How Many Times Must Assange Be Proven Right Before People Start Listening?

There is a MEME out there that suggests this is a planned extraction to bring him safely home as a key witness. Certainly there has been an ongoing war against the DEEP STATE that has hardly bubbled up to the surface.

We have certainly observed that TRUMP has steadily tightened control over the apparatus of the STATE and he is clearly eroding entrenched interests.  Not bad for two years of effort.  The truth is that I have a list of challenges that he will ultimately take up.  I am also certain that he shares those challenges.  The problem he faces is that he can truly fight one war at a time and the GREAT WAR was eliminating the SWAMP and ultimately ensuring that it cannot happen again.

That means other battles must be played on a much different key.  Thus the assault on the free-press must include smashing the ownership (CIA) of the MSM and sharply decentralizing it.  Assange will act as a stalking horse for that battle.

.

How Many Times Must Assange Be Proven Right Before People Start Listening?
Fri, 05/24/2019 - 10:25

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-24/how-many-times-must-assange-be-proven-right-people-start-listening

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

And there it is. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged by the Trump administration’s Justice Department with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, carrying a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. Exactly as Assange and his defenders have been warning would happen for nearly a decade.



The indictment, like the one which preceded it last month with Assange’s arrest, is completely fraudulent, as it charges Assange with “crimes” that are indistinguishable from conventional journalistic practices. The charges are based on the same exact evidence which was available to the Obama administration, which as journalist Glenn Greenwald noted last year declined to prosecute Assange citing fear of destroying press freedoms.


Hanna Bloch-Wehba, an associate professor at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law, has called the indictment “a worst-case, nightmare, mayday scenario for First Amendment enthusiasts.” Bloch-Wehba explains that that the indictment’s “theories for liability rest heavily on Assange’s relationship with Manning and his tendency to encourage Manning to continue to bring WikiLeaks material” in a way that “is not readily distinguishable from many reporter-source relationships cultivated over a period of time.”

One of the versions of the New York Times’ report on the new Assange indictment, which has since been edited out but has been preserved here in a quote by Slate, said that “officials would not engage with questions about how the actions they said were felonies by Mr. Assange differed from ordinary investigative journalism. Notably, The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government.”

Press freedom organizations have been condemning these new espionage charges in stark and unequivocal language.


“Put simply, these unprecedented charges against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the most significant and terrifying threat to the First Amendment in the 21st century,” reads a statement by Freedom of the Press Foundation Executive Director Trevor Timm.

“The Trump administration is moving to explicitly criminalize national security journalism, and if this prosecution proceeds, dozens of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere would also be in danger. The ability of the press to publish facts the government would prefer remain secret is both critical to an informed public and a fundamental right. This decision by the Justice Department is a massive and unprecedented escalation in Trump’s war on journalism, and it’s no exaggeration to say the First Amendment itself is at risk. Anyone who cares about press freedom should immediately and wholeheartedly condemn these charges.”

“The indictment of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information is an attack on the First Amendment and a threat to all journalists everywhere who publish information that governments would like to keep secret,” reads a statement by Committee to Protect Journalists Executive Director Joel Simon.

“Press freedom in the United States and around the world is imperiled by this prosecution.”

“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information,” reads a statement by the ACLU.

“This is a direct assault on the First Amendment. These charges are an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism, establishing a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. The charges against Assange are equally dangerous for US journalists who uncover the secrets of other nations. If the US can prosecute a foreign publisher for violating our secrecy laws, there’s nothing preventing China, or Russia, from doing the same.”

Also opposing the new indictment, far too late, have been popular pundits from mainstream liberal news outlets.


“The Espionage indictment of Assange for publishing is an extremely dangerous, frontal attack on the free press. Bad, bad, bad,” tweeted MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

“Today the Trump DOJ becomes the first administration to ever charge a publisher with *espionage* — an assertive, unprecedented legal crackdown on the traditional rights and protections for publishers,” tweeted MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “That is a legal fact, regardless of one’s views of Julian Assange. The new Trump DOJ indictment treats activities most top newspapers engage in — gathering and publishing classified material — as criminal plotting, claiming Assange ‘conspired’ with and ‘aided and abetted’ his source in the pursuit of classified material.”

One need only to look at the outraged “this is a horrible take” commentsunderneath these tweets to see that these condemnations are coming long after the propaganda they’ve helped advance against WikiLeaks has seeped well into the bloodstream. It’s impossible to tell the same group of people day after day that Assange is an evil Nazi Putin puppet rapist who smells bad and mistreats his cat, and then persuade them to respond to a depraved Trump administration agenda against that same person with an appropriate level of resistance.


“I find no satisfaction in saying ‘I told you so’ to those who for 9 years have scorned us for warning this moment would come,” tweeted WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson. “I care for journalism. If you share my feeling you take a stand NOW. Either you are a worthless coward or you defend Assange, WikiLeaks and Journalism.”

Indeed, WikiLeaks staff and their supporters have been warning of this for many years, only to be dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists and rape apologists by smearers who insisted Assange was merely avoiding rape charges by taking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London back in 2012. There are many tweets by the WikiLeaks Twitter account warning that the US is trying to charge Assange under the Espionage Act all the way back in 2010, and they’ve been warning about it over and over again ever since, but nobody’s listened.


“The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride,” blareda Guardian headline last year by the odious James Ball, with the sub-header “The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US, charges in Sweden have been dropped — and for the embassy, he’s lost his value as an icon.”

Assange has been warning for years that this was coming. He’s been unequivocal about the fact that he was perfectly willing to participate in the Swedish investigation from the beginning and was only taking asylum with Ecuador due to fear of extradition and political prosecution in the US, which Ecuador explicitly stated were its reasons for granting him asylum. He was absolutely correct. He’s been correct the entire time. History has vindicated him. He was right and his critics were wrong.

We are also already seeing Assange vindicated in his warnings of what his prosecution would mean for the free press. He hasn’t even been extradited yet and we’re already seeing a greatly escalated war on journalism being implemented, with new developments in just the last few days like a San Francisco journalist now being charged with conspiracy for receiving internal documents from the San Francisco Police Department, and a prominent French journalist being summoned by police for reporting on corruption in the Macron government.

All this of course begs the question: what else has he been right about? Anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty who has previously had their doubts about Assange will necessarily begin asking themselves this question now. It’s worth reviewing the things Assange has been saying about Russia not being the source of the 2016 Democratic Party emails that WikiLeaks published, about what really happened in Sweden, and about his general understanding of what’s going on in the world with opaque and unaccountable power structures leading us all down a very dark and dangerous path.

If you open your mind to the possibility that Assange has been right about more than you’ve given him credit for previously, the implications can shatter your world. Give it a try. There’s no longer any legitimate reason not to.

* * *

Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

Assange Is Going To Get Railroaded By "Hanging" Judge?

This is likely a trip to the supreme court and can also end in a pardon.  At the same time he becomes a key witness against the DEEP STATE. how would you like to be a pawn?

Again this is all been orchestrated by Mil Intel.  Believe nothing that is public knowledge.  

The astounding surprise is that the whole world is voting in support of the TRUMP.  We are also seeing the Global reconstitution of CHRISTENDOM.   The MEME of TRUMP GOD EMPEROR has not been seen since the days of ALEXANDER and CAESAR in the WEST and more recently in the EAST.

TRUMP has lit a match that is spreading like wildfire globally as he confronts all entrenched power bases.



CIA Whistleblower: Assange Is Going To Get Railroaded By "Hanging" Judge

by Tyler Durden

Fri, 05/24/2019 - 11:25

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-24/cia-whistleblower-assange-going-get-railroaded-hanging-judge


A former CIA analyst-turned-whistleblower says that an extradited Julian Assange would have no chance of a fair trial in front of a federal judge who "reserves every national security case for
herself."


  

Judge Leonie Brinkema, Julian Assange

John Kiriakou, who was sentenced to 30 months in prison by Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema for telling ABC News about CIA waterboarding, told Russian state-sponsored RT "They are going to try to make an example of Julian," adding "He’s been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia. His judge was also my judge and ex-Snowden’s judge and [CIA whistleblower] Jeffry Sterling’s judge who reserves every national security case for herself."


"She is a hanging judge. She will not give him a fair trial. It’s impossible for Julian to receive a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia," addid Kiriakou.

Speaking from his own experience with the same district court, Kiriakou argued that it “gonna try to give him as many years as they can,” which means a “sentence of 30-40 years” if served concurrently.

The only avenue worth taking a shot on is to protest the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, notorious for its vague language, to the US Supreme Court, Kiriakou said.

“He’ll have immediate standing to appeal on the basis that the Espionage Act is unconstitutionally vague,” he said. “The Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue. That may be the way to go.” -RT

Why New York City Stopped Building Subways

It is an ugly story having to do with political expediency. What it certainly needed from an administrative point of view is a true regional authority able to properly capitalize and collect contribution from the State down. That authority would find it in its interest to promote full development at the stations and this can drive revenues as well in a beneficial partnership with the municipalities.

We have gone through a similar experience in Vancouver that works because matching funds are supplied by the Province and the Federal levels for the builds.  Now we are hearing of a possible sub or even a rail connection to the north shore and general planned utility has served to eliminate plenty of automobile commuting. 

I do think a regional authority that properly manages the general bus service can be a good start as is clearly shows us were the opportunities lie.

.. .

Why New York City Stopped Building Subways 

Nearly 80 years ago, a construction standstill derailed the subway’s progress, leading to its present crisis. This is the story, decade by decade.

by Jonathan English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

In the first decades of the 20th century, New York City experienced an unprecedented infrastructure boom. Iconic bridges, opulent railway terminals, and much of what was then the world’s largest underground and rapid transit network were constructed in just 20 years. Indeed, that subway system grew from a single line in 1904 to a network hundreds of miles long by the 1920s. It spread rapidly into undeveloped land across upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, bringing a wave of apartment houses alongside.

Then it stopped. Since December 16, 1940, New York has not opened another new subway line, aside from a handful of small extensions and connections. Unlike most other great cities, New York’s rapid transit system remains frozen in time: Commuters on their iPhones are standing in stations scarcely changed from nearly 80 years ago.

Indeed, in some ways, things have moved backward. The network is actually considerably smaller than it was during the Second World War, and today’s six million daily riders are facing constant delays, infrastructure failures, and alarmingly crowded cars and platforms.

Why did New York abruptly stop building subways after the 1940s? And how did a construction standstill that started nearly 80 years ago lead to the present moment of transit crisis?

Three broad lines of history provide an explanation. The first is the postwar lure of the suburbs and the automobile—the embodiment of modernity in its day. The second is the interminable battles of control between the city and the private transit companies, and between the city and the state government. The third is the treadmill created by rising costs and the buildup of deferred maintenance—an ever-expanding maintenance backlog that eventually consumed any funds made available for expansion.

To see exactly how and why New York’s subway went off the rails requires going all the way back to the beginning. What follows is a 113-year timeline of the subway’s history, organized by these three narratives (with the caveat that no history is fully complete). Follow along chronologically or thematically for the historical context of the system's sorry state, or use a playful “map” of the subway's decline.

1904: First subway opens

The private Interborough Rapid Transit company opened the first underground subway line in 1904, stretching from West Harlem to Grand Central. After taking over the existing elevated railways, it created a near-monopoly on rapid transit in Manhattan and the Bronx. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit company dominated the elevated transit business in that borough, as well as its connections to Manhattan.

1913: The “Dual Contracts”

In an agreement called the “Dual Contracts,” the city entrusted the two private subway companies with a radical expansion of the system. Almost immediately, municipal leaders regretted the decision. Many were dissatisfied with the financial return from the investment of over $200 million—more than half the total cost of construction.

The dispute went beyond mere finance, however: The subway became a symbol of the battle between public and private interest, and a populist touchstone for a succession of mayors. Their most important leverage was control of the subway fare: By refusing to let the private companies charge more than a nickel for decades, inflation meant that in 1948 riders were effectively paying less than half what they had been paying in 1904.

1922: Independent Subway

Opposition to the private transit duopoly was the centerpiece of Mayor John Hylan’s administration. He announced a vast new “Independent” subway system, to be built and owned by the municipal government. Unlike earlier subway lines, which pushed deep into undeveloped territory, many of the IND lines closely paralleled existing private routes in order to compete with them.

The real estate industry was one of the most important constituencies supporting the development of the subway system in the early years. Developers enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the subway, which was extended into empty fields that were then swiftly and profitably blanketed with apartment houses whose residents then filled the trains. With the construction of the IND, that bargain began to break down—they saw new subways as more of a tax burden than a generator of big speculative profits. 

1939: World’s Fair

As visitors to New York’s 1939 World’s Fair gazed on General Motors’ vision of the world to come at its Futurama exhibit, they didn’t see new trains and subways. Instead, they saw cars traveling quickly on wide new superhighways to bungalows in a bucolic landscape. The car was viewed as the height of modernity; many dismissed public transit as a grimy relic of an earlier age. The postwar federal government would spend what it took to make the suburban dream come true. 

 

1940: City takes over the private subways

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took advantage of the disastrous finances of the BMT and IRT, ravaged by the Depression and the ban on fare increases, to acquire both companies. That strained the city’s resources, with a total cost of $326,248,000. The cost was not much lower than that of building the entire IND network, and while it did unify the system, it didn’t produce a single additional mile of subway.

1940: Sixth Avenue subway opens

The Sixth Avenue line was one of the core segments of the IND’s Manhattan network. It was to be followed soon after by the Second Avenue line, but New Yorkers ended up waiting over 70 years for even a tiny segment of that project to be completed. The Sixth Avenue subway was an astonishing engineering achievement: The work had to weave around both the PATH train tunnel and the supports for the busy elevated line above. Such wizardry did not come cheaply, and it was emblematic of the high standards—and costs—on all the new IND lines. 

The IND lines built by the municipal government cost an average of $9 million per mile, which was 125 percent higher than the earlier “Dual Contracts” lines. The cost per mile of Sixth Avenue was about four times as high as the original subway. This pattern of high construction cost persists to the present day.

1946: Subway ridership peaks

Subway ridership has never been as high as it was in 1946, and a precipitous decline began in the late 1940s as automobiles became widely available. The busiest station in the system, Times Square, saw its ridership drop from 102,511,841 riders in 1946 to 66,447,227 riders in 1953. Subway expansion would become increasingly difficult to justify as New Yorkers were abandoning the existing system—even though outward expansion was just what was needed to keep the subway as the region’s primary mode of transportation. 

1947: End of the five-cent fare

With the subways now in municipal hands, a doubling of the fare was finally negotiated. Years of deferred maintenance by the cash-strapped private companies had become increasingly evident. But by then, fare hikes only exacerbated the problem of declining ridership. 

The current New York City subway map altered to highlight all of the lines whose construction started after World War II. Additional lines not shown were converted or repurposed from existing railway lines.Photo by Jonathan English/Madison McVeigh//MTA/CityLab

1951: Transit Bond issue

After 1945, the City of New York found itself in constrained financial circumstances. The growth and modernization of its infrastructure necessitated substantial borrowing, but the city was already burdened by an enormous Depression-era debt and faced a state-mandated debt limit. In November 1948, the Board of Transportation recommended that the city seek a $500 million exemption from the debt limit to permit the revival of the Second Avenue Subway plan, along with several outer-borough projects like the Utica Avenue line that mayors since have continued to tout, most recently Bill de Blasio. (Indeed, the wish list for subway construction has changed little to the present day.) The request passed in a statewide referendum on November 6, 1951. 

But rather than being used as promised to continue the prewar pattern of expansion, most of the money was instead diverted to eroding the mountain of deferred maintenance that had built up during the war and the Depression. 

1953: Creation of the Transit Authority

To ensure that fare policy never again became captive to electoral politics, many civic leaders advocated for the creation of an independent state authority to administer the city’s transit system, comparable to the Port Authority or Robert Moses’ Triborough authority. The subways were thus handed over to the state-created Transit Authority. 

But the institutional reshuffle did not resolve the fundamental financial problems of a system; ridership continued to decline and maintenance remained deferred. The state and municipal governments were both unwilling to provide the subsidy that would have been needed to adequately sustain the system. Unlike highways, transit was still seen as a business that should make a profit, and not as a public service. 

1956: The Interstate Highway Act

With the encouragement of President Eisenhower, Congress passed an act providing lavish federal funding for a cross-country network of expressways. The 1950s saw the construction of over a dozen major expressways and bridges in the New York region. This construction program rivaled or even exceeded the earlier subway boom. And unlike the subways, all of it benefited from federal largesse. Celebrating the completion of the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx, Mayor Robert Wagner boasted, “This two and one-half mile stretch of elevated expressway cost more than $34 million, of which 90 percent was put up by the federal government.”

1950s: Growth of the suburbs

By the postwar period, the majority of population growth in the New York region was taking place outside of the five boroughs. New York City no longer dominated the region to the same extent that it once had, and the growing political power of the suburbs hindered funding requests for subway projects that many suburbanites believed did not benefit them. Manhattan and Brooklyn shrank from 1940 to 1960, while Nassau and Suffolk counties essentially tripled in population. 

Yet New York City still planned subway projects as if the suburbs didn’t exist. In the postwar period, most greenfield real estate development shifted out of the city entirely and into the surrounding counties. Instead of being built around transit, new developments were centered on expressways.

1965: Creation of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority

In an effort to address the geographic and financial limitations of the Transit Authority, Governor Nelson Rockefeller created a new regional authority that would ultimately control the subways and commuter railways. It was given the toll revenue from the Triborough Authority’s bridges and tunnels, which had been the financial basis of Robert Moses’ bureaucratic empire, to provide the revenue needed to subsidize the transit system. 

But while the new authority’s service area stretched beyond the five boroughs for the first time, it never made efforts to turn the subway and commuter railroads into a combined regional transit system. (For such a model, consider Paris’ Regional Express Network). New York may be an extraordinarily transit-oriented city, but once the municipal boundary is crossed into Nassau and Westchester, transit—especially other than commutes to Manhattan—is near as foreign a concept as it is in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. 

1968: Program for Action

The new MTA announced the last of its comprehensive plans to expand the network on the pharaonic scale of prewar construction. It proposed a number of new lines in the outer boroughs, a full Second Avenue subway, and a “superexpress” line along the LIRR in Queens. Construction began on several of the projects, but even those were only completed in truncated form or abandoned entirely. Never again would the MTA seriously plan major network expansion. Instead, the only discussion is of projects like the new Second Avenue line or 7 train extension, which are of a scale that would barely have registered on the city’s consciousness in the 1910s and ‘20s.

1973: Closure of the Third Avenue Elevated

As transit ridership dropped from prewar level, segments of the city’s subway and elevated system were abandoned entirely. While elevated lines had previously been closed to be replaced with adjacent subway lines, they were now closed without their promised replacements ever being built, including, infamously, the Second Avenue elevated line in Manhattan. The Bronx segment of the Third Avenue Elevated was the last major segment of the system to be shut down without replacement. 

1975: Fiscal crisis and Second Avenue abandonment

The centerpiece of the Program for Action, the Second Avenue Subway, had begun construction in the early 1970s. But with the complete disintegration of the city’s finances, construction simply could no longer be supported. The disconnected tunnel segments have lain underused beneath the streets ever since. Several bond issues intended to finance subway expansion had also been defeated, and the limited funds that were available ended up being diverted to the system’s dilapidated trains and stations.

1988: Opening of three-stop Jamaica extension

The 1968 Program for Action proposed a number of projects intended to improve subway service in some of the neighborhoods that had sprouted up in the postwar years, particularly in Queens. Unfortunately, few of the projects were built. One small remnant was the extension of the E train to Jamaica; the J and Z trains were also moved off a nearby elevated line into the new tunnel along Archer Avenue. But a combination of limited funds and community opposition derailed more substantial expansion plans. Even simple extensions along existing rail corridors had become out of reach.

Photo by Jonathan English/Madison McVeigh/CityLab

2017: First phase of the Second Avenue subway opens

The Second Avenue Subway has been part of the city’s transit plans since the creation of the IND in the 1920s. It was intended to replace two elevated lines that shut down in the 1940s and 1950s respectively. An attempt to begin construction was abandoned due to the financial crisis of the 1970s and only a few tunnel segments were built. Over the years, plans were scaled down, and its length was trimmed to only three stops on the Upper East Side. The prospect for future phases remains unknown.

Beyond: The high cost of forgotten history

Many other world cities also slowed their pace of subway construction in the early postwar years. They, too, succumbed to the appeal of the automobile, or struggled with debt and destruction accumulated during the Depression and Second World War. But by the 1960s, this had changed. London opened two new Underground lines in the 1960s and 1970s. Paris began its vast RER project to connect all of its commuter rail lines, linking the rapidly growing suburbs with the historic core. 

By contrast, New York’s subway system had deteriorated to such a dismal state that nearly all available funds had to be diverted to basic maintenance and overhaul. The city’s declining population and fiscal troubles made expansion nearly impossible. 

Now, New York’s economy has turned around, the population is growing, and the city is in a relatively good financial position. Still, the maintenance backlog is devouring capital spending. Staggering subway construction costs—by far the highest in the world—mean that whatever funding is available does not go very far at all. Old problems that precluded subway construction in the past echo in the present day: There is still no meaningful integration between the subway and suburban transit, the mayor and governor carry on the same types of jurisdictional battles, and the subway has not managed to step off the treadmill of deferred repairs. These problems have deep roots, and overcoming them will not be a simple matter. 

Most challenging of all is the shockingly high cost of subway construction. Anyone would expect costs to have risen since the early days of the system, but the cost of the proposed Second Avenue line is nearly eight times what a comparable project cost in the 1980s, when adjusted for inflation.* Procurement problems and labor relations issues are partial explanations, but the most important factor may be the wholesale loss of experience resulting from the decade-long gaps in construction. One of the distinct characteristics of European systems with much lower building costs is continuous construction: Every time they complete a new line, they are able to apply the lessons from the one previous. But in New York, from the opening of the Archer Avenue Line in 1988 to the construction of the 7 train extension and Second Avenue lines in the 2010s, virtually all the experience and knowledge that had been built up in subway construction had atrophied. 

The same situation risks repeating itself, as the Second Avenue construction has been completed with no new construction immediately on the horizon. The subway’s cost-induced construction paralysis becomes more severe with every passing decade. We must learn from history in order to break it.

Gramsci and the persistence of the Communist MEME.

 Read this and cringe.  It is now and only now earning its richly deserved blow back.  Essentially in the USA in particular, the academic world of the liberal arts has been hijacked by both secret and overt Marxists who have worked directly to undermine our culture.

I have never strongly said this but this nonsense has to be cleaned out of our whole academic world as rigorously as possible.  It is based on a false narrative that their world view is progressive when it is not.  Yet they are unable to eliminate poverty which alone informs us that they are all wrong headed.

They naturally recruit the under belly of potential  student talent.  Those that can get in but are deeply unprepared for the heavy lifting most academic work demands. Then they are easily recruited into their power dream.  Think Obama in particular who is an excellent example
  .

Dan McCall wrote

I didn't realize Mayor Pete Buttigieg's recently deceased father Joeseph Buttigieg was the Antonio Gramsci scholar/cheerleader at my grandfather's school, Notre Dame. 

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist that was jailed and killed by Mussolini's regime. As an undergraduate Gramsci (pronounced GRAM-she) fascinated me because of his unique take on Marxism which was focused on understanding how communists might conquer the West. At that time, the Bolshevik revolution proved to many like Gramsci that the forces of economic production weren't the only thing that could cause a revolution of the workers. CULTURE had as much to do with it.

In the 20s Lenin challenged theorists to consider how a revolution could be fomented across the West and in other places. More infamous theorists that found "local recipes" for a communist revolution like Mao may have been more "successful" historically, but Gramsci's analysis - focused on the Christian West - simply took a bit longer to see fruition. In fact, Gramsci's analysis became the fountainhead of what we today call "postmodernist" theory. 

Gramsci saw Christianity as by far the greatest obstacle to communist revolution in Europe and America. As a good Marxist, Gramsci wasn't an idle theorist by any means, his program was very specific on how a "united communist front" should go down - by having a central political goal, and then challenging, subverting, and replacing all cultural institutions with a new "communist hegemony" as he called it to counter the middle-class capitalist culture and ethical superstructure that held up capitalism.

In conquering the West, his the primary target was the Catholic church and Christianity in general, but all social institutions would have to be infiltrated or built anew to make culture accept a centrally planned communist paradise of the workers. That meant EVERY institution. The family must be destroyed and rebuilt. The arts must be remade. The academy, press, and everything else. Subterfuge was the most effective means according to Gramsci. He called it cultura capillare - or capillary culture. So activists should enter cultural institutions through the capillaries and then move to the very arteries of the body politic to either take it over, or kill off the organ if it threatens the goals of the revolution.

Universities are one of the clearest examples of Gramscism in action here in the United States. Gramsci's views have fully permeated academia and the view that every facet of society must be judged and dealt with against the political goal of a fundamental reorganization of society from the culture up. 

In the 1990s as an undergrad, reading Gramsci hit me hard. I recognized his almost ubiquitous influence throughout academia, his copious references in almost everything I read in the social sciences, and the deliberate influence his ideological offspring had in the arts. In a very real sense, reading Gramsci made me choose to create Liberty Maniacs. I was completely convinced, and still am, that culture leads policy, and that confronting authoritarianism through art and culture was my path. 

Buttigieg'a candidacy now more than disquiets me. He was reared as a Gramsci communist from the leading Gramsci cheerleader in the world. He went from a mayor of a small town, to basically #3 in Iowa and New Hampshire in the primaries right now. Cultura capillare isn't some idle notion. It's a central aspect of Gramsci's 4 strategies for conquering the West. Gramsci's radicalism is powerful stuff. It's not something that Joseph Buttigieg would devote his life to creating the International Gramsci Society and translating his prison notebooks and not pass down to his only son.

Mueller's last kick

 

Do watch this youtube report on the Mueller Press Conference.  Someone commented that he was practically crying to say the things he said.  That could be well be true.  There was zero reason for this press conference.  Thus he may well have been forced to the flame.

Otherwise his reported explicitly in the written text that no American colluded with Russians and how that blanket exoneration fails to include Trump escapes me.

In the meantime the world has gone on and certainly no longer cares about DEM lies regarding Trump.  In fact they must be bleeding supporters by these tactics now. You do not win elections on hate.  What is worse, their own polls are garbage or they would never have been caught out so often in the past.

Robert Mueller Wishes You’d Read His Report


The special counsel is a man out of time, a by-the-book throwback who expects Americans to absorb carefully worded documents. 2:25 PM ET

Ken White
Attorney and former federal prosecutor
Jim Bourg / Reuters


Special Counsel Robert Mueller wishes that you’d read his report. He’s not angry; he’s just disappointed.


When the Department of Justice announced Mueller’s press conference Wednesday morning, the media exploded in a frenzy of wild speculation. What new evidence might he reveal? Would he endorse impeachment? Would he complain about the administration’s response to his report? No, he would not. Nobody who has paid attention to Mueller’s pattern of behavior expected him to do anything of the sort. Instead, Mueller assumed the pained tones of a teacher who must read the instructions to the class again. The answers to all of our questions, he intoned repeatedly, are in his report.


Mueller characterized Wednesday’s appearance as merely an opportunity to summarize what he had done on the occasion of the formal conclusion of his investigation and his return to private life. But even if he did not explicitly set out to quell rumors and conspiracy theories, his calm recitation ought to have that effect. (Whether it will is another matter.)


Notably, Mueller undermined a scandalous book before it could even reach the shelves. This week The Guardian reported that in his forthcoming tell-all, Siege, Michael Wolff claims that Mueller’s office drafted an obstruction-of-justice indictment against President Donald Trump. Mueller, Wolff claims, wrestled with the question of whether it’s permissible to indict a sitting president. But Mueller unequivocally refuted that accusation today without even mentioning it. He repeated what he wrote in his report: He views the Department of Justice policy against indicting a sitting president as binding, and believes that was “not an option we could consider.” That’s no surprise. Federal prosecutors decide to indict and then draft the indictment, not the other way around. Wolff’s story was never credible.


Mueller elaborated that since he could not indict the president, and because there was no other mechanism for the executive branch to accuse him of a crime, it was inappropriate to offer a conclusion about whether or not Trump obstructed justice. This, too, was straight from his report. The only glimmer of a new idea today was Mueller’s comment that indicting a sitting president is unconstitutional. It was not clear whether he was simply stating the Department of Justice position or endorsing it, but for a rule-follower like Mueller, that’s a distinction without a difference.

The now ex–special counsel also disappointed anyone hoping to hear kvetching about Attorney General William Barr. We know that Mueller expressed his concerns to Barr in March about Barr’s initial summary, which Mueller suggested did not adequately capture the report’s substance. But Mueller refrained from criticizing Barr, noting that he did not question Barr’s “good faith” in how he went about the process. This was not a surprise either. Barr has sounded more and more like a Trump partisan since he released the Mueller report, but he followed the rules when he received, evaluated, minimally redacted, and eventually released it.


Wednesday’s press conference was consistent with Mueller’s image as a classic just-the-facts-ma’am G-man, a persona that frustrates anti-Trump partisans who dreamed of him as an avenging superhero. But a bit of passion shone through in two areas.

First, Mueller was adamant that his team had not exonerated the president of obstruction of justice. “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” he said rather sternly. Mueller also implicitly rebuked those who dismiss obstruction as a mere “process crime” unworthy of attention, saying that it “strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.” If he hoped this notion would take root in the Trump administration, it was in vain; Trump immediately claimed that Mueller found insufficient evidence of obstruction.

Second, Mueller seemed concerned that Americans have focused on what Trump did rather than on what Russia did. He described his conclusions about overt Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and closed by repeating that “there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.” Mueller’s frustration is justified: Russia’s aggressive misconduct seems to have been lost in the shuffle.

Mueller is a man out of time. This is the age of alternatively factual tweets and sound bites; he’s a by-the-book throwback who expects Americans to read and absorb carefully worded 400-page reports. Has he met us? His high standards sometimes manifest as touching naïveté. “I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner,” Mueller said today, explaining that his report was his testimony and that Congress should not expect him to answer questions with any new information.

If he thinks that reprimand will deter Congress , he doesn’t grasp why Congress would summon him to testify. Our representatives don’t need the answers as much as they need to be seen on camera asking the questions. The rough beast of 2020 slouches toward us. Names can be made, primaries won and lost, and profiles elevated by those questions, whether they support Trump or condemn him. Washington is no place for a rule-follower.

Bizarre celestial object spotted is one of the rarest in the galaxy

 


 This appears to be the likely supernova event and that alone is important as it allows us to investigate its ongoing evolution.

We predict no more than several in our galaxy, so this discovery is rare and also important. 

Sooner or later all our hardware in space will completely map our own galaxy to a level equivalent to this discovery and the sister objects will show up.  All that continues to take time...

Bizarre celestial object spotted is one of the rarest in the galaxy

Michael Irving


https://newatlas.com/rarest-celestial-object-white-dwarf-merger/59786/?


 

 A white dwarf star, which is at the heart of the strange new object(Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI) and M. Barstow (University of Leicester))View gallery - 3 images




The cosmos is full of strange things, like planets made of diamond, mysterious radio bursts and quasars that shine with the light of 600 trillion Suns. Now astronomers have spotted a bizarre star that may prove to be one of the rarest objects ever, with maybe as few as five or six of them in the galaxy.


The object in question is known as J005311, located in the constellation Cassiopeia about 10,000 light-years from Earth. Found in images from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, J005311 is a bright star nestled inside a gas nebula, which seems to be emitting only infrared radiation and no visible light. That's quite a strange combination, which prompted the team to look into its origins.









By analyzing the spectrum of the radiation coming off the nebula and the star, the team found that the object is even weirder than it appears. It has no hydrogen nor helium, and the star in the center is some 40,000 times brighter than the Sun. Stranger still, it was producing an incredibly strong stellar wind – a zippy 16,000 km (10,000 mi) per second. For reference, the fastest stellar winds coming off hot, huge stars usually top out at about 2,000 km (1,200 mi) per second.


The most likely explanation for all this weirdness is that J005311 is the result of two long-dead stars that merged and reignited. These stars would have been born very Sun-like, but then shrunk and cooled into white dwarfs after they'd burned off all their hydrogen and helium. Only then would they have merged into one white dwarf, which then boosts their mass high enough to kick-start the stellar furnace again, this time fusing heavier elements.


This merged white dwarf accounts for the lack of hydrogen and helium, and the extreme brightness. As for the high-speed winds, it's believed that merged white dwarfs have very strong rotating magnetic fields, which would act like a turbine that accelerates the wind.









But perhaps the most intriguing thing about this object is that it defied the odds to be born in the first place.


"Such an event is extremely rare," says Götz Gräfener, corresponding author of the study. "There are probably not even half a dozen such objects in the Milky Way, and we have discovered one of them."


It turns out that J005311 might not just be rare in space – it's rare in time. The team believes that the two white dwarfs collided only a few thousand years ago – the blink of an eye, cosmically-speaking – and the resulting star probably only has that long left to live. Once it fuses the remaining elements into iron, it will collapse under its own gravity. This will be accompanied by a supernova explosion and leave a neutron star behind at its core.

Study suggests marijuana-derived CBD can play a role in treating heroin addiction

this is a pretty light study, but it provided a powerful indication that those long affected are able to benefit.

None of this leads to a blanket recommendation but we are getting there. The negatives are not showing up.

All good news.


Study suggests marijuana-derived CBD can play a role in treating heroin addiction 

Rich Haridy A study has found CBD reduced a person's cravings for heroin and anxiety associated with the addiction(Credit: kaiskynet@gmail.com/Depositphotos)


https://newatlas.com/heroin-opioid-marijuana-cbd-cravings-anxiety/59787/

A preliminary study from researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai suggests cannabidiol, or CBD, can reduce cravings and anxiety in subjects with a history of heroin use. The study doesn't imply CBD alone can help break an opioid addiction but instead points to the marijuana ingredient acting as a tool to help reduce cravings in those struggling with heroin addiction.

The small, but rigorous, trial recruited 42 former heroin users, all currently reporting as drug-free. The trial explored whether doses of CBD altered users' psychological and physiological responses when confronted with drug-related cues such as a video showing heroin-related paraphernalia. 

Subjects were administered one of two different strengths of CBD solution, or a placebo. They were then shown two short videos, one consisting of neutral scenes of nature, and the other filled with cues designed to trigger heroin cravings. A number of different measures were used to record the subjects' responses to the video cues, from self-reported senses of anxiety and drug cravings, to physiological signs such as skin temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels in saliva.

The tests were repeated daily for three days, with the subjects' responses to the cues tracked across the test days and then again a week after the final CBD treatment. The results were compelling, with the CBD groups showing significant reductions across all measured responses compared to the placebo group. The CBD particularly reduced salivary cortisol levels and heart rate responses to the drug-associated video cues. Even more importantly, the effects seemed to hold for at least the seven days following the final CBD dose.

Needless to say, there are significant limitations in how we can interpret these results. The study focused on subjects with well-managed addictions so it is unclear how useful CBD would be for a person acutely suffering from a relapse. The trial was also conducted over a very short time frame with no indication as to if CBD has any tangible effect on whether a person would relapse over time in real-world conditions.

However, these limitations do not detract from the value of the research. There is a significant volume of observational study showing a correlation between cannabis legalization and reduced opioid consumption. This new randomized control trial does offer a clue to help explain those epidemiological studies. If CBD does indeed effectively help reduce opioid cravings and anxiety then it certainly would explain the observation that when US states legalize marijuana, either medicinal or recreational, a drop in opioid prescriptions can be subsequently seen.

Yasmin Hurd, first author on the new research and director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai, suggests this study paves the way for exciting new pathways into better understanding what brain mechanisms contribute to addiction relapses, and one of the team's follow-up studies is homing in on the brain mechanisms that CBD influences. Hurd also notes that if the results from this study can be further verified in wider trials, CBD could become a useful tool to help doctors better treat those subjects trying to move past opioid addiction.

"Our findings indicate that CBD holds significant promise for treating individuals with heroin use disorder," says Hurd. "A successful non-opioid medication would add significantly to the existing addiction medication toolbox to help reduce the growing death toll, enormous health care costs, and treatment limitations imposed by stringent government regulations amid this persistent opioid epidemic."

Placental stem cells found to regenerate heart cells after heart attack

 

 

 

This is promising as we have had little progress through stem cells.  Yet my own experience informs us that recovery does occur over a number of years.   In my case my expulsion fraction after a major heart attack went from an early thirty percent or borderline heart failure to fifty percent after a decade which is borderline normal.

 

The real problem is heart failure or below the thirty percent line.  This will need an intervention of some sort including transplants.  Thus an intervention that can use injected placental cells becomes compelling.

 

 So it is all good news on this front and a potential breakthrough. .

 

 

Placental stem cells found to regenerate heart cells after heart attack
 

Michael Irving

 
https://newatlas.com/placenta-stem-cells-repair-heart-attack/59785/

 

 

 Placental stem cells have been found to regenerate damaged heart cells after a heart attack(Credit: lightsource/Depositphotos)

Broken hearts are notoriously difficult to repair. After a heart attack this vital organ remains damaged, which can eventually lead to heart failure and death. Now, researchers have managed to use placental stem cells to regenerate heart cells in mice, which could lead to groundbreaking new treatments for heart attack victims.

According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases are the biggest killers of people in modern times, and it's largely due to the heart's inability to repair itself properly. Even if a person survives the initial cardiac arrest event, scar tissue renders the heart less effective at pumping blood and more likely to suffer future heart attacks.

Stem cells have long been investigated as a solution, but despite their regenerative prowess in other parts of the body, they've not been as successful in matters of the heart. Injecting stem cells into the heart can cause complications, and it turns out that cardiac stem cells might not even exist. Other studies have tried using stem cell "messengers" instead, or converting other heart cells into beating heart cells.


For the new study, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai examined Cdx2 cells, a kind of stem cell derived from the placenta that has previously shown particular promise in repairing heart tissue.


The team tested them out on three groups of male mice that had suffered heart attacks. One group received a treatment of Cdx2 stem cells, a second group received other placenta cells while the third just had saline as a control. MRIs were taken of all the mice immediately after the heart attacks and again three months after their treatment.


By the three-month mark, every mouse in the Cdx2 group showed regeneration of healthy heart tissue, forming new cardiomyocytes – the heart muscle cells that beat – as well as new blood vessels. Meanwhile the other two groups showed no sign of regeneration, and many went into heart failure.


The results are exciting for a number of reasons. Alongside all the regenerative abilities of embryonic stem cells, the team found that placental stem cells also have a few extra abilities of their own that makes them more suited to treatments.


"Cdx2 cells have historically been thought to only generate the placenta in early embryonic development, but never before were shown to have the ability to regenerate other organs, which is why this is so exciting," says Hina Chaudhry, principal investigator of the study. "These findings may also pave the way to regenerative therapy of other organs besides the heart. They almost seem like a super-charged population of stem cells, in that they can target the site of an injury and travel directly to the injury through the circulatory system and are able to avoid rejection by the host immune system."


On top of that, since they're derived from the placenta they can skirt the potential ethical issues of using embryonic stem cells, and should be far easier to obtain in useable amounts.


"We have been able to isolate Cdx2 cells from term human placentas also; therefore, we are now hopeful that we can design a better human stem cell treatment for the heart than we have seen in the past," says Chaudhry. "Past strategies tested in humans were not based on stem cell types that were actually shown to form heart cells, and use of embryonic stem cells for this goal is associated with ethics and feasibility concerns. Placentas are routinely discarded around the world and thus almost a limitless source."

Rising Global Communion based on the Centrality of Popular National Traditionalism

 

 This is a huge story and it has been totally misunderstood.  First you must understand that all National sentiment in the historic past was harnessed by the Military as an critical organizing principal.  It still is of course.  It is now becoming far less necessary, not least because mass armies equate mass suicide while hyper trained specialists dominate all war.

Yet mass sentiment is very real and is a natural result of all education and community involvement. What this sentiment is not is fascist or socialist at all.  It is a cultural movement that also self invests without any encouragement.  Attempting to politically label it is wrong.

What is now happening though is that Trump has lit a spark that is bringing this natural movement out globally.  It never was his intent and it simply was not obvious.  Yet he can now ride it as should all like minded political leaders who oppose the egregious 'socialist' MEME to grabbing power.

This global movement opens the door to a global political entity acting as a Communion of Nations in which Hierarchy particularly is eschewed.  I emphasize this because the idea of hierarchy has poorly served us for thousands of years because it glorifies an individual above all without establishing a natural system of succession.  The universal application of the rule of twelve should obviate all that at all levels from the natural community upward.

Great leaders need to arise to meet great needs, but the moment those needs are met his task is well done.  We need a true communion of Europe that includes Russia.  This could be shepherded by Putin in particular who has already ignited a vigorous Christendom in Russia...

This thinking applies everywhere else as the Military MEME wanes everywhere.

Why populists could struggle to capitalise on EU elections success 

Populists won 29% of seats, analysis shows, but divisions could blunt their influence

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels 

Tue 28 May 2019 13.40 BST Last modified on Tue 28 May 2019 20.58 BST 

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Matteo Salvini’s plans to create a far-right supergroup have suffered a setback. Photograph: Vincenzo Livieri/LaPresse via Zuma Press/Rex/Shutterstock 

Populists have won nearly three in 10 seats in the European parliament, according to new analysis, which also shows how anti-establishment parties fell short of apocalyptic predictions. 

Analysis shared with the Guardian reveals that populists, spanning the far right to the radical left, won 29% of seats in European elections, their best ever score, but not the populist wave some had predicted would upend the EU. 

Matthijs Rooduijn, a political sociologist at the University of Amsterdam, said populists had won 218 of the parliament’s 751 seats. All kinds of populism were on the rise: left, right, as well as groups such as the Brexit party, which cannot be easily categorised. 

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Populist success was heavily dependent on breakthroughs in just three countries beset by political volatility: the Brexit party in the UK, Matteo Salvini’s far-right League in Italy, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical-left France Unbowed. 

These groups will remain divided in the European parliament, blunting their influence. But their greater numbers in Brussels and Strasbourg, combined with the deepening fragmentation of European politics, will make it harder for traditional parties to find a majority. 

In the outgoing parliament, populists have 24% of seats, compared with 9% in 1999. 

The rise of populism was driven not only by immigration, European integration and economic issues, Rooduijn said, but the narrative that an “evil elite” was in charge. “This evil elite can be a national elite, it can be Brussels elite or European elite.” 

Many, but not all, populist parties are sceptical or hostile to the European project, he said. “Euroscepticism is framed in a populist way, so it is about Brussels technocrats, who do not listen to ordinary citizens.” 

Rooduijn, working with his University of Amsterdam colleague Philipp Mendoza, analysed election results across the EU’s 28 member states and matched them to the PopuList, an overview of populist parties compiled by political scientists and supported by the Guardian. 

The European elections resulted in traditional centre-right and centre-left blocs losing their majority for the first time in the 40-year history of the directly elected parliament. Greens and liberals made striking gains, ending the cosy consensus of centre right and left. 

While populists could continue to grow, their fortunes could also change quickly, Rooduijn said. “It depends on the topics that are salient in the media, it depends on the performance of the leader, all these things matter a great deal and it can really lead to big shifts in success or losses over very short periods of time.” 

He predicted that the far right would continue to advance, because politics was focused on immigration and EU integration, while the far right was trying to frame action over the climate crisis as “something that the elite is doing to ordinary citizens”. 

Non-populist politicians will dominate the next European parliament but will be forced to confront more opponents who paint them as an out-of-touch elite..

“Mainstream parties in general are still struggling to deal with populism,” Rooduijn said. “In the beginning they tried to ignore them, then they have tried to compete with their rhetoric [and] many mainstream right parties have moved towards the radical right; they have not become radical right, but they have become more strict on immigration, more sceptic on European integration.” 

Macron was trying a different but “dangerous” strategy by becoming the “anti-populist”, he said. “If the most important division within European politics becomes the ‘anti-populists versus populist’ movement, and the anti-populists will not be very successful any more, that will lead to the idea that the only real alternative is the populists.”.very successful any more, that will lead to the idea that the only real alternative is the populists.”

Populist MEPs will remain divided between different groups in the European parliament, which will blunt their ability to secure senior posts and set an agenda..

Salvini had hoped to create a “League of Leagues” that would become the third-largest group in the European parliament, leapfrogging the Eurosceptic British Conservatives’ group, and the Liberals, who hold third and fourth place in the outgoing parliament. 

But this looks unlikely. “Even if [the populist far right] come together they will be divided on every issue,” the political scientist Cas Mudde told a recent event in Brussels..

The Salvini alliance would unite League MEPs with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Alternative for Germany. But hopes of a far-right supergroup have suffered a setback after the Danish People’s party haemorrhaged votes and Geert Wilders’ Freedom party in the Netherlands lost all its seats..

Another member, Austria’s far-right Freedom party, was hit by a modest decline in its vote after a corruption scandal forced its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, to resign, precipitating the collapse of government and removal of the chancellor..

Mudde said the Austrian scandal was likely to have a bigger impact on changing politicians’ calculations, rather than voters. “It will make other parties look again at their local far-right party and think: ‘Should I really make a coalition with them, if I only get a few seats extra?’ It makes the far right a little bit more of a liability again.”.

Nigel Farage, whose Brexit party is one of the biggest national parties in the European parliament, hopes to resuscitate his Eurosceptic group, Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, in which he is allied to Italy’s Five Star Movement. He has previously ruled out working with Le Pen..

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is expected to remain allied to British Tories in the European Conservatives and Reformists group..

Viktor Orbán, currently suspended from the centre-right European People’s party, pending an investigation, has not revealed whether he intends to quit and join forces with the far right.