turkey, is the world's biggest offender. But hold on. Isn't Trump turning on the Kurds to pacify the Turks? Maybe it's something the Saudi's said. Go figure.
What doesn't change is the interchangeability—with respect to any peaceful overtures made by President Trump toward Russia—of the Stupid Party (Republicans) and the Evil Party (Democrats). And yet, the same self-interested individuals protest, periodically, that Trump's recklessness risks plunging the country into war.
The president wants to cooperate with the Russians. International confrontation being their stock-in-trade, the UniParty won't countenance it. Politicians in both parties have not stopped egging Mr. Trump on, rejecting the détente he seeks with Russia, and urging American aggression against a potential partner. Yet, incongruously, in October of 2017, a Republican Senator, Bob Corker, saw fit to complain that the president was "reckless enough to stumble [sic] the country into a nuclear war."
To please and curry favor with an establishment that detests him and is vested in the geopolitical status quo—POTUS even signed sanctions into law against Russia.
Cui bono, pray tell? Who benefits from this standoff?
General Barry R. McCaffrey has The Answer. The Trump congratulatory courtesy call to Mr. Putin shows the president's refusal to protect US interests, tweeted the general.
"US interests" or your interests, sir? Who benefits here? Ordinary Americans, or the media-military-industrial-complex; the swamp organism Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address: "The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – … felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government … [of] an immense military establishment and a large arms industry."
Not to mention the attendant barnacles who suction onto the ship of state: professional TV talkers, think tank sorts, self-anointed intellectuals (who're not very intelligent). All are vested in an American-led order, so long as they get to dictate what that (martial) order looks like.
The same political flotsam "argues" against President Trump's desired détente with Russia using the following logic: If the "master of the political insult," Donald Trump, "declines to chide Putin," to quote NBC and CNN standard issue "analysts"—something is off. Ergo, Trump is beholden to Putin and to Russia. The Russians have something on him.
Such a line of "reasoning" fails basic logic, simply because it's inexhaustive. In other words, there are other, highly plausible explanations as to why the president is not warring with Russia, not least that diplomacy is a good thing; that POTUS ran on a promise of peace with Putin; that he had articulated, as a campaigner, an idea entertained by most Deplorables. Namely that Russians are at odds with Islam and ISIS; that Putin is a Russia First, nationalist, whereas our Anglo-Europeans "allies" are Islam-friendly globalists.
Had POTUS kept pressing the perfectly proper positions he ran on, he might have retarded the Russia political wildfire, now raging out of control. Philosophical consistency would've served him well as an antidote to the political opportunism around him.
Instead, President Trump has surrounded himself with appointees who deliver a message discordant to his. What comes out of the White House is an ideological cacophony.
Hiring different perspectives in business could well be a strength. But it's a weakness when politics and policy are in play. Needed to advance a political agenda is a team that shares the political philosophy underlying the agenda.
MSNBC's Miss Hunt and her political clones were particularly galled by Sarah Sanders. The White House press secretary was asked whether the Russian election was free and fair. She replied: "We don't get to dictate how other countries operate."
What's outraging our neoconservative-Jacobin establishment is that the White House is practicing, if only fleetingly, what another American president counseled in a bygone Independence-Day speech: detachment and diplomacy in foreign policy.
[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
The man who'd be casting pearls before swine today was John Quincy Adams. The sixth president of the United States (1825-1829), son of John Adams, spoke truths eternal on that July 4, 1821.
History (US)
Ideologies (Classical Liberal)
'Oil wars.' Is this an accurate summary of US-led interventions in the Middle East of the 21st century?
Posted on 13 January, 2018 by Without Prejudice	9 comments
Duncan Whitmore
"America is addicted to oil"
So said President George W Bush, echoing a contemporary cover of The Economist, in his State of the Union Address on January 31st 2006.
Although President Bush's speech was a lament for the fact that the United States is the world's biggest consumer of oil (reaching 19.4 million barrels per day by 2015[1]), this candid admission by the architect of American interventionism lent support to the notion that his country's forays into the Middle East have been either wholly or mostly motivated by the desire to have a greater, physical control over oil. In this essay we will, however, conclude that this theory is, at best, incomplete, and, at worst, false and misleading, and that America's interventionist efforts can be best understood through the explanation of three distinct, yet connected objectives:
To maintain the petrodollar system and the global reserve status of the US dollar;
To appease and promote the interests of the US's biggest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia;
To serve as proxy wars against Russia and China and to contain and minimise Sino-Russian influence in the region.
How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism
Posted on 11 January, 2018 by ilana mercer	2 comments
It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:
"… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"
"For a moment," swooned Lake, "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting."
Onward to Venezuela!
Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism."
As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State.
That's just the way things are.
So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake.
After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369!
Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate sheiks?
Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected. Curiously, they're currently rioting.
If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency—its spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First" plank—is to "undermine American democracy."
Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."
In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man rule.
When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration—is that another bloodline in-the-making?—has not broken with America's ruling dynastic families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).
It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs. In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly, beheaded with a sword.
Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik. At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)
Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like this one. Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.
No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy. Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."
These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.
"It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without … any debate in Congress or the media."
Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000 additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not undertaking nation building.
This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.
Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.
Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola.
The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and Norway. "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."
With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our dangerously united political factions.
This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives—who now comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.
How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives—aka Conservatism Inc.—did the same.
Having consistently complained of his isolationism, the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism. The other option is to admit that we of the callused Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always right.
Not going to happen.
To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly paleolibertarian column since 1999, and is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016) & Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Follow her on Twitter, Facebook & YouTube.
Politicians (Trump, Donald)
Godfrey Bloom: A Presidential Spat
Posted on 5 December, 2017 by Andy Duncan	4 comments
Our Honorary President, this morning spoke in a debate on the BBC Radio Kent Breakfast show, about the proposed visit to the UK of President Donald Trump.
He spoke second in what became a 'lively' debate. If you would like to hear his contribution, please click on the audio link below. He starts speaking at 54 seconds:
https://thelibertarianalliance.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/godfreybloomuspresidentvisit20171205.mp3
Yesterday, Godfrey Bloom also spoke on the Jonathan Cowlap show, on BBC Radio York, about changes to the UK's driving test regulations. Click on the audio link below to listen to this:
https://thelibertarianalliance.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/godfreybloomnewbritishdrivingtest20171204.mp3
godfrey bloom
Media (BBC)
Niger: Finally, A War John McCain Doesn't Love
Posted on 3 November, 2017 by ilana mercer	Leave a comment
News first broke about America's Niger misadventure on October 4. "The real news here is that the US has forces in Niger, where they're conducting covert operations," this writer tweeted out. "Hashtag America First."
Official media ignored the ambush of the American Special Forces, until the story gained anti-Trump traction. No word came from John McCain. Three weeks hence, the senator from Arizona is making history. McCain, who has never encountered a war he wasn't eager to prosecute, is questioning the folly in Niger.
The senator from Arizona can run but can't hide from the pollution he has left along his political path. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo; McCain jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and "more boots on the ground." At the prospects of war with Iran, McCain burst into song, "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran." The possibility still makes this war ghoul smile. Before that, McCain promised a 100-year war in Iraq.
Senator McCain's jingoism has encompassed Syria, Georgia, Mali, Nigeria, and China. Where the US could not effect regime change, as it did fecklessly in Afghanistan and Libya—McCain would typically call to side with an imagined local "friend of America" against an imagined "foe of America." McCain has many imaginary friends.
Where his target country was beyond US bullying (Russia), the idea of the resumption of a cold war was an option McCain liked. He is currently fulminating over a slight delay in sanctions against Russia. When all efforts to tame the world militarily fail, McCain is partial to the idea of UN troops acting as his surrogates, say in Sudan.
No war makes Johnny a sad boy. But now he's considering a subpoena over Niger.
GLOBAL CENTRALIZER
Playing out in Niger are the permanently entrenched, unchanging, American foreign-policy interests. Keen observers will detect a familiar pattern. Once again, the American bias everywhere is toward a powerful, overweening central state. This conceit has put our forces on a collision course with the tribal interests America toils to tame.
Indeed, US foreign policy often flouts local authority. It certainly disavows separatists and generally discourages any meaningful devolution of power. Born of a loose confederation of independent states, America now stands for the strong centralized state. Our interchangeable leaders strive to see the same in the tribal lands of the Middle East and Africa.
MEDDLING IN YEMEN'S CIVIL WAR
In Yemen, America is working to impose a central authority on "bickering sheikdoms." In the South alone, Yemen has 14 such principalities. Southern secessionists are at war with the north, have been for at least 139 years. There, "even the bottled water," notes the Economist, "is called 'South.'" There's no such thing as a united Yemen. Never was.
Into this fray, the US has waded. So stupid and dangerous is our foreign-policy colossus that it imagines America is fighting al-Qaida by backing the Saudi-led coalition to vanquish northern Houthi rebels. The northern Houthi rebels, however, clearly wear many hats. More so than the invading coalition, the rebels are of the community and often for the community.
As America's Emirati partners in Yemen are realizing, "Motivating recruits to push north is an uphill task even with the payment of bonuses. Those who were happy to fight for their own homes seem unenthused about fighting for somebody else's."
Would that the Empire's military would confine itself to that constitutional mandate: fight for home and hearth and no more. Alas, our soldiers have been propagandized to conflate fighting for American freedom with fights in Niger, Burkina Faso (yeah, I know) and Mali.
Ultimately, all the spots America chooses to mess with are too complex for the prosaic American mind to grasp, for we are schooled to see societies unlike our own through a Disneyfied, angels-and-demons prism.
More so than the Middle East, Africa is riven by tribal interests and dynamics. These, McCain or CENTCOM (the United States Central Command) have no hope of understanding, because they're wedded to the idea that their own home (America) is nothing more than an idea, and never a community of flesh-and-blood people with a shared, treasured patrimony.
AND NOW, NIGER
To their credit, Africans' fealty is not to deracinated political propositions—democracy, human rights, gay marriage, and communal bathrooms—but to each other. They will kill for clan and kin. (And they kill each other, too.)
Niger is no different. You're told that the Americans and the French are empowering the local forces of Niger against the mythical ISIS. Poppycock. This is never the case. In Africa, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the conflicts are regional, tribal, old, if not ancient.
Tongo-Tongo, the Niger village that ambushed our unsuspecting Green Berets, had not been "infiltrated" by hostile forces; that's the take of Niger's central government, itself a very recent development. If past is prologue, it's fair to assume that the Niger government is vested in developing as a French and American client state with all the attendant perks.
Villagers have likely learned not to wait for any trickle-down from the state. The Tongo-Tongo villagers enticed our forces to mill about, giving their homie militant benefactors just enough time to set up an ambush in a kill zone.
Imagine! Locals don't particularly relish a visit from the American and French patrolmen and their Nigerien puppets.
Again, Niger is heavily dependent on bribes from the West (foreign aid, we call it). We reward Niamey (the capital) to play war games with us. This is another case of an Islamic, if multi-ethnic, tribal land, whose people don't want Americans there. (And even if the people of the region wanted us there, America has no business being there. Deplorables voted against the concept of making Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali great again.)
So, if John McCain's hatred of President Trump has driven America's most ardent warmonger to question the American intervention in Niger—that's a good thing.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a paleolibertarian column since 1999, and is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016) & Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube.


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"The time has come when class can no longer stand aloof from class, and that man does his duty best who works most earnestly in bridging over the gulf between different classes which it is the tendency of increased wealth and increased civilization to widen. I claim for music the merit that it has a voice which speaks in different tones perhaps, but with equal force, to the cultivated and to the ignorant, to the peer and the peasant. I claim for music a variety of expression which belongs to no other art, and therefore adapts it more than any other art to produce that union of feeling which I much desire to promote. Lastly, I claim for music the distinction which is awarded to it by Addison—that it is the only sensual pleasure in which excess cannot be injurious. What more, gentlemen, can I say on behalf of the art for the promotion of which we are to-day opening this institution, which I trust will give to music a new impulse, a glorious future and a national life."
You are reading A Musical Decade In England from the August, 1910 issue of The Etude Magazine.
Justice to Weber is the next entry in The Etude.


Why Do People Still Throw Trash on the Road?
I was reminded this morning that sometimes people can be really rude to nature and Tuscaloosa as a whole.
As I was driving to the station this morning, it was a normal day. Sun out, window rolled down. The car in front of me was sort of swerving, but they eventually corrected, after doing something that made me seriously mad. They pulled over to the side, and proceeded to throw out their trash! Right there on the road!
In short, don't be that type of person to Tuscaloosa. Dispose of your litter properly!


I just discovered a real can of worms. Apparently - though I have to see an actual textbook dealing with this time period to bear it out - the US government or the writers of American history (probably both) have made it a policy to minimize and villainize the president of the First Philippine Republic, Generalissimo Emilio Aguinaldo. I thought before that this was just something isolated as I'd heard the same story from my American uncle who was a missionary there for a while (then married my Filipina aunt) and then later on read something in an Osprey book on counter-insurgency. The line is apparently that contrary to what we have been taught and affirm within our history, that Aguinaldo was only the leader of a small insurgent band which did not have the loyalty of the native people at all and in its entirety, that he was a power hungry murderous leader who orchestrated the murder of Bonifacio and Luna, that the Filipinos did not have the capacity to govern themselves and needed the benevolent Americans to sort them out, the whole 'revolt of the Tagals' story that the American government sold to the American people to give them causus belli against their Filipino allies who they sold out, is still being taught and accepted apparently as real history. This gives the Americans the right, in their eyes, to still refer to the Fil-American War as 'the Philippine Insurrection' because Aguinaldo's government was not in any way legal at all. I don't know about you but this persistent and very clearly politically oriented slander hurts my Filipino sensibilities.
Aguinaldo wasn't perfect. No one is. But from all the research I've done I see that he did his best under the circumstances and he was the only person short of Rizal who could have done what he did - create a virtually united revolutionary front and lead it under war circumstances against not one but two colonial powers. Sure there were regional sensibilities and often regional commanders were virtual warlords but they did have to acknowledge his overall authority. As for the Bonifacio-Aguinaldo controversy, I stand by Aguinaldo in this as I see Bonifacio's actions as ultimately reprehensible and a threat to the overall course of the revolution. Bonifacio was a great organizer and he did get the structure of the Katipunan in place - this in and of itself along with the influence of the Propaganda movement and Rizal in particular laid the ground work for a UNITED revolutionary front. No longer did the indio in the Visayas or Mindanao see himself in isolated serfdom to the Spaniards but he saw that this was going on throughout the archipelago. Why else did the friars and Spanish government hate Rizal and his books so much? This allowed Bonifacio to form the Katipunan after La Liga Filipino failed and allowed the Katipunan to be not just a Tagalog movement but as far north as Ylocos and as far south as the settlements of Mindanao. Bonifacio was a superb organizer and the Katipunan, his brain-child, set in motion the course to armed revolution - but he wasn't too good a battlefield commander. His raid on the polvorin at San Juan del Monte ultimately failed and the Katipuneros who were captured including Sancho Valenzuela were shot by firing squad. Other Magdiwang efforts in Manila came to nothing and after skulking around Manila and Morong (Bataan) he went to the one place where the revolution had won distinct success - Cavite Province.
Aguinaldo had been inducted by Bonifacio himself in the Masonic-style Katipunan rites and was recognized as the leader of the Katipunan in his area of Cavite. However, it was Aguinaldo's battlefield success that cemented him as the leader of the revolution in Cavite - winning dramatic victories at Imus (where a 'Braveheart - Stirling' style hold and flank caught the Spanish forces by surprise and routed them) to Binakayan where Filipino trenches built by Belgian trained engineer Edilberto Evangelista defeated a massive Spanish assault. Coupled with the success of Caviteno forces more inclined towards Bonifacio's 'Magdiwang' Party the end of 1896 showed Spain that the Philippine Revolution was a dead serious reality. Then it all started to go wrong.
Bonifacio came to Cavite and began putting on airs - even Dr.Pio Valenzuela, his compatriot, noted that Bonifacio was 'algo despota' - and demanding that he be made leader of the revolution, essentially claiming the success that Aguinaldo had won. Aguinaldo, preparing for the new Spanish offensive that was coming and not considering himself much more than a successful general, was less inclined to play politics as he was to prepare Cavite's defenses. It soon became clear that the revolutionaries had to determine whether a new revolutionary government instead of the Katipunan should lead the revolution and a convention was formed at Tejeros to vote in a new revolutionary government. While all this was going on, the Spaniards were relentlessly attacking with fresh reinforcements from Spain and a dynamic new governor general in charge, Camillo de Polavieja. Aguinaldo was at the front, fighting, not behind the lines politicking, which is where Bonifacio was. When the votes were cast, Bonifacio was voted to a relatively low position, and this position was challenged by one of Aguinaldo's officers since the position required legal know-how, something which Bonifacio, who had been not much more than a middle manager at a trading firm, did not have. Bonifacio was enraged - he had started the Katipunan, he felt that he should be the commander-in-chief and he refused to acknowledge the results of the Tejeros Convention. Thereafter, the two factions of Magdiwang (Bonifacio) and Magdalo (Aguinaldo) were hostile to each other. Bonifacio began to sabotage military operations, pulling troops out of line that were loyal to the Magdiwang Faction and refusing reinforcements at critical stages in the battle. Meanwhile Aguinaldo had just lost his elder brother Crispulo who fought a valiant but doomed delaying action at Pasong Santol just so his younger brother could be sworn in as leader of the Philippine Revolution. In the end, an attempted coup by Bonifacio at Naik was exposed and Aguinaldo was forced to decide what to do with the recalcitrant Supremo. He was in favor of banishment or imprisonment but two of Bonifacio's own subordinates - who had actually been involved at Naik - recommended death. Probably to whitewash their own part in the coup. Aguinaldo then sentenced Bonifacio to death.
This was not enough to save the Revolution, however. Aguinaldo was forced to retreat from Cavite province into the mountainous area in Bulacan in the central part of Luzon. In his fortress at Biak na Bato he fought the Spanish forces to a stand still in guerrilla war. The new Spanish governor General, Fernando Primo de Rivera realized that the rebellion would not be quashed by force of arms alone and proposed a truce. A peace pact was negotiated at Biak Na Bato which promised reforms in exchange for Aguinaldo and his coterie going into exile.
After this, the Americans got involved, the Spanish-American War began and so on and so forth.
Since the beginning the American government saw that it was in their best interests that Aguinaldo be vilified, that his part in the Philippine Revolution be minimized and reduced to nothing more than a bandit chieftain, just the leader of one insurrecto band among many. I can see now how this, coupled with their over-idealization of Rizal, was part of their plan of historical revisionism - something which Filipino historians have also called 'miseducation'. And so it continues today apparently, that American history views Aguinaldo as a villain, no less than Yamanutsa and Homma, a villain whose only crime was he stood up to the might of American arms. They see the factiousness of the nascent Philippine republic and see it as a war among warlords with NO CENTRAL GOVERNMENT rather than a shaky but complete revolutionary government whose generals were arrogant and difficult to control and yet still owed their authority to Aguinaldo and his government. I can see how important it is for America to believe that there was no central government because, as Eddie Izzard so eloquently explained, "No flag no country". If there is no 'flag' - no central government, no civil authority - then rebels are just bandits and their leaders nothing more than insurrectionists and bandit chieftains. Instead of seeing the Katipunan as the basis for a united revolutionary front which would pave the way for nationalist revolutionaries from Luzon to Mindanao recognizing Aguinaldo's authority - how else does one explain that upon Aguinaldo's return the Spanish forces throughout the islands were either put entirely on the defensive or soundly beaten save for those in Manila and the hold outs in Baler? - they choose to see the small pockets of Magdiwang hold outs, the Luna assasination (which as far as I can tell was a power play by Luna - who himself was not without his own faults - against Aguinaldo) or how this or that Igorot tribe refused to give Aguinaldo shelter in his retreat north as examples of how disunited the Philippines was. They cannot accept a united Philippines.
By putting all the blame on Aguinaldo, it also is convenient to make martyrs of those who Aguinaldo had to or was made responsible for executing - Bonifacio and Luna. But really, are those two really as guiltless as we imagine? Bonifacio is the poster boy of the masa and I am willing to acknowledge his drive, his ambition and his talent for organization made possible the Katipunan without which there would have been no revolution. Think about it - in the whole history of the Spanish Philippines NO revolt was ever successful because every revolt was localized. From Suleyman fighting for Maynilad against the steel clad conquistadors of Legaspi through Dagohoy's rebellion, to Silang and Palaris fighting in the North, every single revolt was quashed - and how? By the Spaniards taking a tribe that hated whatever tribe was rebelling and using them as mercenaries to put down their fellow natives. The Spanish army in the Philippines at the time of the Revolution of 1896 was not Castilian white, it was Indio brown! Native Regiments - Magallanes, Jolo, etc. and native paramilitaries - the Guardia Civil - were the backbone of Spanish forces in the islands until the rebellion grew out of hand following Aguinaldo's victories of 1896. It's only then that massive reinforcements of 'expeditionary rifle battalions' - the famed Cazadores' - were shipped in from Spain. What had changed? The Katipunan. The Katipunan, Bonifacio's brainchild, had changed the political and military game by providing a unifying organization within which the disaffected natives, whether they were Tagalogs in Manila, Ylocanos in the north or Visayans in Panay and Negros, could be made part of a single revolutionary organization that was poised to strike as a united front. All throughout late 1896, the rebellions would break out in various places in the archipelago and Spain would not be able to call in a tribe of mercenaries to quash it because all the tribes were united against her.
That is not to say that everything was all good. Power struggles and betrayals seem to be sadly endemic to a race as passionate as the Filipinos and in the Aguinaldo-Bonifacio and Aguinaldo-Luna power struggles it eventually got to the point where only one would survive. But does that make the 'victim' totally innocent? As explained above Bonifacio endangered the Philippine Revolutionary cause by creating political trouble rather than mediating a solution. Bonifacio was ultimately jealous of Aguinaldo's success and was undermining him - he was defeating his own revolution when Spain's best general was crashing in. Can anyone really fault Aguinaldo for wanting to stop this distracting and destructive sideshow from getting any worse? And how about Luna - yes he was instrumental in creating a 'modern professional army' but let's not forget that he and the other upper class mestizo illustrados had held aloof from the first phase of the Philippine Revolution. I suspect that Luna and many of his men had been Spanish loyalists but when Spain was beaten by America, they refused to accept it and sided with Aguinaldo if only to get back at America. Many of Luna's officers were ex-Spanish Army - Jose Torres Bugallon, who died fighting against the Americans in Manila for example. The native regiments were joining the Philippine Revolutionary Army, one even defected wholesale and there was a huge groundswell of popular support for Aguinaldo's revolutionaries all across the islands. The problem was, before the army had enough time to 'gel' as a national formation, they found themselves in a war with a much more powerful, professional army. Luna and many of the other generals, for example 'the boy general' Gregorio del Pilar, had egos the size of football fields and Luna's penchant for slapping soldiers (something which is deeply insulting in the Filipino machismo mindset) didn't make him any friends (any more than it did General Patton, come to think of it). Luna also botched the defense of a strategic river crossing when he personally took several battalions of troops and some artillery to 'punish' a recalcitrant rival, General Tomas Mascardo, at the time when the American forces were about to force a river crossing and what should have been a massacre for the Americans turned into a rout for the Filipinos. So it's not like Luna didn't bring a measure of guilt upon himself.
One might question in response how united the American colonies were - Washington himself had to surmount a coup attempt by Conway and Gates, Benedict Arnold, who might have been the Antonio Luna of the American Revolution defected to the British side after extremely shabby treatment by the American congress and the issue of Loyalists who fought on the British side as loyal subjects of the crown, including the legendary Robert Rogers, founder of the Rangers whose rules are still recited by American rangers today. All these issues are swept under the rug to present a picture - a myth if you will - of a united United States.
I am sorry but I cannot accept these very biased and subjective, not to mention politically inspired American myths as fact when my history tells me otherwise. They are no more factual than America taking half-naked bow and arrow armed members of indigenous tribes in the hinterlands, shipping them off to the St. Louis World's Fair and presenting them as examples of 'Filipinos'. They are part of American myth making designed to create an impression among the American people that they were right in supporting a war of aggression that was unjustified in view of their oft-trumpeted stand on freedom and independence and a blight upon their image as a beacon of freedom in the world. Imperialist conquest cannot be justified by lies - at least the British were clear that they were empire builders. I would ask that America simply renounce its pretentions to being 'freedom-loving' and supporting the cause of 'freedom' in the world and be clear about what it really desires. Manifest Destiny is just newspeak for imperialism.
Again, I think that in this case, I will have to agree to disagree with the 'American version' of things.