“The degree to which this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics. Unlike every president in modern history, Trump did not place his assets in a blind trust.”

They Will Have To Die Now-mosul and the fall of the caliphate (James Verini):today Iraqi Sunnis worry the Islamic State will end as badly for them as Sicarri did for the Jews. In a 2012 Pew poll, half of muslims surveyed said they believed the end of the world is imminent. In my experience, rates are much higher in Iraq. Can you blame them? are they not, in sense, right already? What else to call forty years of wars and invasions, the death and displacement of millions, the atrocities, the massacres, the suicide bombings, the black flags fluttering across the landscape, if not portents of the Day of Judgement? Or, fucking hell, the day itself?

bad’ bad’ bad shit. If somehow by chance it escaped you by now, the incessant sexual abuser, rapist & incestuous grabber of pussies has left a considerable tangle of collateral. There are a lot of them, a lot! some more prominent/vocal than others, & with accounts that vary from low level vulgarity, to shocking, to out-and-out sick sexual criminality in the first degree. Trash’s response remains blanket –

“Nothing ever happened with any of these women. Totally made up nonsense to steal the election. Nobody has more respect for women than me.”

“Don Huber, professor emeritus of plant pathology at Purdue University, believes that glyphosate may be even more toxic than DDT. “Future historians may look back on our time and write about us … how willing we were to sacrifice our children and jeopardize future generations based on false promises and flawed science just to benefit the bottom line of commercial enterprise.”

“In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from the concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up. For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is – above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those that have power and those that don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market- friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.”

This is how the scale of the undiscovered country remains so hidden – because three quarters of the population look around them and see nothing but prosperity. There is a veil over the experience of the other quarter. When the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the House of Commons in 1988, ‘Everyone in the nation has benefited from increased prosperity – everyone’, she was drawing this veil deliberately across the truth, but for most people there is nothing cynical about it. For the most part, they simply do not see it”.

Heavy shit. A very important account of Egypt’s Arab Spring & the transformations that have occurred in its disastrous aftermath.

Perhaps the most pernicious toxin in the Chump Disintegration’s tank of disease – Javanka.

The Accusation-forbidden stories from inside North Korea:

“We will worship the Great Leader until the sun and moon go out”

Billed as the first piece of regime critical fiction from within North Korea by a dissident writer (the only hitherto examples of such documentation being from successful defectors), The Accusation encompasses seven separate stories that have been smuggled out to the world at large & found their way to print.

I needed a crash course in the governments involvement in antileft action in California, and solid sources to tell me how Manson could have been swept up in it. I focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective. According to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the leftwing movement by any means necessary – an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.