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Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Crashing Down

Observing Reality,

It turns out that among the Saudi "interrogation team" that flew in to interrogate Jamal Khashoggi there was a Medical Professor in forensic pathology, and 3 close associates of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. That doesn't sound like rogue-interrogators-gone-wild to me. It sounds like a murder and cover-up premeditated at the highest level. That will cost more to ignore, lots more...

Oh ... "They cut him up while he was still alive" ... Oh ...  
Dr. Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, who was identified by the Times and other media outlets as an "autopsy expert" whose presence cuts against Saudis' suggestions that the killing wasn't premeditated, started cutting Khashoggi's body into pieces while the journalist was unconscious, but still breathing. 
  After Khashoggi had been knocked unconscious (never to awaken again), al-Tubaigy put on his headphones and started the grim process of dismembering the body with a bone saw...
"When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too," Tubaigy was recorded as sayin​g...
The United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has called for the lifting of diplomatic immunity for any facilities and persons tied to the killing, which means that, even if Saudi Arabia gives its nominal "rogue operatives" a pass, extradition requests from Turkey or another UN member would greatly increase their chances of arrest.

Those on the list handed over to MBS by Kushner were all subjects of NSA and CIA communications intercepts of phone calls, video conferences, and emails. Kushner is said to have had a phone conversation with MBS a day before Khashoggi was murdered.  
​(That would have been October 1, the day Kashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and asked for his divorce papers, and was told to return the next day.)​
Reports from U.S. intelligence sources report that the NSA had intercepted high-level communications between the Saudi government in Riyadh and the Saudi consulate-general in Istanbul indicating that there was a plot afoot to either kidnap Khashoggi and fly him back to Riyadh or murder him on the spot.  

Turkey changes the name of the street that will host the new US Embassy to "Malcolm-X." Malcolm-X was a black Muslim political activist, who is almost universally believed to have been assassinated by the US Government, probably under FBI auspices. "We know who you are, America." Thanks Eleni.

Pepe Escobar looks at the chaotic power struggles across the globe, heading into the G-20 summit next month. He does a good and detailed job, without losing the big picture of relationships. There is no summation to excerpt. Each paragraph is valuable. It's concise.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism looks at how not to get a "Nobel Prize in Economics" for evaluation of the relationships between business and environmental degradation. Specifically; do not do the rigorous science that proves what bankers don't want to hear. What will win the prize is a little softball work with wide margins of error that endorses a very modest carbon tax and waiting to see what happens after we die. (Wake up, yourself!)
The Nordhaus/Romer combo is so artificial and unconvincing it’s hard to avoid the impression that the prize not given to Weitzman is as important as the one given to Nordhaus.  This is a clear political statement about how to deal with climate change and how not to deal with it.  The Riksbank has spoken: it wants a gradual approach to carbon, one that makes as few economic demands as possible.  

​Here is another interesting take on how capitalism can't stop global warming. Recently I have seen that Baby-Boomers can't be trusted with decisions, because we will all die before things get really bad, though I think they will be really bad before 10 years pass, myself.
The think is that climate change is only one part, the least threatening part, of the global human overgrowth and environmental devastation, which is now finally about to hit the economy really hard. That's why all of the urgency in the centers of global power. Reset is about to happen. It can't be pulled out like 2008. Everything that can be done is being done to forestall the next, final collapse of the current world order.
Fascism is capitalism with a gun and $1 billion per vote.​ I don't agree that fascists see this as a "solution", but billions of people dying is ok for them.
My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.​..
 Things like climate change and inequality and fascism are not really “problems” — they are emergent processes, which join up, in great tendrils of ruin, each piling on the next, which result from decades of neglect, inaction, folly, blindness. We did not plant the seeds, or tend to our societies, economies, democracies, or planet carefully enough — and now we are harvesting bitter ruin instead.

North and South Korea continue to work to decrease the risks of Korean War-II by demilitarizing the DMZ, and getting rail and road connections built.

Taking Initiative

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