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Tuesday 17 March 2015

Divisions emerge between Britain and US over China bank


© Takaki Yajima/Reuters

China's Finance Minister Lou Jiwei (L) gives a speech with the guests of the signing ceremony of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing, October 24, 2014.



A significant rift has opened up between the UK and the US following the decision by the Cameron government last week to defy the wishes of the Obama administration and become a founding member of the $50 billion China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In a sharp rebuke, an unnamed White House official told the the British government had been engaged in a "constant accommodation" of China.


The decision came after the US earlier had applied great pressure to its allies in the region—South Korea, Japan and Australia—not to become members, out of concern the bank would undermine the influence of the US-dominated World Bank and cut across US plans for the diplomatic and military encirclement of China under the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia."


Last October, intense lobbying by the Obama administration saw the Australian Liberal government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott overturn a previous decision to take part in the establishment of the AIIB.


Secretary of State John Kerry took up the issue with Abbott during a meeting in Indonesia, and his efforts were followed by a telephone call by Obama to Abbott as well as an intervention by US treasury secretary Jack Lew.


Following the pressure from this "troika", foreign minister Julie Bishop secured the overturn of the previous decision through the national security committee of the Australian government.


While the official reason given for US opposition is that the new bank will not meet "acceptable" investment standards, the essential motivation was laid out by Bishop, who expressed concerns that funding from the bank would be used to finance infrastructure projects such as airports and upgraded naval ports that would enhance China's military capacities in the region, citing possible projects in Papua New Guinea.


The attitude of the US to China-funded projects has been graphically demonstrated in strategically important Sri Lanka. The US-backed Sirisena government, which came to power through the carefully organised American regime change operation in January, is now reviewing Chinese funding for the Colombo-based port city project.


Aware of the US position and that any prior public announcement would bring intense US pressure, the Cameron government clearly decided to provide minimal information to the Obama administration of its plans.


According to the Financial Times, a "senior administration official" told it the British decision had been taken after "virtually no consultation with the US" and at a time when the G7 group of major economic powers had been discussing their approach to the bank.


"We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage a rising power", the US official said.




Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, made no apology for the manner of the decision, however. Britain had not acted out of the blue, he said, and there had been a month of intense discussions in the G7, including with Jack Lew.

He said Britain should be present at the start of the bank, ensuring that it acted in a transparent way in filling an important gap in the provision of infrastructure in Asia.


"Joining the AIIB at the founding stage will create an unrivalled opportunity for the UK and Asia to invest and grow together," he said, before delivering another blow to the US by noting that he expected other western governments that had been making positive noises about the bank to become involved.


That prediction was not long in being fulfilled with a report in today's that Abbott is now "seized by the regional potential of the bank" and is considering making an announcement that Australia will join, possibly later this week.


Pointing to the motivations for the British government decision, the noted: "It has been keen to establish the City of London as a platform for overseas business in the Chinese currency as it starts to play a bigger role in the global economy."


Notwithstanding the supposed "special relationship" between Britain and the US, the intense American opposition was palpable. The described the two countries as being at "loggerheads" over the investment bank, while pointed to "US anger" in the headline of its article on the decision.


In an editorial comment said it was an "exaggeration to talk of the pace of reform at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund," because there had been almost none, and it was "no surprise" that China was promoting a solution to the shortage of infrastructure capital in Asia.


The US, it said, "cannot keep on shoring up an obsolete economic order in Asia," and China was not withdrawing from the Washington institutions but was supplementing them. "Unlike certain other aspects of China's policy, this development is properly seen in the context of the 'peaceful rise' which China's leaders have proclaimed. This is a case for accommodation, not confrontation."


However, so far as the US is concerned, the advance of China's economic influence in the region and the enhancement of its military and strategic capacities cannot be separated. They are both part of a growing threat to the US position.


The same attitude is reflected in the US drive to secure agreement on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. Together with the effort to secure a similar agreement with Europe, the goal of the TPP has been described as an attempt by the US to write the rules for trade and finance in the 21st century.


An article by China correspondent John Garnaut, published last Wednesday, cited Australian trade minister Andrew Robb as saying that conclusion of the deal would "mark a major strategic win for the United States, as it wrestles with China for regional leadership."


Robb said the TPP was "very important" for the Obama administration "in terms of being a symbol of its pivot to Asia. It has that strategic importance attached to it," he said.


Other commentators cited by Garnaut made it clear that more than symbolism was involved.


According to Ely Ratner, a deputy director at the Center for a New American Security, "Failure of the TPP would create a vacuum to be filled by China in ways that would almost assuredly run counter to...the US visions of an open an inclusive regional order in Asia." In this context, "open and exclusive" means a trade and financial system in which US interests are able to dominate.


Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Information Foundation, warned that failure of the TPP would mean "China, with its focus on mercantilism and restricted freedom of information, will soon be dictating the terms of trade in the world's fastest-growing economic sector."


However, other major powers are coming to question whether their economic interests in the region are best served by aligning themselves with the US push to maintain its economic and military position, under conditions where they fear losing lucrative opportunities. These concerns are certainly behind the British decision.


But this poses a dilemma: how far do they go in pursuing those interests without jeopardising the strategic relationship with the US as the dominant military power?


Some of these issues were canvassed in a editorial on Saturday. After noting that in the "special relationship" between Britain and the US it was "unusual for one side to rebuke the other publicly", it said American sensitivity to the creation of banks such as the AIIB was "understandable."


However, while the US may want to stop the growth of such bodies, "its lacklustre stewardship of the Washington-based institutions is one of the reasons rivals are proliferating." The influence of the World Bank had declined because of restrictions on lending to poorer countries, and the US had failed to secure enhanced voting rights for rising powers such as China in the International Monetary Fund.


The editorial pointed to claims of "opportunism" in the British decision with "Osborne pitching for the City of London in its attempt to capture a portion of the renminbi trade and other Beijing goodies."


At the same time, it pointed to strategic considerations, saying that Britain's move would "encourage China to continue pursuing its strategic goals through a policy of divide-and-rule and that it would have been preferable had the G7 adopted a united strategy towards the AIIB rather than seeing a nation break way in its own interests."


Pointing to longer-term issues, it said the decision should prompt some "hard thinking" about the role Britain would play in the world. For most of the post-war period, Britain had been able to "punch above its weight" because it was a staunch ally of the US, but now that relationship was under strain.


It concluded that stewardship of the global financial system was up to the United States. However, Washington seemed "flatly opposed to anything which raised China's profile and threatens the status of the dollar." A policy of "keeping China at bay at all costs" would only encourage Beijing to build its own parallel system from scratch.


Radiation in Japanese Green Tea


Four years after the multiple explosions and melt-downs at Fukushima, it seems the scary stories have only just begun to surface.

Given that Japan's authoritarian regime of Shinzo Abe has cracked down on the information flow from Fukushima with a repressive state secrets act, we cannot know for certain what's happening at the site.


According to the New York Times, a sample of powdered tea imported from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba, just southeast of Tokyo, contained traces of radioactive cesium 137.


We do know that 300 tons of radioactive water have been pouring into the Pacific every day. And that spent fuel rods are littered around the site. Tokyo Electric power may or may not have brought down all the fuel rods from Unit Four, but many hundreds almost certainly remain suspended in the air over Units One, Two and Three.


We also know that Abe is pushing refugees to move back into the Fukushima region. Thyroid damage rates—including cancer—have skyrocketed among children in the region. Radiation "hot spots" have been found as far away as Tokyo. According to scientific sources, more than 30 times as much radioactive Cesium was released at Fukushima as was created at the bombing of Hiroshima.


Some of those isotopes turned up in at least 15 tuna caught off the coast of California. But soon after Fukushima, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration stopped testing Pacific fish for radiation. The FDA has never fully explained why.


But now a small amount of Fukushima's radiation has turned up in green tea shipped from Japan to Hong Kong. This is a terrifying development, casting doubt on all food being exported from the region.


According to the New York Times:



"A sample of powdered tea imported from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba, just southeast of Tokyo, contained traces of radioactive cesium 137, the Hong Kong government announced late Thursday evening, but they were far below the legal maximum level.


The discovery was not the first of its kind. The government's Center for Food Safety found three samples of vegetables from Japan with "unsatisfactory" levels of radioactive contaminants in March 2011, the month that nuclear reactors in Fukushima, northeast of Tokyo, suffered partial meltdowns following a powerful earthquake and tsunami."



Should every meal you are served now be accompanied with a radiation monitor?

The Middle East oil/nuclear puzzle

Oil

© Reuters/Ali Jarekji



US Secretary of State John Kerry may be starting to enjoy the brinkmanship, as he says it's "unclear" whether the US and Iran would reach a political framework nuclear deal before the end of this month.

Loud applause may be heard in corridors ranging from Tel Aviv to Riyadh.


As negotiations resume in Lausanne, the fact is a potential nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (US, UK, France, BRICS members Russia and China, and Germany) is bound to open the possibility of more Iranian oil exports - thus leading oil prices to fall even further. As of early this week, Brent crude was trading at $54.26 a barrel.


Assuming the US and the EU nations that are part of P5+1 really agree to implement the suspension of UN sanctions by the summer (Russia and China already agree), not only will Iran be exporting more energy - that should take a few months - but also OPEC as a whole will be increasing its oversupply.


The EU badly wants to buy loads of Iranian energy - and invest in Iranian energy infrastructure. Beijing, a key yet discreet member of the P5+1, is also watching these developments very carefully.


Whatever happens, for China this is a win-win situation, as Beijing keeps actively building up its strategic petroleum reserves profiting from low prices. And even as oil prices also remain under pressure from the strong US dollar - which makes oil way more expensive if you are paying with a different currency - that's certainly no problem for China, with its mammoth US dollar reserves.


The oil price war essentially unleashed by Saudi Arabia has hit Iran with a bang. The country may be down, but not out. There were no good options for Tehran except to try to keep its market share by offering the same discounts - especially to Asia - the Saudis are offering.


Tehran has been under a tsunami of nasty Western sanctions for years, which limit its ability to export oil and increase production. It's extremely difficult for the Iranian governments to reduce the gap of the expected revenue based on previous high oil prices.


Now the name of the game among major oil producers is to keep market share at all costs. Iran can't escape it - as it needs to keep in check at all times the fear of oversupply and its desire to increase production. Some oil producing countries are definitely keeping upcoming oil supplies out of the market. The result is Iran will have serious trouble going for more production and more exports while trying to regain its pre-sanctions market share.


Wanna buy a Middle East condo?


Guard

© Reuters/Azad Lashkari



While a sort of undeclared "oil war" is still far from reaching an endgame, the nuclear front promises some eye-popping breakthroughs.

Powerful - if sometimes conflicting - 'Empire of Chaos' factions in Washington are actively entertaining the dream of transferring US military assets from the Middle East to Europe to keep ratcheting up the pressure on Russia, under the pretext of the "aggression" on Ukraine.


That might happen only after "control" of the Middle East is somewhat shared between Turkey, Iran, and to a much lesser extent, the House of Saud. For the notoriously wobbly "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" Obama administration's foreign policy, this development would be a key rationale behind the push for a successful P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran to be reached this summer.


Iran has already cultivated - and blossomed - its own sphere of influence. It's the Turkey-Saudi case that is way more complicated.


As much as Ankara is well aware of the fierce catfight for regional power between Tehran and Riyadh, it tries to maintain good relations with both.


Crucially it's in Syria that Ankara and Riyadh are almost on the same "Assad must go" page. Almost - because in fact a pro-Muslim Brotherhood Turkey-Qatar alliance has found itself for four years in direct competition with a Salafi-boosting House of Saud.


Anyway, when Turkey's President, also known as 'Sultan' Erdogan, visited the new Saudi King Salman in early March, they reached an understanding; they will both turbo-charge "support" - weaponized and otherwise - for the Syrian opposition. Problem is there is no credible Syrian opposition; virtually everyone that knows how to fight has migrated to the fake Caliphate of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.


What this means in a nutshell is once again a Sunni against Shi'ite set up; a classic Divide and Rule gambit that is the perennial House of Saud priority.


The 'Empire of Chaos', in theory, should but be pleased. But it's not. The Obama administration's objective - on the record - is


But that may also change in a heartbeat. New Pentagon supremo Ashton Carter has just admitted, But that would also


No wonder Damascus is weary, and will wait for US "actions" before any possible negotiation with Washington. One day Kerry says talks with Damascus are necessary to end the Syrian civil war. The next day he repeats, "Assad must go."


Osama's pal plays paranoia


As for a no-fly zone over northern Syria - heavily pushed by Erdogan, and a wet dream of neo-cons in Washington - it won't fly. One extra reason for Ankara to stay away from this new Saudi anti-Iran push.


To complicate things further, power within the House of Saud remains diffused. Both the CIA and BND - German intelligence - agree, and there have been constant rumblings in Washington that the House of Saud eventually should go.


The House of Saud still has not understood that Syria is not the main "threat" against them. They are freaking out about their border with Iraq - as well as their borders with Yemen and Bahrain. On top of it they picked a fight with Russia via the oil price war. The Saudis say they are pumping only 9.5 million barrels of oil a day out of their 12.5 million barrels a day; Moscow is essentially saying they are pumping their entire capacity.


If the oil price war delights the Russia-demonizing 'Masters of the Universe', they are at the same time deeply enraged because it is decimating the US shale oil "revolution". What's left for masses of unemployed US workers? Find a job in Saudi Arabia. Still one more reason for the 'Masters of the Universe' to dump the House of Saud anytime they feel like it.


Predictably, House of Saud paranoia remains the norm. Former Saudi intelligence (and former great pal of Osama bin Laden), Prince Turki, is on overdrive, charging Iran with being ; insisting "the enemy" is both Assad and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh; and last but not least unequivocally blasting any possible nuclear deal with Iran.


What's even more worrisome is that King Salman brought Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Riyadh - rushing to meet him at the airport - to confirm a key strategic, secret nuclear agreement before any Iran/P5+1 deal is clinched. The bottom line: the House of Saud does not trust the American nuclear umbrella anymore. They are making their own nuclear power play with the help of nuclear power Pakistan. The connection does exist, but remains extremely mysterious.


No need to outline the upcoming maze of ominous consequences. Demented nuclear Wahhabis, anyone?


Rage of the Elites: America's cultural, political elite and their overseas groupies


A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution—a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong—was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

It so happened that my aunt, then a sensitive and somewhat dreamy young woman, had stubbornly and haplessly clung to certain musical tastes which at that time in China came to be regarded as politically incorrect, being said, in the trendy ideological jargon of that time, to reflect "decadent bourgeois revisionist aesthetics." To wit, my aunt had kept in her record collection a rendition of "The Urals Mountain-Ash" (Уральская Рябинушка), a Russian folk song in which a young girl meets two nice boys under a mountain-ash tree and must choose between them, performed by the National Choir of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was an old-style LP spinning at 78 RPM. It had a red emblem in the middle emblazoned with "CCCP."


One of my aunt's roommates, who probably had always resented her for one reason or another, found out about it and reported her to the authorities. For this rather serious infraction, student members of the Red Guard made my aunt publicly smash her beloved record, then kneel upon the fragments and recite an apology to Chairman Mao while fellow-students threw trash at her face shouting "Down with Soviet revisionists!" This generation of Chinese young people, who once donned Red Guard uniforms, beat people up around the country and smashed various cultural artifacts, is now mostly living on government pensions or earning meagre profits from home businesses, but some have prospered and can be found among the upper crust of contemporary China's business, cultural, and political elites.


This episode came to my mind when in the summer of 2014 I came upon video clips of Ukrainian student activists storming university classrooms in mid-lecture and ordering everyone to stand up and sing the Ukrainian national anthem, then forcing the professor to apologize for the lecture not being adequately patriotic. There were also ghastly spectacles of "Enemies of the People" (guilty only of having served under the overthrown president Yanukovich) being paraded around in trash bins. In Ukrainian schools, children were made to jump up and down, and told that "Whoever doesn't jump is a Moscal" (a derogatory term for "Russian").


Add to this the destruction of public monuments to World War II and the ridiculous rewriting of history (turns out that, during World War II, Germany liberated Ukraine, but then Russia invaded and occupied Germany!) and a complete picture emerges: the Ukrainian Maidan movement is one of a species of "cultural revolution." The new, fashionable term being thrown around is "civilizational pivot," but it and the old "cultural revolution" can be understood as approximate synonyms, sharing the need for frenzied spectacles of mass humiliation and destruction.


In 1971 the Vietnam War began to draw toward an agonizing and, from the American government's point of view, highly unfulfilling conclusion. That same year Dr. Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing, flying in from a military airport in Pakistan. This was followed by the joint Nixon-Kissinger summit in 1972, which culminated in Nixon's historic handshake with Mao Zedong, completing China's civilizational pivot away from the USSR and toward the west. In hindsight, this dramatic opening could only be properly characterized as a swift dagger-in-the-back against the USSR, in both geopolitical and ideological senses. The decrepitating, inflexible body of the USSR never recovered from this stab wound, leading to its final collapse, from a multitude of internal and external causes, two decades later.


In late February, 2014, just as Ukraine was attempting its civilizational pivot away from Russia and toward the west, I interviewed a senior captain of the Right Sector, a radical Ukrainian nationalist group with neo-Nazi stylings. The burly man looked aggressive in his paramilitary garb, and arrived with bodyguards, but turned out to be rather amiable. He was particularly glad to see me because I look Chinese. He spoke Russian, reluctantly, after announcing that he was ashamed of it. (This is typical; Ukrainians use Ukrainian to spout nationalist nonsense, but when they need to make sense they lapse into Russian.) He said that he had served in the Red Army and had been stationed in the Far East, on the Chinese border. He expressed hope that China would soon do something big in Siberia.


That was my only meeting with the man from the Right Sector. It's safe to guess that the recent Russian-Chinese embrace has dashed his hopes concerning Siberia. The Chinese government's unambiguous expressions of solidarity with Russia starting in March of 2014 have been noted by all. But he would have been far less disconcerted, and the many international supporters of Russia far more discouraged, had they been able to read the comments on various popular Chinese social sites, which abounded with slogans such as "Crimea to Putin, Siberia to China!" or "Putler will hang on lamppost!" or "Glory to Ukraine! China sides with the Civilized World!"


To explain what is behind this phenomenon, which affects certain Chinese internet users, young and old, we need to introduce a Chinese neologism: "Gong Zhi" (公知). The literal meaning of the term is "public intellectual," but it is used sarcastically and sometimes even derogatorily. It denotes a cute, successful, popular, trendy individual, who is often involved in the mass media, and who, for various reasons, has millions of virtual followers via Tweeter and various social networking sites. Such individuals make daily, sometimes hourly, witty and biting public remarks on a vast range of social and political subjects, and, to add human interest, on their own kaleidoscopic emotional states.


In a Russian/Ukrainian setting, more or less analogous figures are to be found in the public personae of Ksenya Sobchak, Irina Khakamada, Masha Gessen, Lesha Navalny, and the late Boris Nemtsov. The base audience for such people consists of what in Russia and the Ukraine came to be known as the "creative class," or "creacl" (креакл) for short. In China such a term does not yet exist, but the reality of a very similar social group definitely does and, by an overwhelming margin, they are inclined to follow and worship the "Gong Zhi." Many of these, in spite of carefully maintained youthful appearances, are in their late 50s or early 60s—in other words, they are former Red Guards who did well financially by becoming informal spokespersons for what they regard as a hip and new ideology and attempting a new, technologically enhanced "civilizational pivot."


The trendiness of said ideology comes from the use of a kit of parts that includes canonical words and phrases from which clichéd narratives can be generated effortlessly. It includes: institutional building, civil society, rule of law, enhance democracy, raise transparency, economic growth, entrepreneurship, innovation, privatization, good guidance, western expertise, human values, human rights, women's rights, minority rights. There is also a mantra; instead of "OMing," they "west": the west, the west, the west, western values, western civilization, west west west west. Never mind that this kit of parts fails in application; these are articles of faith, not reason.


And the opposite of all this western goodness is the horrible, unspeakable easternness of Russia. Here we have another kit of parts, from which one can fashion any number of Russophobic rants: Putin/Stalin, tyranny, gulag, low birth rate, alcoholism, mafia, corruption, stagnation, aggression, invasion, nuclear threat, political repression, "the dying nation." Never mind that this kit of parts does not reflect reality; again, these are articles of faith, not reason . And the reason Russia is so horrible is, of course, the Russian people. When will the Russian people wake up? Will they ever rise up and overthrow their dictator, their tyrant? Will they ever become civilized, cool, happy, normal, WESTERN people... like we already are, or at least, like we will be... someday... if western people pick us up, take us home and make love to us...


The overall goal of this civilizational cross-dressing is one of personal transformation, personal rebranding: "If we look western and we quack western, then we will BECOME western, we will become cool, accepted, rich and prosperous and civilized. And what's holding us back is 'this country,' and 'these people,' who are so uncool, so un-trendy, so un-western. Ugh! There is nothing to be done about them, so let's just accept funds from western donors who want to destabilize Russia, and spend this money organizing virtual opposition parties like little girls organizing tea parties for their dolls. But we are getting lots of sympathetic western press coverage, so whatever we are doing must be working!"


The above-mentioned events, trends and movements arose in very different historical periods and in distant, non-contiguous parts of the world, but they share a singular emotional overtone and an orientation towards a singular goal: to cut Russia down, in word, if not in deed.


And then there is what is real.



It is really hard tell Ukrainians apart from Russians. About 90% of the conversation one overhears in the Kiev metro is and probably will remain in Russian, some speaking it with an accent, some with hardly any accent at all. A man or a woman from Yaroslavl (where the late Boris Nemtsov held on to a seat in the regional legislature) could without the slightest effort blend into the crowd surging through the Kiev metro. But should a Russian or a Ukrainian be traveling through the Beijing metro, it will be rather simple to tell them apart from everyone else.

It would also be quite easy to tell an American tourist, reporter, NGO-representative, or Ukrainian wife-hunter apart from the rest of the people in the Kiev metro. The signals would be unmistakable: the demeanor, the style of speech and the facial expression, regardless of ethnic or racial traits. But most of the young Ukrainian students who were shouting and jumping up and down on the Maidan would also take great pride in showing off their English language skills, good or not, and in being seen hanging out with Americans. Why would Ukrainians want to jump out of their Russian skins and try to impersonate Americans?


And are Americans, by some quirk of mystical collective nature, spontaneously anti-Russian? Are 'we'—the Americans I have lived and studied and worked with for years—anti-Russian? Now, come on, of course not! But we certainly are anti-something else! Take a couple of minutes to gaze at the face of Victoria Nuland, or Jan Psaki, or Samantha Power, or Hillary Clinton. Don't they all remind everyone—that is, us regular American guys of whatever ethnic origin—of that quintessential "cool crowd" we had to contend with during our student days? Aren't they all a bunch of uppity up-tight feminist radical liberal bitches who once made a living hell out of our fresh, green and naïve college days? Well, now that we are not so horny and stupid any more, and they are all wrinkly and saggy (or worked on and Botoxed to hell) don't we all want to metaphorically get down on our knees and thank Jesus or Yahweh or Allah or whoever that we didn't end up marrying one of these specimens?


But our country, the former land of the free and home of the brave—it has sunk. We all know this, deep in our hearts, don't we? The Victoria Nuland clone army, like a cruel, evil, insidious high school rumor, like the reflection of a witch's face in a polluted river, spread and flew into every crevice and corner of this land, high and low, far and wide. We encounter her avatars and lookalikes everywhere—in Hollywood, in the publishing houses, universities, school boards, kindergartens, in elevators on the way to our offices, and of course, on the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.


The questioning, seeking, original, fearless, rebellious, fractious and individualist American soul is expiring on its air-conditioned deathbed. America is not an interesting place any more. When was the last time we heard a new singer who could be compared to Tom Waits, or Suzanne Vega? Which one of you loose-pants hip-hoppers ever heard of Robert Altman, Wim Wenders, Gore Vidal, John Cassavetes? All of them are fading away, dying away, withering away, and this started to occur during roughly the same time period when the lookalikes and talkalikes of Victoria Nuland started to make their appearances around American universities, en masse.


Thirty years was the portion of my lifetime which fate had allocated to America. As a non-philosopher, non-psychologist, non-cultural historian, I attest with my own irretrievably lost youth that America's unprecedented and unexplained spiritual, intellectual, cultural, romantic, literary, linguistic and political decline did mysteriously and biblically occur during this same period.


Within these same 30 years the world also witnessed the miraculous rise of China's economy, whose windfalls and overnight profits I had largely missed out on. But observing America's bitter and terminal illness had taught me something. For example, when people talk about China being the next America, one thing I've got to ask myself is: will the 1.4 billion Chinese people make good neighbors and interesting company? Will they be liked and likable, or will many of them likewise come to be regarded as impudent louts and aggressive, greedy, egotistic, crafty pricks and bitches?


Regarding my own original motherland and my own people I have mixed feelings. The initial signals aren't promising. The drastic and depressing contrasts in personal manners between your typical Chinese tourist and the meek and quiet locals of Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, Singapore, indeed all of East Asia, is a dreadful omen. In 2014, the outbursts of hysterical and ludicrous hostility towards Russia from the clueless Chinese Creative Class and the internet mobs who follow them has to be another big sign. Those who have bright hopes for Russia-China geopolitical alliance would be well-advised to keep them in mind.


Keep what in mind, exactly? What we need to keep in mind is the normally hidden collective psycho-mental pathology of populations, which is often embodied in erratic and destructive intellectual trends, and is upheld by their self-doubting and neurotic cultural elites. This pathology has everything to do with self-identity.


For the Chinese and the Russian/Ukrainian "creative classes," America represents the Ultimate Cool Place, the Olympus of Coolness, to be strived towards intellectually, culturally and emotionally, if not always physically. Because America represents to them not only a theory or a line of argument, but a profound source of emotional self-identification, there arise within them ferocious flames of fury and rage whenever someone is perceived as preventing them from basking within the aura of this self-identification. They become like adolescents who put on the cool clothes and want to go and dance to the cool music, but are told that they can't wear these clothes and can't dance to this music. Why? Because they are not as cool as they think, and because those cool kids don't care about you, and don't really want you as their friends.


Actual political, economic and social problems are of secondary importance. What is of upmost importance is that they—the cultural elite, "the creative class," the cool kids who consider themselves so much cooler than the rest—feel insulted and denied their self-respect. They are angry that real life in Russia/Ukraine or China does not back up a certain concept of their own aspired coolness. Russia gets a special designation in such a line of discourse, or cultural narrative: it gets to be the ultimate spoiler of coolness. Even before the February 2014 putsch, Eastern Ukraine was always referred to as ground zero of "Sovok," the land of Soviet-era retrogrades—backward, dim-witted slaves who held cool, cute Ukraine back from its well-deserved western coolness.


I will never forget the sight of the torn limbs of a five-year-old Donbass girl, or the bits of blood-soaked shawl and the mangled grandmother's aged body scattered about on the ground. What have they done—and tens of thousands like them—to deserve this end? On the Kiev metro, most people appear modest, polite, humble, gentle, and, occasionally, very kind. Over the last year many of them have also looked weary, worried, numb and exhausted. But I could not detect one iota of disparity in features, skin tone, bone structure, and the modest yet lively style of clothing between these riders on the metro in Kiev and the dead girl or the dead grandmother in the Donbass. Is it all because of someone wanting to be cool, and throwing a tantrum, because they didn't get to feel cool like they wanted?



Returning to America, the supposed Olympus of Cool, trudging through trash-strewn sidewalks of Queens, tramping along the endless alleys of Brooklyn, stepping into a dimly lit Manhattan office elevator and there encountering yet another Victoria Nuland lookalike, I began to understand. The year 2014 was the fatal year when it was suddenly revealed who is who and what is what, like a sharp knife slashing through an old, moldy, dusty curtain. Think not of conspiracies and dark, complex, sinister geopolitical plots. These went with a different generation, when people might have been greedy and cruel, but they also had the ability to distinguish reality from fiction. That was the era of western imperialism, which is long dead. Churchill and Roosevelt and Nixon are all dead; Kissinger is a nonagenarian. Their replacements do not think in terms of Realpolitik; they think in terms of optics, and dwell in a mirrored hall devised to generate an optical illusion of their hallucinated greatness.

Don't think of reality; instead, think of neurosis, obsession, delusion, perpetual psychic adolescence (real adolescence long gone and even menopause unacknowledged). From the midst of these there arises a white-hot fire of rage so fierce and so random that Nietzsche or Sartre, in their most diabolical existential revelations, could never have foreseen them. Thus is the new Zeitgeist, in this advanced stage of decay of the collective consciousness of America's cultural/political elite and their overseas groupies. It explains their reckless and maniacal love affair with the Ukrainian Maidan, their rekindled but now impotent rage against Russia, and their despicable, narcissistic indifference to the tragedy suffered by the population of the Ukraine.


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Severe geomagnetic storm lights up New Zealand's sky

Aurora Australis

© Stephen Chadwick

The Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, in the sky at Himatangi Beach on Tuesday night, March 17.



A severe geomagnetic storm has whipped through Earth's magnetosphere, putting on a light show at both ends of the earth.

The storm, which began on Tuesday, is among the strongest in the current 11-year solar cycle, earning a rating of a "severe" G4 on a one-to-five scale, which means it had the potential to affect power grids, high-frequency communications and satellite operations.


Interestingly, there was no radiation storm, which typically accompanies geomagnetic storms of this magnitude. Therefore, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center was not expecting disruption to satellite electronics or polar-routed aviation.


But the changes in density in the ionosphere - the very high levels of Earth's atmosphere - could cause more drag on low-orbit satellites, which operators may have to adjust for with thrusters. Simple GPS technology, like the kind in your car or on your smartphone, could be affected in the form of difficulties locating your position.


Aurora Australis_1

© Liz Carlson

The incredible view from Wanaka.



The solar wind was not particularly fast, but it was potent enough to cause the severe geomagnetic storm, according to Joe Kunches, director of space weather services at Atmospheric and Space Technology Associates.

Quick & Dirty all sky timelapse of last night's Aurora Australis over Dunedin. http://bit.ly/1LrIU8s #Dunedin #aurora


— Ian Griffin (@iangriffin) March 17, 2015




Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Green from space. We have @Space_Station aurora views: [video] http://bit.ly/1LrIWx0 http://bit.ly/1LrIWx1


— NASA (@NASA) March 17, 2015




Rendering 300 frames takes a while doesn't it! Meanwhile, here's another still from last night. #Dunedin #aurora http://bit.ly/1Epe5rQ


— Ian Griffin (@iangriffin) March 17, 2015




There's a stunning aurora over Crowborough, East Sussex tonight. The view from the Wetherspoons car park is magical. http://bit.ly/1Epe5rV


— Nick Harvey (@mrnickharvey) March 17, 2015




Solar storm smacks Earth, pushes northern lights — so more people can enjoy colorful sky show http://bit.ly/1Epe5rW http://bit.ly/1Epe3QF


— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 17, 2015



The storm's strength came as somewhat of a surprise to forecasters and was probably caused by the combination of two coronal mass ejections from an active sunspot region, forecasters at the prediction centre said.

Space weather models predicted just a "glancing blow" from these ejections, which instead have caused a stronger disruption here on Earth, and vivid auroras.


Sunspots full of high magnetic energy frequently explode and send plumes of radiation called solar flares into space. When these flares and the super-heated plasma that can accompany them interact with Earth's magnetic field, radioactive energy sometimes makes it into the Earth's upper atmosphere.


These particles can interfere with radio communications and global positioning systems, and when strong enough, they can even harm the electrical grid. But they do have at least one positive effect: The impact of the particles with the upper atmosphere creates a beautiful glow that we know as the northern lights.


Because the Earth's magnetic field funnels charged particles from these solar storms towards its poles, polar regions are much more likely to be affected by them. That's why the auroras are most frequently seen at the poles and rarely make it to North America, as they have this week.


Solar cycles are periodic changes in the sun's activity, including the number of sunspots and solar flares, that have an average duration of about 11 years. They are marked by solar maximums and minimums. The sun is currently close to the solar maximum of this cycle, which began on January 4, 2008, and likely peaked in April 2014.


The Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ranks the intensity of geomagnetic storms on a G-scale of one to five, with five being the strongest. According to the centre, on average around 100 G4-magnitude storms occur every solar cycle. This is the first G4 storm since the fall of 2013. There hasn't been a G5 storm - the strongest on the scale - since August 2005.


The current storm is in season, so to speak, since they are most common around the equinoxes.


Research as to why solar storms are more common and severe around the equinoxes is still ongoing, but it most likely has to do with the way the Earth's position relative to the sun changes. The Earth's orientation changes what parts of its magnetic field are interacting with the sun's, making those interactions more volatile.


North Island Aurora


Central North Island residents were seeing pink as the Southern Lights, or Aurora Australis, lit up the sky.


The Aurora Australis is usually only visible in southern New Zealand but was clear in the skies over Himatangi Beach in the Manawatu when resident Steve Chadwick snapped some pictures before midnight.


Chadwick, who teaches astronomy and philosophy at Massey University and dabbles in astrophotography, said he was out taking pictures from about 9pm.


"You need a dark sky away from the city lights and you have to be able to have a long exposure," he said.


"At this latitude they're a lot fainter than in the pictures but at best you could see faint red."


As someone who's lived in the Manawatu for most of his life, this was only the second time he'd ever seen the lights so it was a special moment, he said.


Travel blogger Liz Carlson captured the stunning sky from Wanaka. "Last night you could see beams of light dancing over the mountains around Wanaka and you had every colour visible, red, yellow, pink purple and green. It was pretty spectacular to see. This was shot with a 15 second exposure from Eely Point looking over Lake Wanaka around 11pm."


Palmerston North Astronomical Society president Jeremy Moss said the colourful light phenomena was caused by charged particles, like protons, neutrons, ions and electrons, being released from the sun and hitting the Earth's atmosphere.


"The closer you are to the pole, so north and south, the more likely you are to see it," he said.


"We don't see it very often in the north of New Zealand unless there's some pretty serious solar activity going on so we were pretty lucky last night."


He said the lights were reasonably common in Southland and they usually didn't last for more than several minutes.


Meet the CDC front group lobbying for mandatory vaccinations

NACCHO CDC

NACCHO?

It sounds like a bad acronym from an Austin Powers movie.


What/who the heck is NACCHO?


NACCHO is The National Association of County and City Health Officials . If you briefly perused their website, you might be confused into thinking that they were a federal agency of sorts. First off, there's the name. Many people associate "National Association" with something sort of official. The next thing that might throw you off is the way NACCHO describes themselves:



NACCHO's members are the 2700 local health departments across the United States. NACCHO's vision is health, equity, and security for all people in their communities through public health policies and services. NACCHO's mission is to be a leader, partner, catalyst, and voice for local health departments in order to ensure the conditions that promote health and equity, combat disease, and improve the quality and length of all lives.



For the uninitiated, reading NACCHO's self-description might cause you to reach the following conclusions:

  • NACCHO is a federal organization

  • Its members are all the local health departments

  • Somehow, this is a way for all the local health departments to all be connected together, probably there is a rule somewhere that says they should all coordinate themselves on a national basis (and there isn't, the health of citizens is a state-level job, according to the U.S. Constitution)


As you're probably getting used to by now with these articles, NACCHO could not be farther from any of that in reality, so let's look at the details:

1. NACCHO's "membership" revenue numbers don't add up at all


Referring to the conclusions one might draw from the above, it appears that NACCHO is a collective of local health departments. According to NACCHO, there are "over 2700" of them and most people would probably presume these local health departments pay a membership fee to be a part of NACCHO, which they do.


NACCHO has a membership form for local health departments, you can see it right here . If you look at the form, you'll see that local health departments (NACCHO's claim is that they are just a group of local health departments) can join NACCHO, and that their annual membership fees is pro-rated based on how large a population they serve. The most an annual membership could cost any health department would be $4,150 per year, as you can see right here:


naccho dues

Just for fun, we ran the math. 2,700 local health departments. To be conservative, let's say EVERY health department had 3 million or more people in it (which would be impossible because with more than 2,700 health departments as NACCHO members that would mean the U.S. had 8.1 billion people) but let's just see how much money NACCHO could pull in annually from membership dues if that were true:

"Membership Fee of $4,150 x 2,700 local health departments= $11,200,000"



Here's the problem. NACCHO breaks out their revenue from membership dues on their 990 form. Are you ready for this? Here's what NACCHO actually made in membership revenues in 2013:

$595,881



If you are saying, at this point, "so what"? You're right. We haven't proven anything. In fact, the only thing you know about NACCHO so far is that:

  • They claim to be a collective of 2,700 local health departments. (In fact, it's fair to say this is the primary way they define themselves.)

  • From their members they receive just over a half million dollars a year in membership dues, according to their 2013 990 form filed with the IRS.


Here's the problem NACCHO makes $25 MILLION a year in revenues:

naccho 990

$25 million a year? That means membership dues—which NACCHO implies defines who they are—are responsible for approximately 2% of their annual revenues.

2. NACCHO makes all their money from government and private grants


With membership dues of roughly $500,000 and revenues of $25 million, the story on NACCHO is $24.5 million short of an explanation. Luckily, their 990 has to break out sources of revenue one step further, which is how we learn the following:


naccho 990 revenue

NACCHO is making the majority of their annual revenue from two sources: government grants ($19.3 million) and other grants ($3.6 million).

Government grants? What kind of government grants? Who, aside from a local health department, wants to contribute to an organization that represents local health departments? Remember, NACCHO's mission is very clear:



"NACCHO's mission is to be a leader, partner, catalyst, and voice for local health departments"



Government grants

Unfortunately, NACCHO's Form 990 doesn't break out exactly where their Government grants come from, but this document gives you a pretty good idea:


naccho funding

Wait a minute. 7 of the 11 funding priorities from NACCHO come from the Centers for Disease Control? Not only that, but CDC is really all over NACCHO's website, like here , here , and here .

NACCHO spells out who their partners (funders) are on their website right here . CDC is listed. So is the Immunization Action Coalition . And, a myriad of other "private nonprofts" that focus on public health.


Can we draw any conclusions from this information? Sure we can.


yay oregon

NACCHO gets most of their money from government grants. CDC appears to be a primary funding source.

What does any of this have to do with Oregon? As the readers of this series know, Oregon is currently experiencing an intense fight over Senate Bill 442, a bill sponsored by State Senator Elizabeth Steiner Hayward that would remove both philosophical and religious exemptions from Oregon, effectively making vaccinations in Oregon mandatory for a parent who wants to send their child to any kind of school.


NACCHO and the Oregon Legislature


This article was spurred by repeated reports from members of the Oregon Legislature that they were being heavily lobbied by a group called NACCHO about Senate Bill 442. In general, NACCHO was characterized as a primary advocate of Senate Bill 442. This would make sense, since in July 2011 NACCHO issued a very clear policy statement that the time had come for states to eliminate personal belief exemptions:



The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) urges that personal belief exemptions be removed from state immunization laws and regulations.




NACCHO acknowledges that there are states that may not be in a position to eliminate personal belief exemptions immediately. States that easily permit personal belief exemptions to immunizations have significantly higher rates of exemption than states that have more complex procedures. These states should begin a process to limit the availability of personal belief exemptions to the greatest degree possible. An initial step might be to review the process of applying for and receiving exemptions: the more educational and demanding the process, the lower will be the rate of exemptions. There should be more involved in the application process than simply signing a form.



This isn't the first policy statement from NACCHO. A quick compilation of statements shows where the nonprofit group who get all their money from government grants is focused:

naccho statement of policy

Do NACCHO's policies share a common theme? Clearly:

  • Mandatory vaccines

  • National registries of vaccination status

  • More vaccines

  • All vaccines


Cradle to Grave

But, perhaps NACCHO's future goals should be of most concern to Oregonians. In July 2013, NACCHO's Board approved this new policy statement , titled "An Immunization Program for all Stages of Life":



The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) urges the federal government to support the creation of a comprehensive national immunization program that addresses all stages of life (cradle to grave) with the intention of achieving the Healthy People 2020 immunization goals and standards. Such a program will help protect our nation's population from vaccine-preventable diseases by increasing rates of childhood, adolescent, and adult immunization coverage.



Cradle to grave?

Yes, that's what NACCHO said. They go on to write:



A function of many state and local health departments is to collect vaccination data and maintain immunization registries. These registries are often used to help ensure children and adolescents have up-to-date immunizations. Low levels of vaccine coverage among adults underscores the need to expand these systems to include adults and for providers to develop systems to minimize missed opportunities.



Immunization registries for adults?

Oregonians, it's time to wake up. Let's put SB442 in proper context: its just another step in the plan of comprehensive mandatory immunizations for everyone, including ADULTS.


"Cradle to grave," as NACCHO says.


Is it really that hard to imagine what their policy statement for adult vaccinations will say in a few years?


If you support SB442, you also need to support getting up to date on your adult vaccines—the CDC recommends 72 vaccinations between the ages of 19 and 65 . Are you going to get your 72 shots?


Is NACCHO breaking the law?


We're not attorneys, but we are very troubled by this document which we found on NACCHO's website that deals with prohibitions of lobbying on the part of organizations that receive grants from the CDC, like NACCHO. The language is pretty unambiguous:



"Except in certain cases of state and local government communication, as part of their normal and recognized executive-legislative relationships, as discussed above, grantees [like NACCHO] are restricted from using federal funds to attempt to influence deliberations or actions by Federal, state, or local legislative or executive branches. This includes communications to a legislator or executive official that refer to and reflect a view on specific measure (legislative or executive)."



We're just parents. We haven't sat in the room during the meetings between our elected representatives here in Oregon and NACCHO, but we'd sure ask our elected representatives to take a close look at these prohibitions and compare those to NACCHO's efforts on behalf of SB442.

Summary


So, what have we learned?



  • According to Oregon legislative members, NACCHO is heavily lobbying in support of SB442, which appears to violate CDC grantor rules, but we're not lawyers.

  • NACCHO is not a member-funded organization as their self-characterization implies (less than 2% of revenues from membership dues). NACCHO is an independent nonprofit entity that relies almost exclusively on government grants to operate. CDC is certainly one of the granting organizations and given the scale of interaction and partnership between CDC and NACCHO, it's likely CDC is one of the largest grantors. If true, NACCHO may be better described as a "captive nonprofit" which others might call a "front group"

  • In July 2011, NACCHO issued a policy statement encouraging states to eliminate personal belief exemptions. If that wasn't a possibility, NACCHO at least encouraged states to make exemptions harder to get by making the process more cumbersome.

  • In June 2013, 24 months later, the Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, which made personal belief exemptions harder to get. Their approach perfectly matched the recommendations of NACCHO from July 2011.

  • Now, two session later, with Senate Bill 442, there is a movement to eliminate all non-medical vaccinations, and NACCHO is heavily involved.

  • The long-term plan for NACCHO is adult immunization—"cradle to grave" as they say. Anyone who doesn't believe a push for mandatory adult vaccinations is likely somewhere in the near future is not paying attention.


If you support Senate Bill 442, you are supporting a path to mandatory adult vaccinations, plain and simple, and the hand of the CDC in all of this is very hard to miss.

Who's behind Oregon Senate Bill 442? We think the answer is fairly obvious.


This article was written by several well-meaning Oregonians who are big fans of medical freedom and informed consent who apparently have nothing better to do than crunch numbers. We have nothing to gain or lose financially from the passage of this bill. We have proudly joined a movement of a few thousand Oregonians fighting this legislation, the organizing website can be found here: www.NoOnSB442.com . We have actually written four articles on this topic, in chronological order they include:


Part 1: The truth about Oregon's vaccination rates


Part 2: Who cried wolf in Oregon


Part 3: What's NACCHO got to do with Oregon's vaccine exemption fight?


Part 4: Exemption-gate in Oregon?


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Teacher facing obstruction charges for trying to stop school cop as he choked a child

cop _student_teacher

© The Free Thought Project



Lakewood, WA — Students are speaking out against what they believe to be a case of excessive force at their high school.

An officer at Clover Park High School is now being investigated for using excessive force after arresting a student.


The student is facing a charge of resisting arrest, and a teacher is also facing possible charges of obstruction for trying to help the student. The case has been referred to the city attorney who will determine if charges will be filed.


According to KIRO 7,




The incident happened a week and a half ago near the pool on campus.


Reports of a fight prompted the on duty school resource officer, Lakewood Police Detective Rey Punzalan, to respond.


Witnesses say the officer hit one of the students, a 14-year-old, with his car door.


Because he failed to put it in park, the door kept hitting the student.




Police are claiming that the negligent actions of the officer using his car door as a weapon did not injure the child at all. Lakewood Police Lieutenant Chris Lawler says the student wasn't hurt. "It didn't knock him down," Lt Lawler explained. "It didn't cause any injuries."

When the officer told the student to go to the office, the student, who had just been struck by the officer's car door, allegedly responded with profanity.


"So he goes to grab the student, who is 6-foot-1, 210 pounds, and the kids immediately tenses up and starts to fight with the officer," says Lawler, in an attempt to paint the student as some monstrous villain.


However, the eyewitnesses say that's not the case at all. They say the student was not fighting back, and the officer placed him in a chokehold.


Predictably, police are claiming that it wasn't a chokehold, the officer merely "grabbed the child by the neck."


Grabbing a non-violent child by his neck reasonable force, according to Lawler. "We have to overcome that resistance, What the officer did sounds reasonable," Lawler said. "I have no problem with it."


It is quite obvious, with all of the eyewitness testimonies, that the officer is not giving a proper account of what actually happened. Also, the fact that a teacher risked arrest and possibly her career to stop the abuse speaks volumes as to what was actually transpiring.


Since the department has received a complaint about the incident, they now claim they are investigating themselves.


Students at Clover Park High School are not taking this abuse lightly.


They have taken to social media to express their discontent and explain how they no longer feel safe on campus.


"I'm disgusted that this happened, angered at how it was handled, irate that they are punishing a teacher for doing their damn job," says one student on Facebook.


Another says "Police brutality should never be allowed in school."


"They could have handled it differently," Clover Park sophomore Jeffrey Lauterbach said.


"You can't get in trouble or else something like that could happen," Clover Park sophomore Alex Avila added.


To protest the incident of police brutality last Friday, all of the students wore black to school.


Unfortunately, this incident is hardly isolated. Less than a week ago, we reported the story of a Kentucky cop, with a history of hurting children. He is facing discipline for choking a student so hard, that he passed out and was left with brain damage.


Putin denounces attempts to rewrite WWII history as plot to undermine Russia


© RIA Novosti / Aleksey Druzhinin



The Russian president has again denounced attempts to rewrite WWII history, noting that the authors seek to sow strife between peoples and nations for their own geopolitical purposes.

Putin said the cynical lies about the Great Patriotic War and the attempts to blacken the reputation of the Soviet people and the Red Army have nothing to do with the truth. The president's comments came at the Tuesday session of the committee preparing the May 9 celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The Great Patriotic war is the traditional Russian title for the 1941-45 campaign against Germany and its allies.


"I reject these shameless conclusions and so called observations that have nothing to do with the truth. Their objective is clear - they want to undermine the power and moral authority of modern Russia and deprive it of the winner nation status with all consequences that would follow in international law," Putin told the committee members. "They want to divide peoples and instigate conflicts among them, to use historical lies in geopolitical games."


The president urged all committee members to maintain their efforts in upholding the truth about the war and the Soviet Union's input in repelling the Nazi threat.


"Unfortunately, they keep testing our society for maturity and unity and for the strength of our historical traditions and the connection between generations. The task of the committee is to calmly reply to these challenges on the basis of citizens' support and active cooperation," Putin said.


The president also noted that the most important part of the Victory Day celebration was the extensive and continuous support given to the veterans. He gave a riminder that Russia still has 2.5 million veterans, each of whom made a personal input in the victory over Nazism.


In late February this year, Putin pledged more support to the veterans as he spoke at a major Gala dedicated to the "Defender of the Fatherland Day" holiday. "This is our victory, our history, which we'll vigorously defend from lies and oblivion," he said, referring to what Moscow has viewed as attempts by officials in Ukraine and Poland to rewrite history and undermine Russia's role and sacrifices during the war.


In January, the Russian president blasted any attempts to rewrite the history of WWII and hide the crimes of Nazism as inadmissible and immoral, saying that people who do this often try to distract attention from their nations' collaboration with Hitler.


"Direct attempts to silence history, to distort and rewrite history are inadmissible and immoral. Behind these attempts often lies the desire to hide one's own disgrace, the disgrace of cowardice, hypocrisy and treachery, the intent to justify the direct or indirect collaboration with Nazism," the Russian leader stated, as he spoke in the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow at an event dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation.


"In places where they imprint the ideas of ethnic and moral supremacy into people's heads, where they destroy or scoff at human values, civilization is being quickly and inevitably replaced by barbarity," Putin noted, adding that the process is often accompanied by war and aggression.


Heavy rain and high winds pummel Portland, OR leaving downed trees and thousands without power

landslide portland oregon

© KGW

A landslide in NW Portland.



Heavy rain and high winds combined to create problems in the Portland and Vancouver metro areas Sunday.

Area residents reported trees down, along with some power lines. On Sunday, Portland General Electric reported 45,000 customers without power. The number dropped to about 1,700 by 5 p.m. Monday.


Pacific Power and Clark Public Utilities no longer reported widespread outages due to the storm Monday afternoon.


In Vancouver, crews responded to more than 30 reports of downed trees or large branches that were blocking streets, including the busy East Mill Plain Boulevard.


"Crews concentrated on quickly cutting up and clearing out a big fallen tree so traffic could get through safely on the busy arterial, a major route for emergency services," said Loretta Callahan, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works. "Meanwhile, Operations Signal crews spent the day restoring traffic signals that were entirely out of service or operating in flashing red due to windstorm power outages and surges."


She said traffic signals at 15 intersections were impacted.


In Portland, a tree fell on a car with a woman insidein the Park Blocks. Firefighters had to cut her out of the vehicle but amazingly, she was not seriously hurt.


"All the trees were blowing, but it was just regular wind, just blowing like 'Shooo!' I couldn't believe that one tree landed on that car. It was just incredible, almost impossible," said onlooker Davond Dade.


tree falls car portland oregon

© KGW weather

#KGWWeather)A large tree fell onto this vehicle in the Park Blocks, but the woman inside was not seriously injured.



The winds packed such a wallop in downtown Portland that scaffolding was also partially torn off a building on the corner of Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street.

Ben Shumlin was in disbelief as the scaffolding fell.


[embedded content]




"I suddenly heard some screams and I looked up and I just saw this wall," he said. "I immediately thought it was from a movie, it felt like I had seen it before. It was crazy. Everyone just started running, it was one of those crazy, hectic things."

The heavy rains led to a small landslide in the Northwest Portland hills.


On Portland's busy Northeast Cesar Chavez Boulevard, near Davis Street, a large tree fell and knocked out power to the area. Authorities closed the roadway, from East Burnside to Northeast Glisan Street, for several hours on Sunday.




Portland police and Portland Fire & Rescue responded to several reports of large trees down, blocking roads throughout the area. Residents were urged to use caution when going outside as large, falling trees could be very dangerous.

In Northwest Portland, heavy rains caused a landslide that came within inches of tumbling onto a home.


TriMet officials said the MAX Blue Line was disrupted, due to a power line that fell onto the tracks.


Portland officials said the heavy rainfall also caused sewage to overflow into the Willamette River early Sunday.


wind damage portland

© KGW

A firefighter carries a girl to safety at the Gable Park Apartments in St. Helens.



An advisory warned that people and their pets should avoid contact with river water between the Sellwood Bridge and Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette and Columbia rivers meet. That means no jet skiing or swimming, because water could be swallowed, according to the Bureau of Environmental Services. Anyone who chooses to fish within 48 hours of sewage overflow, should cook the fish thoroughly to kill bacteria.

Further out, along Walker Road in Beaverton, a downed tree blocked a neighborhood street and nearly smashed a car.


In St. Helens, high winds sent eight trees crashing down on the Gable Park Apartments (pictured at left) and two parked cars. No one was hurt but 33 people had to find somewhere else to stay overnight, due to the damage to their apartments.


trees down St. Helens Oregon

© KGW

Eight trees fell on this apartment complex in St. Helens.



"It was kind of shocking because I've lived there almost three years now and that's the worst I've ever seen," said Deborah Stratton.

There was also widespread damage in Lake Oswego and Salem.


The wind and rain had died down by Monday morning and conditions were expected to stay relatively calm at least through Thursday night.


"Tuesday another weak weather system will push over the area leading to increasing showers or some light rain," said KGW Meteorologist Nick Allard. "Temperatures will stay in the lower-60s and I expect really nice and sunny weather through Thursday."


The Cholesterol Drug War: ABC Australia bans documentary exposing statin drug scandal




Dr MaryAnne Demasi from the Catalyst. Her investigative reporting on the dangers of statin drugs has now been banned.



Dr. MaryAnne Demasi's documentary on the criminal activity of the pharmaceutical industry regarding cholesterol-lowering statin drugs sent shock waves through the mainstream media in Australia last year. Published in two parts on the popular news show , the pharmaceutical industry complained loudly after the first show, and requested the network not air the second episode, "."

ABC Australia aired it anyway, but the pharmaceutical influence is apparently too strong, as it was announced that the network would remove the videos from their website because "they breached its impartiality standards." They also removed them from YouTube.


These two episodes were among the most watched videos on Health Impact News in 2013, with tens of thousands of "likes" on Facebook alone, helping the videos go viral outside of Australia.


We found other copies on YouTube for now, but it may only be a matter of time before YouTube bans these altogether. If you or anyone you know have been prescribed cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, then you need to watch this documentary. It could save your life.


Here are the two episodes, with our original commentary:


Outside of the United States, the myth that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease is quickly falling apart. Sweden just recently became the first western nation to reject the low-fat dietary philosophy in favor of a high-fat low-carbohydrate diet. A leading cardiologist in the U.K. made shock waves recently by appearing in the mainstream media and stating that saturated fats were not the cause of heart disease, but refined carbohydrates were.


Now, ABC TV in Australia has released a news documentary with the title: This documentary interviews cardiologists, science writers, and other experts who expose the saturated fat and cholesterol myth. This is part 1 of a 2-part series.


Part 1 caused so much controversy when it was aired (watch it below), that Australia's top medicine safety expert, Emily Banks, urged the ABC not to air the follow-up, because it might encourage people to go off their anti-cholesterol statin drugs. "If people stop using their statins . . . it's very likely that it will result in death," she said. (Source.)


Wow, talk about scare tactics! If the science that is represented in this documentary is wrong, why not refute the science instead of using scare tactics to endorse censorship? Fortunately, ABC Australia did not censor it, and you can watch Part 2 here.


People around the world are waking up to these dietary myths, as well as the scam of cholesterol-lowering drugs and how harmful they actually are. But given how much of a threat exposing this myth is in losing billions of dollars in profits in the United States, will the mainstream media and the U.S. Government follow other western nations? Those of us in the alternative media, via the Internet, have been covering this issue for more than a decade now!


Heart of the Matter - Part 1


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ABC News in Australia has done an incredible investigative report on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, daring to expose organized crime in the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. This is an area where no mainstream media outlet in the USA dares to go, due to the influence of the pharmaceutical industry.

In this excellent investigative documentary, cardiologists are interviewed to reveal the fraud of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, and the criminal activity that has allowed this class of drug to become the best-selling class of drugs all-time.


After ABC Australia aired Part 1, The Heart of the Matter, Australia's top medicine safety expert, Emily Banks, urged ABC not to air the follow-up, because it might encourage people to go off their anti-cholesterol statin drugs. "If people stop using their statins . . . it's very likely that it will result in death," she said.


But those scare tactics and attempts at censorship failed, and below is Part 2 as it was aired in Australia, and is now available for the world to watch via the ABC TV Catalyst YouTube channel. Some of the top cardiologists in the U.S. have stated that there is not one single study showing that people who take statins will actually live longer. This fraud is now coming out into the open.


If you or someone you know are prescribed a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, you would do well to invest 30 minutes of your time to watch this investigative report. You are not likely to learn this information from your doctor, and it could literally change your life.


Heart of the Matter Part 2 - Cholesterol Drug War


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BEST OF THE WEB: The Rage of the Cultural Elites






China's 'cultural revolution', destroying anything that didn't 'conform' to simplistic slogans. Outbreaks of such madness occurs periodically the world over.



A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution—a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong—was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

It so happened that my aunt, then a sensitive and somewhat dreamy young woman, had stubbornly and haplessly clung to certain musical tastes which at that time in China came to be regarded as politically incorrect, being said, in the trendy ideological jargon of that time, to reflect "decadent bourgeois revisionist aesthetics." To wit, my aunt had kept in her record collection a rendition of "The Urals Mountain-Ash" (Уральская Рябинушка), a Russian folk song in which a young girl meets two nice boys under a mountain-ash tree and must choose between them, performed by the National Choir of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was an old-style LP spinning at 78 RPM. It had a red emblem in the middle emblazoned with "CCCP."


One of my aunt's roommates, who probably had always resented her for one reason or another, found out about it and reported her to the authorities. For this rather serious infraction, student members of the Red Guard made my aunt publicly smash her beloved record, then kneel upon the fragments and recite an apology to Chairman Mao while fellow-students threw trash at her face shouting "Down with Soviet revisionists!" This generation of Chinese young people, who once donned Red Guard uniforms, beat people up around the country and smashed various cultural artifacts, is now mostly living on government pensions or earning meagre profits from home businesses, but some have prospered and can be found among the upper crust of contemporary China's business, cultural, and political elites.


This episode came to my mind when in the summer of 2014 I came upon video clips of Ukrainian student activists storming university classrooms in mid-lecture and ordering everyone to stand up and sing the Ukrainian national anthem, then forcing the professor to apologize for the lecture not being adequately patriotic. There were also ghastly spectacles of "Enemies of the People" (guilty only of having served under the overthrown president Yanukovich) being paraded around in trash bins. In Ukrainian schools, children were made to jump up and down, and told that "Whoever doesn't jump is a Moscal" (a derogatory term for "Russian").





Such madness has currently taken ahold of Ukraine.



Add to this the destruction of public monuments to World War II and the ridiculous rewriting of history (turns out that, during World War II, Germany liberated Ukraine, but then Russia invaded and occupied Germany!) and a complete picture emerges: the Ukrainian Maidan movement is one of a species of "cultural revolution." The new, fashionable term being thrown around is "civilizational pivot," but it and the old "cultural revolution" can be understood as approximate synonyms, sharing the need for frenzied spectacles of mass humiliation and destruction.

In 1971 the Vietnam War began to draw toward an agonizing and, from the American government's point of view, highly unfulfilling conclusion. That same year Dr. Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing, flying in from a military airport in Pakistan. This was followed by the joint Nixon-Kissinger summit in 1972, which culminated in Nixon's historic handshake with Mao Zedong, completing China's civilizational pivot away from the USSR and toward the west. In hindsight, this dramatic opening could only be properly characterized as a swift dagger-in-the-back against the USSR, in both geopolitical and ideological senses. The decrepitating, inflexible body of the USSR never recovered from this stab wound, leading to its final collapse, from a multitude of internal and external causes, two decades later.


In late February, 2014, just as Ukraine was attempting its civilizational pivot away from Russia and toward the west, I interviewed a senior captain of the Right Sector, a radical Ukrainian nationalist group with neo-Nazi stylings. The burly man looked aggressive in his paramilitary garb, and arrived with bodyguards, but turned out to be rather amiable. He was particularly glad to see me because I look Chinese. He spoke Russian, reluctantly, after announcing that he was ashamed of it. (This is typical; Ukrainians use Ukrainian to spout nationalist nonsense, but when they need to make sense they lapse into Russian.) He said that he had served in the Red Army and had been stationed in the Far East, on the Chinese border. He expressed hope that China would soon do something big in Siberia.


That was my only meeting with the man from the Right Sector. It's safe to guess that the recent Russian-Chinese embrace has dashed his hopes concerning Siberia. The Chinese government's unambiguous expressions of solidarity with Russia starting in March of 2014 have been noted by all. But he would have been far less disconcerted, and the many international supporters of Russia far more discouraged, had they been able to read the comments on various popular Chinese social sites, which abounded with slogans such as "Crimea to Putin, Siberia to China!" or "Putler will hang on lamppost!" or "Glory to Ukraine! China sides with the Civilized World!"


To explain what is behind this phenomenon, which affects certain Chinese internet users, young and old, we need to introduce a Chinese neologism: "Gong Zhi" (公知). The literal meaning of the term is "public intellectual," but it is used sarcastically and sometimes even derogatorily. It denotes a cute, successful, popular, trendy individual, who is often involved in the mass media, and who, for various reasons, has millions of virtual followers via Tweeter and various social networking sites. Such individuals make daily, sometimes hourly, witty and biting public remarks on a vast range of social and political subjects, and, to add human interest, on their own kaleidoscopic emotional states.





"The West is the best / Get here and we'll do the rest / The blue bus is calling us..."



In a Russian/Ukrainian setting, more or less analogous figures are to be found in the public personae of Ksenya Sobchak, Irina Khakamada, Masha Gessen, Lesha Navalny, and the late Boris Nemtsov. The base audience for such people consists of what in Russia and the Ukraine came to be known as the "creative class," or "creacl" (креакл) for short. In China such a term does not yet exist, but the reality of a very similar social group definitely does and, by an overwhelming margin, they are inclined to follow and worship the "Gong Zhi." Many of these, in spite of carefully maintained youthful appearances, are in their late 50s or early 60s—in other words, they are former Red Guards who did well financially by becoming informal spokespersons for what they regard as a hip and new ideology and attempting a new, technologically enhanced "civilizational pivot."

The trendiness of said ideology comes from the use of a kit of parts that includes canonical words and phrases from which clichéd narratives can be generated effortlessly. It includes: institutional building, civil society, rule of law, enhance democracy, raise transparency, economic growth, entrepreneurship, innovation, privatization, good guidance, western expertise, human values, human rights, women's rights, minority rights. There is also a mantra; instead of "OMing," they "west": the west, the west, the west, western values, western civilization, west west west west. Never mind that this kit of parts fails in application; these are articles of faith, not reason.


And the opposite of all this western goodness is the horrible, unspeakable easternness of Russia. Here we have another kit of parts, from which one can fashion any number of Russophobic rants: Putin/Stalin, tyranny, gulag, low birth rate, alcoholism, mafia, corruption, stagnation, aggression, invasion, nuclear threat, political repression, "the dying nation." Never mind that this kit of parts does not reflect reality; again, these are articles of faith, not reason. And the reason Russia is so horrible is, of course, the Russian people. When will the Russian people wake up? Will they ever rise up and overthrow their dictator, their tyrant? Will they ever become civilized, cool, happy, normal, WESTERN people... like we already are, or at least, like we will be... someday... if western people pick us up, take us home and make love to us...





Chinese wannabe Westerners



The overall goal of this civilizational cross-dressing is one of personal transformation, personal rebranding: "If we look western and we quack western, then we will BECOME western, we will become cool, accepted, rich and prosperous and civilized. And what's holding us back is 'this country,' and 'these people,' who are so uncool, so un-trendy, so un-western. Ugh! There is nothing to be done about them, so let's just accept funds from western donors who want to destabilize Russia, and spend this money organizing virtual opposition parties like little girls organizing tea parties for their dolls. But we are getting lots of sympathetic western press coverage, so whatever we are doing must be working!"

The above-mentioned events, trends and movements arose in very different historical periods and in distant, non-contiguous parts of the world, but they share a singular emotional overtone and an orientation towards a singular goal: to cut Russia down, in word, if not in deed.


And then there is what is real.


It is really hard tell Ukrainians apart from Russians. About 90% of the conversation one overhears in the Kiev metro is and probably will remain in Russian, some speaking it with an accent, some with hardly any accent at all. A man or a woman from Yaroslavl (where the late Boris Nemtsov held on to a seat in the regional legislature) could without the slightest effort blend into the crowd surging through the Kiev metro. But should a Russian or a Ukrainian be traveling through the Beijing metro, it will be rather simple to tell them apart from everyone else.


It would also be quite easy to tell an American tourist, reporter, NGO-representative, or Ukrainian wife-hunter apart from the rest of the people in the Kiev metro. The signals would be unmistakable: the demeanor, the style of speech and the facial expression, regardless of ethnic or racial traits. But most of the young Ukrainian students who were shouting and jumping up and down on the Maidan would also take great pride in showing off their English language skills, good or not, and in being seen hanging out with Americans. Why would Ukrainians want to jump out of their Russian skins and try to impersonate Americans?


And are Americans, by some quirk of mystical collective nature, spontaneously anti-Russian? Are 'we'—the Americans I have lived and studied and worked with for years—anti-Russian? Now, come on, of course not! But we certainly are anti-something else! Take a couple of minutes to gaze at the face of Victoria Nuland, or Jan Psaki, or Samantha Power, or Hillary Clinton. Don't they all remind everyone—that is, us regular American guys of whatever ethnic origin—of that quintessential "cool crowd" we had to contend with during our student days? Aren't they all a bunch of uppity up-tight feminist radical liberal bitches who once made a living hell out of our fresh, green and naïve college days? Well, now that we are not so horny and stupid any more, and they are all wrinkly and saggy (or worked on and Botoxed to hell) don't we all want to metaphorically get down on our knees and thank Jesus or Yahweh or Allah or whoever that we didn't end up marrying one of these specimens?


But our country, the former land of the free and home of the brave—it has sunk. We all know this, deep in our hearts, don't we? The Victoria Nuland clone army, like a cruel, evil, insidious high school rumor, like the reflection of a witch's face in a polluted river, spread and flew into every crevice and corner of this land, high and low, far and wide. We encounter her avatars and lookalikes everywhere—in Hollywood, in the publishing houses, universities, school boards, kindergartens, in elevators on the way to our offices, and of course, on the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.





Hmmm, yummy, we luv r lies smeared with Nutella...



The questioning, seeking, original, fearless, rebellious, fractious and individualist American soul is expiring on its air-conditioned deathbed. America is not an interesting place any more. When was the last time we heard a new singer who could be compared to Tom Waits, or Suzanne Vega? Which one of you loose-pants hip-hoppers ever heard of Robert Altman, Wim Wenders, Gore Vidal, John Cassavetes? All of them are fading away, dying away, withering away, and this started to occur during roughly the same time period when the lookalikes and talkalikes of Victoria Nuland started to make their appearances around American universities, en masse.

Thirty years was the portion of my lifetime which fate had allocated to America. As a non-philosopher, non-psychologist, non-cultural historian, I attest with my own irretrievably lost youth that America's unprecedented and unexplained spiritual, intellectual, cultural, romantic, literary, linguistic and political decline did mysteriously and biblically occur during this same period.


Within these same 30 years the world also witnessed the miraculous rise of China's economy, whose windfalls and overnight profits I had largely missed out on. But observing America's bitter and terminal illness had taught me something. For example, when people talk about China being the next America, one thing I've got to ask myself is: will the 1.4 billion Chinese people make good neighbors and interesting company? Will they be liked and likable, or will many of them likewise come to be regarded as impudent louts and aggressive, greedy, egotistic, crafty pricks and bitches?


Regarding my own original motherland and my own people I have mixed feelings. The initial signals aren't promising. The drastic and depressing contrasts in personal manners between your typical Chinese tourist and the meek and quiet locals of Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, Singapore, indeed all of East Asia, is a dreadful omen. In 2014, the outbursts of hysterical and ludicrous hostility towards Russia from the clueless Chinese Creative Class and the internet mobs who follow them has to be another big sign. Those who have bright hopes for Russia-China geopolitical alliance would be well-advised to keep them in mind.


Keep what in mind, exactly? What we need to keep in mind is the normally hidden collective psycho-mental pathology of populations, which is often embodied in erratic and destructive intellectual trends, and is upheld by their self-doubting and neurotic cultural elites. This pathology has everything to do with self-identity.





Not quite human



For the Chinese and the Russian/Ukrainian "creative classes," America represents the Ultimate Cool Place, the Olympus of Coolness, to be strived towards intellectually, culturally and emotionally, if not always physically. Because America represents to them not only a theory or a line of argument, but a profound source of emotional self-identification, there arise within them ferocious flames of fury and rage whenever someone is perceived as preventing them from basking within the aura of this self-identification. They become like adolescents who put on the cool clothes and want to go and dance to the cool music, but are told that they can't wear these clothes and can't dance to this music. Why? Because they are not as cool as they think, and because those cool kids don't care about you, and don't really want you as their friends.

Actual political, economic and social problems are of secondary importance. What is of upmost importance is that they—the cultural elite, "the creative class," the cool kids who consider themselves so much cooler than the rest—feel insulted and denied their self-respect. They are angry that real life in Russia/Ukraine or China does not back up a certain concept of their own aspired coolness. Russia gets a special designation in such a line of discourse, or cultural narrative: it gets to be the ultimate spoiler of coolness. Even before the February 2014 putsch, Eastern Ukraine was always referred to as ground zero of "Sovok," the land of Soviet-era retrogrades—backward, dim-witted slaves who held cool, cute Ukraine back from its well-deserved western coolness.


I will never forget the sight of the torn limbs of a five-year-old Donbass girl, or the bits of blood-soaked shawl and the mangled grandmother's aged body scattered about on the ground. What have they done—and tens of thousands like them—to deserve this end? On the Kiev metro, most people appear modest, polite, humble, gentle, and, occasionally, very kind. Over the last year many of them have also looked weary, worried, numb and exhausted. But I could not detect one iota of disparity in features, skin tone, bone structure, and the modest yet lively style of clothing between these riders on the metro in Kiev and the dead girl or the dead grandmother in the Donbass. Is it all because of someone wanting to be cool, and throwing a tantrum, because they didn't get to feel cool like they wanted?



Returning to America, the supposed Olympus of Cool, trudging through trash-strewn sidewalks of Queens, tramping along the endless alleys of Brooklyn, stepping into a dimly lit Manhattan office elevator and there encountering yet another Victoria Nuland lookalike, I began to understand. The year 2014 was the fatal year when it was suddenly revealed who is who and what is what, like a sharp knife slashing through an old, moldy, dusty curtain. Think not of conspiracies and dark, complex, sinister geopolitical plots. These went with a different generation, when people might have been greedy and cruel, but they also had the ability to distinguish reality from fiction. That was the era of western imperialism, which is long dead. Churchill and Roosevelt and Nixon are all dead; Kissinger is a nonagenarian. Their replacements do not think in terms of Realpolitik; they think in terms of optics, and dwell in a mirrored hall devised to generate an optical illusion of their hallucinated greatness.

Don't think of reality; instead, think of neurosis, obsession, delusion, perpetual psychic adolescence (real adolescence long gone and even menopause unacknowledged). From the midst of these there arises a white-hot fire of rage so fierce and so random that Nietzsche or Sartre, in their most diabolical existential revelations, could never have foreseen them. Thus is the new Zeitgeist, in this advanced stage of decay of the collective consciousness of America's cultural/political elite and their overseas groupies. It explains their reckless and maniacal love affair with the Ukrainian Maidan, their rekindled but now impotent rage against Russia, and their despicable, narcissistic indifference to the tragedy suffered by the population of the Ukraine.


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