Mark Vallen: A NEW LOOK AT [DIEGO] RIVERA'S "GLORIOSA VICTORIA" @ Art For A Change

Gloria Allred, Ray McGovern et. al. hosted by Jeremy Scahill: DONALD TRUMPS 'STACHE INFECTION @ Intercepted Podcast

Dave Lindorff: A CRAZY THOUGHT: IS TRUMP GOING OFF THE RAILS OR POSSIBLY GETTING BACK ON TRACK? @ This Can't Be Happening!

Here’s a bizarre contrarian thought — one admittedly based on limited and dubious evidence and that flies in the face of a more than a year’s contrary evidence, and that is more along the lines of a desperate hope than reality, but what the hell. Bear with me:

Suppose for a moment that President Donald Trump, a narcissistic man of little intellect and even less intellectual rigor, but with a pretty acute sense of the nation’s political mood, has realized that he has been pushed by the so-called “permanent government,” over the past year, far away from his stated intention expressed during the 2016 campaign to re-set relations with Russia on more friendly terms, and away from his call to pull the US military back from its over-extended involvement in wars in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and eastern Europe, and to instead focus on rebuilding the US economy. Suppose that his recent behavior and decisions, which the corporate media for the most part are portraying as the desperate actions of a man abandoning his advisors and deciding to “go by his gut instincts instead,” are not that at all. Suppose instead that he has decided to fight back against the concerted effort over the past year by the Washington foreign policy and intelligence establishment to hem him in and prevent him from doing those things he had wanted to do.

Okay, I know it’s a stretch, but if all that were in fact the case, could the tossing out of another 60 Russian diplomats in support of Britain’s spurious and fact-free accusation of a Putin-ordered poisoning of a former Russian double agent and the naming of the horrifying Neocon warmonger John Bolton as his new and third national security advisor have been something different than they appear? Could they be not a sign that Trump wants to both ramp up a new Cold War against Russia and to launch wars against North Korea and Iran, but rather actions designed to shore up his conservative wing, while he actually returns to his original campaign-enunciated intention to de-escalate US foreign policy, and build a new era of cooperation and friendship with Russia?

The only real evidence for this wild speculation I’m offering here is the rambling campaign-like speech Trump gave on Thursday to assembled union workers in Ohio, in which he claimed that the US campaign in Syria — where over 2000 US special forces troops are leading a group of anti-Assad rebels ostensibly against ISIS forces, though also often against Syrian government troops — is “winning” and that those troops will “be home soon.” He also, in that speech, decried, as he did a month ago, the alleged $7 trillion the US has spent on military campaigns in the Middle East, from Libya to Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, which he correctly notes have won the US “nothing”…

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3850

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Hey readers! ThisCantBeHappening just recently won its sixth Project Censored Award in six years. That's an astonishing record and an honor we're proud of that is not equalled by too many alternative news publications. Unfortunately, the award comes with just a plaque, but no money.

That's where you come in. There are 1500 of you who regularly visit our site, and many more who come once in a while to get the news that they won't find anywhere else. We in the TCBH! collective have been putting out this site now for six years of all-volunteer labor. Think how much more we could do if you all put in just $5 or $10 a year to support our work, instead of reading it for free and moving on. Even if we got enough in donations to be able to take a day a week from our day jobs, think what we could accomplish if we can do as much as we do now out of our back pockets.

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Daneil Lazare: THE BOLTON APPOINTMENT: HOW SCARED SHOULD WE BE? @ Consortium News

Exclusive: Donald Trump’s appointment of war hawk John Bolton is a cause for concern, Daniel Lazare writes, but what is perhaps an even bigger concern is that both major U.S. political parties are dominated by war hawks.

Read more at Consortium News.

Joan Walsh: 6 MINUTES AND 20 SECONDS THAT COULD CHANGE THE WORLD @ The Nation

Linn Washington, Jr.: ADULTS ENGAGE IN IDIOCY: SCHOOL BOSSES ACROSS AMERICA GO "BUTTHEAD" ON ANTI-VIOLENCE STUDENT PROTESTS @ This Can't Be Happening!

March For Our Lives, DC rally, March 24, 2018/John Grant TCBH

Ten days before American student outrage over gun violence triggered multitudes across the U.S and around the world to join in “March For Our Lives” protests; many US high school educators and other adults provided students with strident lessons in assholelisity.

During the March 14, 2018 National School Walkout Day staged by students to show sympathy for the victims of the February high school massacre in Florida, administrators and adults employed threats and punishments to squash students from protesting against the lack of gun control measures across America – the nation with are more guns than people.

School administrators asserted reasons for their harsh response to Walkout participants that went from claims of maintenance of order inside schools to contentions that the Walkout was a political statement that had no place in schools.

A student at a high school outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania saw “hypocrisy of the highest order” in administrators cracking down on participants in the National Walkout. At the school this student attended, administrators slapped over 200 protesting students with detentions that required coming to school on Saturdays.

“They tell us in announcement everyday to be the change you want to see in the world. And then when we tried to do it, they told us we couldn’t,” Pennridge High School student Anna Sophie Tinneny told a reporter.

While many school officials nationwide did not oppose the determination of students to participate in the National School Walkout Day, the reactions of some school administrators and other adults to that protest oozed assholelisity.

The degree of one’s assholeness is a general definition of assholelisity. Widely used definitions for the slang term asshole reference someone who behaves in a stupid way, more mean-spirited than just annoying.

Assholelisity evident across America ranged from detentions to suspensions to the absurd.

Officials at a school in Kansas City, Missouri tagged Walkout participants’ truants and hit them with punishments.

A student in Hilliard, Ohio was slapped with a one-day suspension because he stayed in his classroom doing homework instead of participating in either the walkout or going to the area school administrators designated for students not participating in the walkout. That student said he wanted to stay neutral neither supporting what he saw as gun control in walking out nor disrespecting the Florida massacre victims by going to a school ordered study hall. Hilliard school officials said the student received a suspension for not following orders to leave the classroom that was locked with him inside…

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For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINGTON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3844


The TCBH! Collective


Hey readers! ThisCantBeHappening just won its sixth Project Censored Award in six years. That's an astonishing record and an honor we're proud of that is not equalled by too many alternative news publications. Unfortunately, the award comes with just a plaque, but no money.

That's where you come in. There are 1500 of you who regularly visit our site, and many more who come once in a while to get the news that they won't find anywhere else. We in the TCBH! collective have been putting out this site now for six years of all-volunteer labor. Think how much more we could do if you all put in just $5 or $10 a year to support our work, instead of reading it for free and moving on. Even if we got enough in donations to be able to take a day a week from our day jobs, think what we could accomplish if we can do as much as we do now out of our back pockets.

So please make as generous a donation as you can. And if you simply can't donate even a dollar, please use the letter icon at the bottom of each story to alert friends who don't know about the site yet.

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The ThisCantBeHappening! Collective

Lynn Parramore: NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE POPULIST GROUNDSWELL, U. S. ELECTIONS, FUTURE OF HUMANITY AND MORE @ The Institute for New Economic Thinking

Naomi Klein: THE BATTLE FOR PARADISE @ The Intercept

[Excerpt]   ... The official slogan of this new Puerto Rico? “Paradise Performs.” To underscore the point, conference attendees were invited to a “Cryptocurrency Honey Party,” with pollen-themed drinks and snacks, and a chance to hang out with Ingrid Suarez, Miss Teen Panama 2013 and upcoming contestant on “Caribbean’s Next Top Model.”

Mining cryptocurrencies is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, with the industry’s energy consumption rising by the week. Bitcoin alone currently consumes roughly the same amount of energy per year as Israel, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. The city of Plattsburgh, New York, recently adopted a temporary ban on cryptocurrency mining after local electricity rates suddenly soared. Many of the crypto companies currently relocating to Puerto Rico would presumably do their currency mining elsewhere. Still, the idea of turning an island that cannot keep the lights on for its own people into “the epicenter of this multitrillion-dollar market” rooted in the most wasteful possible use of energy is a bizarre one and is raising mounting concerns of “crypto-colonialism.”

In part to allay these fears, Puerto Crypto made a last-minute name change to the less imperial “Blockchain Unbound,” though it didn’t stick. Moreover, for some in the crypto crowd, the appeal of relocating to Puerto Rico goes well beyond Laboy’s version of paradise. Post-Maria, with land selling for even cheaper, public assets being auctioned at fire-sale prices, and billions in federal disaster funds flowing to contractors, some distinctly more grandiose dreams for the island have begun to surface. Now rather than simply shopping for mansions in resort communities, the Puertopians are looking to buy a piece of land large enough to start their very own city — complete with airport, yacht port, and passports, all run on virtual currencies.

Some call it “Sol,” others call it “Crypto Land,” and it even seems to have its own religion: an unruly hodgepodge of Ayn Randian wealth supremacy, philanthrocapitalist noblesse oblige, Burning Man pseudo-spirituality, and half-remembered scenes from watching “Avatar” while high. Brock Pierce, the child actor turned crypto-entrepreneur who serves as the movement’s de facto guru, is known for dropping New Age aphorisms like, “A billionaire is someone who has positively impacted the lives of a billion people.” Out on a real estate expedition scouting locations for Crypto Land, he reportedly crawled into the “bosom” of a Ceiba tree, a magnificent species sacred in many indigenous cultures, and “kissed an old man’s feet.”

But make no mistake — the true religion here is tax avoidance. As one young crypto-trader recently told his YouTube audience, before moving to Puerto Rico in time to make the tax-filing deadline, “I had to actually look it up on the map.” (He subsequently admitted to some “culture shock” upon learning that Puerto Ricans spoke Spanish, but instructed viewers thinking of following his lead to put a “Google translator app on your phone and you’re good to go.”)

The conviction that taxation is a form of theft is not a novel one among men who imagine themselves to be self-made. Still, there is something about rapidly becoming rich from money that you literally created — or “mined” — yourself that lends an especially large dose of self-righteousness to the decision to give nothing back. As Reeve Collins, a 42-year-old Puertopian, told the New York Times, “This is the first time in human history anyone other than kings or governments or gods can create their own money.” So who is the government to take any of it from them?

As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and surfer shorts, are a sort of slacker cousin to the Seasteaders, a movement of wealthy libertarians who have been plotting for years to escape the government’s grip by starting their own city-states on artificial islands. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the Seasteading manifesto states, “vote with your boat.”

For those harboring these Randian secessionist fantasies, Puerto Rico is a much lighter lift. When it comes to taxing and regulating the wealthy, its current government has surrendered with unmatched enthusiasm. And there’s no need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate floating platforms — as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to be transformed into a “crypto-island.” ... [End of Excerpt]

Read more at The Intercept.

Craig Murray: FIRST RECORDED SUCCESSFUL NOVICHOK SYNTHESIS WAS IN 2016 BY IRAN WITH OPCW COOPERATION

Ellen Brown: THE WAR ON THE POST OFFICE @ Truthdig

Alexander Marks/Wikimeida

[Excerpt] The U.S. banking establishment has been at war with the post office since at least 1910, when the Postal Savings Bank Act established a public savings alternative to a private banking system that had crashed the economy in the Bank Panic of 1907. The American Bankers Association was quick to respond, forming a Special Committee on Postal Savings Legislation to block any extension of the new service. According to a September 2017 article in The Journal of Social History titled “ ‘Banks of the People’: The Life and Death of the U.S. Postal Savings System,” the banking fraternity would maintain its enmity toward the government savings bank for the next 50 years.

As far back as the late 19th century, support for postal savings had united a nationwide coalition of workers and farmers who believed that government policy should prioritize their welfare over private business interests. Advocates noted that most of the civilized nations of the world maintained postal savings banks, providing depositors with a safe haven against repeated financial panics and bank failures. ... [End] 

Read more at Truthdig.

BREAKING: "GHOSTING IN AND GHOSTING OUT" - CAMPAIGN MEDDLING IN THE 21ST CENTURY (VIDEOS)

OPERATING IN THE "DARK ARTS OF DEMOCRACY" REVEALED

March 18, 2018 The Guardian interviews Chris Wylie, data scientist, and former employee Cambridge Analytica describes how the billionaire Mercer family and Steve Bannon influenced the 2016 US elections.





Another interview from the same date about the same subject revealing Wylie's reluctance after having helped the "alt-right" and other regrets from his work with Cambridge Analytica.





March 19, 2018, UK's Channel 4 releases an undercover video with Cambridge Analytica executives discussing their involvement in elections in Africa, Latin America, and the United States.

****************************************

Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin:
Look out for i360 and DataTrust
By Greg Palast

There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.

Clip from Palast's film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy


The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.

That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.

Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],

“They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.”

Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."

The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.

Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.

The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.

Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump’s chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged “aliens” on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate “foreign” names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one “Carlos Murguia” as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.

It would be a joke, except that Kobach’s “alien” hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter

Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential. 

— Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.


The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)

I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of the cost, difficulty and risk in digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.

Coming Soon Worldwide: The Real Wichita Shockwave from #Brownbackistan

Zack Helfand: HOW CHARLES KOCH TURNED WICHITA STATE INTO A COLLEGE BASKETBALL POWERHOUSE @ The New Yorker

Dave Lindorff: The Kids Are Rising: Learning the Power of Protest, Confrontation and Collective Action @ This Can't Be Happening!

A salute to the kids of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida!

After experiencing a terrifying attack on their school by a tragically unhinged former student armed with an assault-style rifle who killed 14 of their classmates and three teachers and seriously injured another 14, they didn’t retreat into fear and victimhood. Instead they are taking to the streets, taking to buses to the state capital in Tallahassee, and are using social media to organize a national youth campaign to get assault weapons and large-capacity magazines banned.

In refusing to be silenced by the National Rifle Assn. and political charlatans like Florida Sen. Marc Rubio or President Trump, or co-opted by Democratic politicians eager to use the issue of gun control to win points in next November’s congressional elections, these students and the tens of thousands of high school kids who have joined them across the country in states blue, red and purple, they have in one stroke revived the idea of mass political action.

These kids are not being polite. When someone like Sen. Rubio or Florida Gov. Rick Scott or the Florida state legislature comes up with an excuse like blaming the shooting on mental illness rather than the easy availability of mass-killing military-style weapons, they shout “BS!” When they’re told the answer is to arm teachers, they shout “BS!” When they’re accused of being “paid crisis actors” or manipulated, they shout “BS!” And when the Florida legislature insults them by ignoring their mass trip to the state capital to demand a hearing on gun legislation, they mass in front of the statehouse, shout “BS!” and demand to be heard.

The whole political battleground over gun ownership in the US has just undergone a tectonic shift as great as if a 9-point tremor had struck. For the first time in memory, huge corporations like Delta Airlines are abandoning their backing for the NRA, dropping lucrative and once popular marketing discount programs for NRA members on pain of being boycotted — a threat that has even gigantic companies like Apple and Amazon worried. No wonder the NRA had their latest version of Charlton Heston, Dana Loesh, put out a short ad in which, like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz, she poses in black with a giant hourglass, darkly warning the “lying media,” Hollywood “phonies,” unpatriotic athletes, politicians who “watch America burn” and late night hosts,” that “Your time is running out — the clock starts now.”

The gun lobby making this threat is suddenly running scared. Like that other top lobbying organization, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which was stood up and ignored by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016, their bluff has been called. Once cowed politicians are realizing they can stand up to such lobbies and still retain or maybe even gain support among voters, it’s their days that are numbered.

Will the student movement, on this once sacred issue of gun rights, succeed?…


For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to:www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3805

With independent news organizations under attack, it’s time to support TCBH!


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A RFK featured guest just made it to the Big League! He's come a long way since Koch.

1-Q&A: Joshua Zeitz
2-Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley
3-Artist Seth Eastman's Military Fort Paintingshttps://t.co/hzwm1L6T5b

— C-SPAN Now (@CSPANnow) March 5, 2018

“An FOI request has revealed 'anonymous' browser Tor is funded by US government agencies” — (via @BIAUS) https://t.co/vKxwgeKiaM

— Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) March 2, 2018

C-SPAN Surveillance Valley fan mail: "I believe you’re a bigger problem." Thanks! pic.twitter.com/iuk2IzViUQ

— Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) March 5, 2018