Shovels
https://twitter.com/corriec1010/status/1276876207360008193/photo/1
Why U.S. Wars in the Middle East Are Far from Over
Despite what appears to be a terminal decline of US influence over the Middle East, Washington has no intentions of gracefully abandoning its aspirations of regional hegemony.
Air strikes carried out against Syria by Washington’s Israeli proxies, a mysterious explosion near Tehran, and the current Iraqi Prime Minister’s decision to round up leaders of Iranian-backed militias who helped defeat the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) unfolded in quick succession in an apparent coordinated campaign aimed at Iran and its allies.
The Washington DC-based Al Monitor in an article titled, “Suspected Israeli airstrikes hit various locations in Syria,” would claim:
Suspected Israeli airstrikes hit Syrian military and Iran-backed militia sites Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. There are differing reports on the casualties.
This morning’s aerial assault targeted Syrian military sites outside the central city of Hama.
Days later, under orders by Iraq’s new prime minister – Mustafa Al-Kadhimi – Iraqi security forces raided the headquarters of an Iranian-backed militia detaining several leaders.
Reuters in its article, “Iraqi forces raid Iran-backed militia base, detain commanders: government sources,” would claim:
Iraqi security forces raided a headquarters belonging to a powerful Iran-backed militia in southern Baghdad late on Thursday, seized rockets and detained three commanders of the group, two Iraqi government officials said.
The officials said the militia group targeted was the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah, which U.S. officials have accused of firing rockets at bases hosting U.S. troops and other facilities in Iraq.
Iraq has been under significant pressure from the US to roll back growing ties with Iran and still hosts thousands of US troops illegally occupying its territory as well as a myriad of militant groups the US and its regional allies back either openly or covertly including Al Qaeda and ISIS itself.
More recently, a massive explosion took place just southeast of Iran’s capital, Tehran. While Iranian officials claim it was an accident at a civilian gas storage facility, pro-war elements across the West have insisted it was the result of an attack on a military complex located in the region.
Should it turn out to be an attack – US proxies – either Israel or US-backed terrorists operating inside Iran are most likely responsible representing a strategy laid out by US policymakers as early as 2009 in their own papers – particularly and explicitly in the Brookings Institution’s 2009 paper, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF) under chapters including, “Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” and “Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority And Opposition Groups.”
The timing of the explosion, following two highly provocative moves made against Iran and its allies in the region suggest the US is attempting to escalate tensions with Iran to save its fading influence in the Middle East.
New Iraqi Prime Minister’s Checkered Past
Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi took office in May 2020.
While he has warned about deepening relations with Iran he has concurrently stated the importance of US backing – despite the US having illegally invaded, destroyed, and since occupied Iraq starting in 2003.
His past – including his exile in London and his US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) linked Iraq Memory Foundation as well as his regular contributions to the above mentioned Washington DC-based Al Monitor call into serious question his ability to protect Iraq’s sovereignty as well as Iraq’s best interests.
On the Iraq Memory Foundation’s own website under “About,” it admits its genesis as a spin-off of a US NED funded Harvard-based front called the Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP). The website claims (emphasis added):
The Memory Foundation is an outgrowth of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP), founded by Kanan Makiya at the Center of Middle East Studies at Harvard University in 1992. In 1993, the IRDP developed a plan to create an archive that would organize and preserve the documents already in its possession for more long-term scholarly purposes. Utilizing a 1993 grant from the Bradley Foundation, followed by a 1994 bridging grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, the IRDP began its work processing the small collection of documents in Makiya’s personal possession and transcribing interviews conducted with Iraqi refugees. The IRDP continued to receive and process small datasets over the next ten years.
Regarding Al-Kadhimi himself, the website notes that he previously worked as:
https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/06/27/why-u-s-wars-in-the-middle-east-are-far-from-over/
Neocons activity
The Senate Is Broken and Senator Chris Coons Is On Board to End the Filibuster
The Senate Is Broken and Senator Chris Coons Is On Board to End the Filibuster
https://pjmedia.com/election/stacey-lennox/2020/06/27/the-senate-is-broken-and-senator-chris-coons-is-on-board-to-end-the-filibuster-n583130
Amazon Acquires Zoox: What Could Its Plan Be For The Autonomous Driving Start-Up?
After months of rumors, Amazon on Friday announced its purchase of Zoox, a San Francisco-based autonomous driving start-up. Specifics about the deal have yet to be disclosed but the Financial Times reported that the deal is worth over $1.2 billion, which would be among Amazon's biggest deal.
Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce juggernaut only previously paid more than $1 billion to acquire Whole Foods, which they paid $13.7 billion in 2017.
“Like Amazon, Zoox is passionate about innovation and about its customers, and we’re excited to help the talented Zoox team to bring their vision to reality in the years ahead,” Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO of global consumer, said.
While once considered to be at the forefront of self-driving car technology, Zoox has suffered setbacks over its six-year lifespan due to a high turnover rate within its management. The company had been actively seeking a buyer for several months. The possible $1.2 billion price tag is a considerable drop from the $3.2 billion it had been valued at two years ago.
“This acquisition solidifies Zoox's impact on the autonomous driving industry,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said in a statement. “We have made great strides with our purpose-built approach to safe, autonomous mobility, and our exceptionally talented team working every day to realize that vision. We now have an even greater opportunity to realize a fully autonomous future.”
While it is unknown at this time what Amazon intends to use Zoox’s technology for, speculation has focused on its potential implementation in its planned fleet of all-electric delivery vans.
Amazon and several other companies came together in 2019 to invest $700 million in Detroit start-up Rivian, which is now working on delivering the first electric vehicles for Amazon in 2021, with up to 100,000 hoped for by 2024.
https://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-acquires-zoox-what-could-its-plan-be-autonomous-driving-start-3001754
Who are the prosecutors for Benjamin Netanyahu's bribery trial?
The prosecutors expected to run Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial are lesser known but potentially as powerful.
The prosecutors expected to run Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial are not Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit and former state attorney Shai Nitzan. They are lesser known but potentially as powerful Deputy State Attorney Liat Ben Ari, Tel Aviv Economic Crimes Division Deputy Chief Yonatan Tadmor and Securities Crimes Chief Yehudit Tirosh.
Ben Ari is leading the team and argued on behalf of the prosecution at the opening of Netanyahu’s trial on May 24.
In court, she speaks with an obvious sense of confidence and seniority. This is something she has earned as the lead prosecutor against former prime minister Ehud Olmert during the Holyland trial in the Tel Aviv District Court.
At the same time, she is not nearly as aggressive and confrontational as former prosecutor Uri Korb, who prosecuted Olmert in the separate Jerusalem corruption trial.
Tadmor is a bit more aggressive when it comes to confronting witnesses. It is possible that he may handle some key cross-examinations even if Ben Ari gives the opening statement and makes the main strategic decisions.
In May 2017, Ben Ari made waves at an Israel Bar Association event when she gave the first hint that Netanyahu could be indicted in Case 1000, “the Illegal Gifts Affair,” even if there was no “quid pro quo,” meaning he did not give anything back directly in return.
More specifically, she said, "there is no such thing as gifts that are too small" to criminally investigate.
“When we are referring to presents worth hundreds of thousands of shekels,” she continued, “it is hard for me to accept that we are talking solely about presents between friends… I know that about myself and my friends, none of us receive presents of that value.”
Her statement was especially significant because it came around eight months before the police recommended indicting Netanyahu.
It was also long before the prime minister was even a suspect in Case 4000, “the Bezeq-Walla Affair” – the case which tipped Mandelblit over into being ready to confront Netanyahu.
From the beginning, this statement (despite Justice Ministry spokespeople attempts to qualify it) and any leaked reports made it clear that Ben Ari was taking a harsher stance on Netanyahu and on the question of bribery than the attorney general.
Even in the final indictment, Mandelblit rejected Ben Ari’s recommendation to indict Netanyahu for bribery in all three cases. Instead, he settled for the lesser charges of fraud and breach of trust in Cases 1000 and 2000, the latter which is known as the “Yediot Ahronot-Yisrael Hayom Affair.”
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/who-are-the-prosecutors-for-benjamin-netanyahus-bribery-trial-632995
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In growing boycott, Coca-Cola, Hershey, Honda pledge to hit pause on Facebook advertising==
Corporations are protesting alleged flaws in the company's content moderation policies.
Coca-Cola, Hershey and Honda have agreed to roll back advertising on Facebook through July, part of a coordinated campaign to force the tech giant to enact stricter content-moderation policies on its platform.
The "Stop Hate for Profit" campaign argues that Facebook has "turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression," "allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice in America," partnered with conservative news outlets with "records of working with known white nationalists," and in general promoted "hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence."
Dozens of businesses have also agreed to the boycott including the Mozilla, North Face, REI and Verizon.
The boycott, a project of the Anti-Defamation League, offers several tips it argues will help Facebook "provide more support to people who are targets of racism, antisemitism and hate."
Among them: "Create internal mechanisms (for every media format on every Facebook platform) that automatically remove all ads from content labeled as misinformation or hate," the creation of "an internal mechanism to automatically flag content in private groups associated with extremist ideologies," and the development of "a separate moderation pipeline for users who express that they have been targeted because of specific identity characteristics such as race or religion."
https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/growing-boycott-coca-cola-hershey-honda-join-boycott-facebook-advertising
https://twitter.com/ODNIgov/status/1277079117234651141
Face Mask Victims Getting Sick - Fauci Needs Higher Mortality Rate
OSHA SAYS FACE MASKS THAT REDUCE OXYGEN BELOW 19.5% ARE DANGEROUS – Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — “Paragraph (d)(2)(iii) of the Respiratory Protection Standard considers any atmosphere with an oxygen level below 19.5 percent to be oxygen-deficient and immediately dangerous to life or health.”
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2007-04-02-0
“Storm Warning”
“The USA has gone so crazy in these months of the coronavirus freak-out that an orgy of looting, arson, and murder, on top of epic job loss and business failure, propelled the stock markets up-up-and-away back to near-record highs. Makes sense, right? The market came down a bit towards the end of the week, but don’t worry. The Fed will make another announcement that it’s going to do something or other and presto, the market will be off to the races again.
In the background of these weeks of protests, riots, looting, and arson is the disintegrating economy, which signifies that pretty much everybody in this land will not be able to keep on keeping on in the ways we’re used to.
Reduced Living Standards: Everybody will have a harder time making a living. Everybody will endure shocking losses in wealth, status, and comfort. And, sadly, everybody will be too perplexed and bamboozled by the rush of events to understand why. The short version of that story is we’ve overshot our resources, especially the basic energy resources that all other activities require. This mystifies the public, too, but you can boil it down to the cost of getting oil out of the ground being too high for customers and not high enough for the oil producers to cover their costs – a quandary.
One result has been the rapid bankruptcy of the shale oil industry. Another is the incremental impoverishment of what used to be America’s broad middle-class – a malady that has, just for now, fenced off the denizens of Wall Street, the notorious One Percent (of the population), who still luxuriate in zooming share prices and dividends while everybody else sucks wind in a ditch with-or-without the added affliction of Covid-19.
The perplexed and bamboozled include the entire leadership nucleus of the land, who seem starkly unable to act coherently in the tightening vortex of crisis.
Piling on More Debt: While Mr. Trump seems to dimly apprehend the urgent need for economic restructuring, he’s able to express it only in messages that sound like a 1961 Frigidaire commercial, with overtones of Marvel Comics superhero grandiosity. The president may understand that a country can’t consume stuff without producing stuff, but he doesn’t get that it’s too late to bring back all that activity at the scale we used to run it when he was a young man in the 1960s.
His answer to the call of restructuring – what the Soviets called perestroika before they fell apart – is to pile on more debt, that is, borrow more from the future to pay for hamburgers today. That dovetails neatly with the needs of the financial community, led by the hapless “Jay” Powell at the Federal Reserve, who is on a mission to destroy the U.S. dollar in order to save the banking system and its auxiliaries in the stock markets.
He literally doesn’t know what to do – except “print” more dollars to support share prices, a symbolic talisman of theoretical economics that has less and less to do with what people actually do on-the-ground in the hours when they’re not sleeping. It looks unlikely that the Fed will rescue either Wall Street or Main Street. The longer he props up the former at the expense of the latter, the more certain it is that it will provoke insurrection that goes well beyond the current hostilities.
http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2020/06/storm-warning_27.html