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Uh-Oh! Violets in late February?: Signs of an Unusually Early Spring in Southeastern Pennsylvania are No Cause for Celebration
By Dave Lindorff
This whole winter has been anomalously warm in southeastern Pennsylvania where I live. My oil guy, Hans, is complaining that the demand for home heating oil is so low this winter that it's killing his business, causing him to lay off workers that he had already trained.
From WIPP with love: Three Years Since the Kitty Litter Disaster at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
By Paul DeRienzo
Bigot boy business: Trump Exposes His Ignorance and Intolerance -- Again
By Linn Washington Jr.
Twice in recent weeks President Donald Trump reinforced his image of ignorance on African-Americans with astounding statements. Those statements amplified concerns about this president who rose to the Oval Office through a campaign tarred by brazen bigotry from his surrogates, his supporters and himself.
In search of a Trumpian reality: On Killers and Bullshitters
By John Grant
* NOTE: The term bullshit is used here in the sense established by Harvard philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt in his little gem of a book titled On Bullshit, which opens with: "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit."
Hoist on his own petard: NSC Head Flynn Was Brought Down By the Very Spying Machine He Helped to Build
By Davd Lindorff
A retired three-star Lt. General, Flynn had previously been director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. In that role since 2012, he was a key player in the leadership of the sprawling $50-billion US intelligence apparatus that has increasingly been spying not just on Americans but on US allies and, to the extent possible, on the entire world. Flynn, as DIA director, was the top guy in charge of the so-called “Five Eyes” group of intelligence agencies-- all English-speaking nations including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada -- which has coordinated spying on citizens of those nations as well as on the citizens and leaders of such supposed NATO allies as Germany, France, Italy, Spain etc.
Knowing all this, it’s simply astounding to learn that Flynn himself was using apparently unencrypted email, phones and texting to communicate with, of all people, the Russian Ambassador to the US, discussing such issues as potentially lifting sanctions imposed on Russia by the sitting president of the United States, Barack Obama.
His political implosion is doubly ironic because Flynn was one of those who was loudly condemning Trump’s presidential opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for her use of a private server for her official State Department business, and for her general lax security standards (he actually led a “Lock her up!” chant at one Trump rally!). Because clearly Flynn was not using secure communications in his own conversations with the Russian ambassador -- communications that are now widely circulating in complete transcript form courtesy of US spy agencies like the National Security Agency.
Talk about someone being hoist upon his own petard!
You’d think that seeing the kind of trouble the NSA’s “collect it all” motto can wreak even for the powerful and seemingly invincible, Washington’s elite might rethink what the NSA is doing?
But nah, I wouldn’t count on that happening. There’s more likely to be a lot of shadenfreude among those, both Democrats and traditional Cold War Republicans, who want to see Trump and his band of bozos go down, but hubristic to a fault, they’re not going to go so far as to think, “Hey, this could as easily happen to me!”
And yet, what we’re seeing here, besides the exposé of a thoroughly inept and out-of-his-depth President Trump, is the workings of the so-called “deep state” -- the permanent power structure the really runs things in the US -- which is taking advantage of its vast powers to rein in the efforts of a loose cannon trying to steer things off on an unorthodox course...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/
Looming climate catastrophe?: Rapidly Warming Arctic Could Unleash a Methane Climate Bomb Meaning Extinction in Nine Years
By Dave Lindorff
Reports from the Arctic are getting pretty grim.
Thinking, and Organizing, Big: The Left Needs to Be a Movement, Not a Bunch of Lobbyists
By Dave Lindorff
Trump’s misplaced wall: It’s Not an Immigrant Tsunami We Should Fear, It’s a Climate Change One
By Dave Lindorff
Time’s running out: As his Last Act in Office, President Obama Should Right a Terrible Wrong and Free Leonard Peltier
By Dave Lindorff
The house with the built-in backdoor: The Whattsapp Scandal
By Alfredo Lopez
Democratic hysteria: Liberal Democrats Claiming a Russian Hack of the Election and Putin Control Over Trump are the New ‘Birthe
By Dave Lindorff
More Clapp-trap: Senate Hearing on Russian Election Mischief Again Fails to Prove Anything
By Dave Lindorff
The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media and, surprisingly, among educated liberals (who should know better after years of government lies and deceit, particularly about foreign affairs), is becoming increasingly embarrassing.
Big win for Hep-C infected inmates: Federal Judge Orders Pennsylvania to Provide Anti-Viral Hep-C Treatment to Mumia Abu-Jamal
By Dave Lindorff
In a stunning conclusion to a year-and-a-half legal drama, a federal judge in Scranton, has ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to quit stalling and to begin treating prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal with the latest available and highly effective anti-viral drugs for curing him of a raging and life-threatening case of Hepatitis C.
New poem by ThisCantBeHappening! resident poet Gary Lindorff: 'Endless war'
my mother
my child
green clay
my way
John Kerry’s finest hour: Obama Team Labels Israel an Outlaw Nation
By John Grant
Hallelujah!
Opening salvo: Get Ready for an All-Out Assault on Social Security by Washington in 2017
By Dave Lindorff
Poet’s notebook: What do I do about the mice: A pacifist's quandary'
It was late,
In the middle of the second half of the night.
We were asleep.
Book review/essay: Morally Surviving America’s War on Vietnam
By Johhn Grant
The War I Survived Was Vietnam: Collected Writings of a Veteran and Antiwar Activist
It wasn’t the Russians!: Hillary Clinton Lost the November Election because She Blew Off Sanders Activists and Voters
By Dave Lindorff
Poet’s notebook: ' Where the pipe ends'
The pipe ends at Standing Rock.
That is also where
We Dream the end to oil.
The hail-mary answer to a Trump presidency: Progressives Still Have a Trump Card to Play against Trumpian Autocracy
By Dave Lindorff
The fake campaign to blame “the Russians”: Democratic Losers and their Media Backers Seek a Scapegoat for Their Own Disaster
By Dave Lindorff
A return to McCarthyism: Rather than Exposing Propaganda, Washington Post Shows How It’s Done
By Dave Lindorff
Too busy getting rich to commit war crimes?: Is Trump’s Idea To Fix the ‘Rigged System’ by Appointing Crooks Who’ve Played It?
By Dave Lindorff
Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are suggesting a governing philosophy along the lines of a corrupt municipal police force relying on gangsters to help it keep street crime held in check.
Confessions of an alleged ‘propagandist’: Slimed by the Washington Post in ‘False News’ McCarthyite Hit on Alternative Media
By Dave Lindorff