its a curious bit of fiction at best here in which the empire creates a 'threat' and then solves it without the adversary doing anything at all beyond standing still the whole time;



The acting US defence secretary has claimed that the alleged threat from Iran has receded as the result of an American show of force in the Middle East.
“We’ve put on hold the potential for attacks on Americans,” Patrick Shanahan told reporters before briefing Congress on the situation in the Persian Gulf and the military deployments that the US said were a response to a danger of imminent attack.
The arrival of an aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships was recently accelerated, and B-52 bombers were sent to Qatar. Tensions increased with mysterious sabotage attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf, and drone strikes on Saudi oil installations, claimed by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Nerves in the region were put even more on edge on Sunday by Donald Trump’s tweeted threat that any conflict with the US would mean “the official end of Iran”.
The remarks from Shanahan appeared to be a sign that tensions were easin
Asked what he meant by saying that the threat was “on hold”, the acting defence secretary said: “There haven’t been any attacks on Americans. I would consider that a hold.
“That doesn’t mean that the threats that we’ve previously identified have gone away,” Shanahan added. “Our prudent response, I think, has given the Iranians time to recalculate. I think our response was a measure of our will and our resolve that we will protect our people and our interests in the region.”
The Trump administration did not make public the intelligence it claimed showed an imminent Iranian threat to the US in the Middle East...........http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=188704

this is your daily thin blue line foolishness where you can discover how much like heroin the ashes of the dead appear to resemble;


Brooklyn, NY — A family is speaking out against the NYPD after they were raided by multiple cops, had their house destroyed, and false charges brought against them for vials of ashes containing their late patriarch.
The incident happened last year as Lucia Santiago, 65, was awakened in her bed by heavily armed NYPD officers and forced into the living room.
“When I opened my eyes I saw . . . six or seven police [officers] in my room,” she recalled to the NY Post. “They told me, ‘Get out of the bed!’”
As the Post reports:..............https://thefreethoughtproject.com/ashes-mistake-heroin-grandmother-nypd/

in line with the previous post comes this description of similar items here in the empire where there are at least two sets of rules and really there may be more;


Miss Tynes was right—no one is supposed to eat in the train—but her tweet set off an avalanche of accusations of racism. “Eating while Black,” sneered black University of New Hampshire professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.
The Root called Miss Tynes “Natasha the Snitch” and celebrated Black Twitter’s campaign of vitriol against her. The article was filed under the category: “Snitches Get Black Twitter Stitches.” “If, by chance, you are ever tempted to call the authorities on a black person for doing something that absolutely affects no one, such as eating or inhaling oxygen, ask yourself these three questions: 1) Why? 2) No, seriously. Why? 3) What the fuck, man? Why?” Michael Harriot wrote.
Mr. Harriot also complained that Miss Tynes had no tweets about “police brutality, racism or inequality.”
The outrage threatens Miss Tynes’s livelihood. On the very day of her notorious tweet, Rare Bird Books said it would not distribute her upcoming novel, They Call Me Wyatt. Rare Bird was appalled that anyone would mistreat a “marginalized” person: “Black women face a constant barrage of this kind of inappropriate behavior directed toward them and a constant policing of their bodies. We think this is unacceptable and have no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way.”
The company urged Miss Tynes’s publisher, California Coldblood, to cancel the book. The publisher announced it would hold off on publication, noting: “We do not condone her actions and hope Natasha learns from this experience that black women feel the effects of systemic racism the most and that we all have to be allies, not oppressors.”
One of the ironies in this little flap is that Miss Tynes is Jordanian-American and markets herself as a “minority writer.” She has now learned that there is a hierarchy of non-white privilege and that her “minority” status was trumped by the queen of spades: a black woman.
One person who dared defend Miss Tynes was the popular Twitter account Unsuck DC Metro, which caustically recounts the many failures of DC public transportation. It wrote that the incident was typical of WMATA’s poor service and bad employees. Local reporters—who had previously used the account as a source—then doxed the account, which was run by a journalist at a prominent publication.
The message: Don’t you dare criticize black transit workers. They can break the rules, but you can’t. Keep quiet or you’ll lose your job. The WMATA union defended the black employee who ate on the train...........https://www.amren.com/commentary/2019/05/rule-breaking-youre-not-allowed-to-notice/

i imagine most of those who have reached my age are mystified, or confused by how wacky the world is getting and in france those who have invaded continue to ramp up their attack. in some ways things are getting quite the same here in the empire;


Hundreds of ‘Black Vest’ migrant protesters occupied Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on Sunday demanding to speak to Prime Minister Édouard Philippe in a demonstration against deportations and in favor of legal papers for all.
The group, estimated to be about 500 people, gathered in Terminal 2 of the airport as riot police officers stood at the foot of the escalators and monitored their activity.
“France does not belong to the French! Everyone has a right to be here!” one of the demonstrators shouted into a loudspeaker.
The protest was organized by the migrant support group La Chapelle Debout. It said its members were calling themselves the ‘Black Vests’ after the Yellow Vest protest movement which has been demonstrating in France for months...........https://www.rt.com/news/459822-migrant-protest-paris-airport/

reality and history meet fiction and 'our free press' in this exploration of who really 'meddles';



In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let's face it, when it comes to election meddling, it’s been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as Jared Kushner improbably claimed, “a couple of Facebook ads” or, as the Mueller report described it, “the Russian government interfer[ing]... in sweeping and systematic fashion.”
But let me mention just a few of the things that we didn’t learn from the Mueller report. We didn’t learn that Russian agents appeared at Republican Party headquarters in 2016 with millions of dollars in donations to influence the coming election. (Oops, my mistake!  That was CIA agents in the Italian election of 1948!) We didn’t learn that a Russian intelligence agency in combination with Chinese intelligence, aided by a major Chinese oil company, overthrew an elected U.S. president and installed Donald Trump in the White House as their autocrat of choice. (Oops, my mistake again! That was the CIA, dispatched by an American president, and British intelligence, with the help of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP. In 1953, they overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, and installed the young Shah as an autocratic ruler, the very first -- but hardly the last -- time the CIA successfully ousted a foreign government.) We didn’t learn that key advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin were in close touch with rogue elements of the U.S. military preparing to stage a coup d'état in Washington, kill President Barack Obama in a direct assault on the White House, and put the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in office. (Sorry, again my slip-up and full apologies! That was President Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger in contact with Chilean military officers who, on September 11, 1973 -- the first 9/11 -- staged an armed uprising during which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of that country, died and army commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet took power.) We didn’t learn that, at the behest of Vladimir Putin, Russian secret service agents engaged in a series of plots to poison or in some other fashion assassinate Barack Obama during his presidency and, in the end, had at least a modest hand in encouraging those who did kill him after he left office. (Oh, wait, I was confused on that one, too. I was actually thinking about the plots, as the 1960s began, to do in Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.) Nor, for that matter, did we learn that the Russian military launched a regime-change-style invasion of this country to unseat an American president and get rid of our weapons of mass destruction and then occupied the country for years after installing Donald Trump in power. (Sorry one more time! What I actually had in mind before I got so muddled up was the decision of the top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to launch a “regime-change” invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on fraudulent claims that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and install a government of their choice in Baghdad.)...........http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176566/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_american_election_exceptionalism/#more

fascism is the combination of corporate and government interests, and here it is manifest by the negation of the first amendment;


Sultan Knish - The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example when she declared that she would "hold social media platforms accountable" if they contained "hate" or "misinformation". “Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. This got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs. The internet was the work of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense..........http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2019/05/americans-paid-for-internet-we-deserve.html

i suspect this information will shock you, if you've been stuck on some desert island;

Us-vs-them, Burning Platform - There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out “legal” payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions.........https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/05/19/us-vs-them/