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Tornado2

Best of the Web: Climate chaos! Tornado tears through Luxembourg - Another touches down in Amsterdam

Luxembourg tornado
© Reuters/ Y. Reiff
A police spokesperson said the twister left a "swathe of desolation" over a large area. Elsewhere, a vortex hit central Amsterdam as awestruck observers caught the formation on video.

A rare tornado ripped through southwest Luxembourg on Friday, injuring 14 people.

Officials said around 160 buildings were damaged by the twister that struck the towns of Petange and Kaerjeng near the French and Belgium border.

Images and videos on social media showed the tornado with winds packing 128 kilometers per hour (80 miles per hour) throwing debris, roofs and tree branches into the air.


Comment: Yeah, tornadoes never happened in Europe until very recently, when they suddenly started happening all the time!


Footprints

Best of the Web: US ambassador to Germany threatens switch of 50,000 troops to Poland if German government doesn't pay for their upkeep

US soldiers
© Getty Images/C. StacheUS soldiers have been posted in Germany since World War II
The US says it might pull out some troops from Germany amid rifts over a naval mission in the Persian Gulf and defense spending. The remarks from the US ambassador come ahead of two presidential trips to Europe.

The United States is considering withdrawing some of the US troops stationed in Germany, with Poland mooted as a possible new deployment, the US ambassador to Germany has said.

The threat of withdrawal comes amid ongoing differences between Berlin and Washington over Germany's contribution to NATO and a current spat caused by the German refusal to take part in a US-led naval mission in the Persian Gulf.

"It is actually offensive to assume that the US taxpayer must continue to pay to have 50,000-plus Americans in Germany, but the Germans get to spend their surplus on domestic programs," US Ambassador Richard Grenell told the DPA news agency, in comments carried widely by German media on Friday.


Comment: See also:




Attention

Best of the Web: Grayzone interviews Maduro: 'John Bolton tried to assassinate me'

maduro i bolton
The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal sits down with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. We discuss the plots to kill him, US sanctions on food distribution, corruption allegations, and the corporate media's industrial grade demonization campaign against him and his elected government.


Eye 1

Best of the Web: Monsanto's 'intelligence center' targeted journalists and activists in attempt to stifle criticism for cancer-causing products

Carey Gillam
© Carey GillamMonsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller.
Internal documents show how the company worked to discredit critics and investigated singer Neil Young

Monsanto operated a "fusion center" to monitor and discredit journalists and activists, and targeted a reporter who wrote a critical book on the company, documents reveal. The agrochemical corporation also investigated the singer Neil Young and wrote an internal memo on his social media activity and music.

The records reviewed by the Guardian show Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company's weedkiller and its links to cancer. Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, also monitored a not-for-profit food research organization through its "intelligence fusion center", a term that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use for operations focused on surveillance and terrorism.

Comment: See also: And don't miss:




Stock Up

Best of the Web: Neoliberalism Has Met Its Match in China. Maybe It's Time to Adopt Their Economic Model?

china oil tanker VLCC
There are oil tankers, and then there are mega AI-controlled Chinese oil tankers...
When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last week, commentators were asking why. According to official data, the economy was rebounding, unemployment was below 4% and gross domestic product growth was above 3%. If anything, by the Fed's own reasoning, it should have been raising rates.

Market pundits explained that we're in a trade war and a currency war. Other central banks were cutting their rates, and the Fed had to follow suit in order to prevent the dollar from becoming overvalued relative to other currencies. The theory is that a cheaper dollar will make American products more attractive in foreign markets, helping our manufacturing and labor bases.

Over the weekend, President Trump followed the rate cuts by threatening to impose, on Sept. 1, a new 10% tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese products. China responded by suspending imports of U.S. agricultural products by state-owned companies and letting the value of the yuan drop. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 770 points, its worst day in 2019. The war was on.

Comment: Great idea, but it's kryptonite to Western banksters and their puppet govts, who would NEVER submit their schemes to genuine public oversight. It's precisely because such ideas can never be allowed to diffuse or transmit from east to west that China, Russia and others are demonized to the nth degree in all spheres. At all costs, Westerners absolutely must be convinced that 'here be dragons' rather than 'here be hope'. If that means taking down competing models, and destroying half the world in the process, so be it.


Red Flag

Best of the Web: Why are Western leaders gawd awful bad and China's so darn competent?

macron xi jinping
In the first part of this essay, I showed why Western leaders are generally so bad. The one sentence answer is they are almost always suborned to serve the interests of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

There is a corollary explanation for this. European cultures and their spinoffs in the rest of Eurangloland, including Israel are founded on violence and theft. If you don't believe this goes back to the Jewish Torah/Christian Old Testament, here is a quick review of Westerners' predilection for killing, destroying, plundering first and asking questions later ( and).

I created a comparative Excel table using Wikipedia's pages on Conflicts in Europe, United States and China. Europe's list has 760 entries, the US's 250 and China's 315. Europe's long list really starts in 1,100BC and does not include all of the genocidal horrors in the Torah/Old Testament before that. The US's only starts in 1775, which is wishful propaganda. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz clearly proves in her book, A Native Peoples' History of the United States, genocidal wars to exterminate the many millions of First Nations' peoples started Day One with the colonial landing at Jamestown in 1607. And the killing has never stopped. China's goes back to 2,500BC, so is over twice as long as Europe's and, compared to the US, almost ten times longer.

Comment: We're not sure what to make of China really, but one sometimes gets the impression it's a couple thousand years more 'evolved' than everywhere else.


Newspaper

Best of the Web: Pepe Escobar: Hong Kong, Kashmir: A tale of two occupations

hong kong riots kashmir india
Two hotspots bordering/in China, both coming to the boil...
Readers from myriad latitudes have been asking me about Hong Kong. They know it's one of my previous homes. I developed a complex, multi-faceted relationship with Hong Kong ever since the 1997 handover, which I covered extensively. Right now, if you allow me, I'd rather cut to the chase.

Much to the distress of neocons and humanitarian imperialists, there won't be a bloody mainland China crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong - a Tiananmen 2.0. Why? Because it's not worth it.

Beijing has clearly identified the color revolution provocation inbuilt in the protests - with the NED excelling as CIA soft, facilitating the sprawl of fifth columnists even in the civil service.

Comment: Escobar takes a hardline regarding Indian policy towards Kashmir. Whataboutery isn't the best argument against that, but we have to ask: what then of how China handles the majority-Muslim Uyghur population of Xinjiang province, aka East Turkestan?

Then there's the geopolitical calculation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), mentioned by the author. India resents Chinese influence in its 'far north' or what it considers its sphere of influence, so its decision to 'strike' there now is almost certainly informed by 'containing China'. Additionally, there is even a pocket of the disputed region that China claims...

India certainly has a 'democracy issue' it will have to justify; the fact that the population of Kashmir is overwhelmingly Muslim. Ideally, it would have done as Russia did wrt Crimea; delivered a positive referendum result. But this is where characterizations of Modi's India as 'fascist-Hindu' are distinctly unhelpful. The fact is, Muslim Indians voted for Modi in droves, both in 2014, and more so in 2019.

See also:


Attention

Best of the Web: John Pilger: Assange being 'treated worse than a murderer' in prison

assange arrest
© Reuters/Henry NichollsWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen in a police van, after he was arrested by British police, in London, Britain April 11, 2019.
Julian Assange is suffering from poor health as a result of mistreatment in prison, according to journalist John Pilger, who recently visited the WikiLeaks founder. Pilger said that he now fears for Assange.

Describing Assange's "deteriorating" condition, Pilger tweeted that he was being treated "worse than a murderer" at London's Belmarsh prison.

"[H]e is isolated, medicated and denied the tools to fight the bogus charges of a US extradition. I now fear for him. Do not forget him," Pilger wrote.

Comment:


Star of David

Best of the Web: On feeding the Israel Lobby in America

Israel lobby in Washington graphic
If you have been wondering when the twenty Democratic aspirants for the presidency will begin a serious discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East, where Washington has been bogged down in both current and impending wars, you are not alone. With the honorable exception of Tulsi Gabbard, no one seems keen to touch that particular live wire.

Part of the problem is the journalists who are asking the questions in the debates. To be sure, the publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt back in 2007 opened the door to a frank discussion of why the United States is involved in unresolvable conflicts on behalf of a tiny client state. But unfortunately, while it is now possible to find in the mainstream media some honest analysis of Israel's ability to corrupt policy formulation in Washington, in general the Jewish state continues to get a pass from both the press and politicians on all issues that matter.

Cult

Best of the Web: New Hollywood movie portrays rich liberal elites gleefully abducting, hunting and massacring ordinary Americans

the hunt movie deplorables
Still from 'The Hunt'. We're ruled by pathological elites, in case anyone hasn't noticed...
A violent thriller in which blue-state elites hunt red-state "deplorables" for sport has been forced to pull some of its ads in the wake of US mass shootings as studio execs fear the tragedies will eclipse the ultra-dark satire.


Comment: So they're actually going ahead with it??

That's some chutzpah!


Universal Pictures, which picked up the controversy-guaranteed script for "The Hunt" after other studios recoiled in horror, is re-evaluating an advertising blitz planned for the month leading up to the film's September 27 release after a trio of mass shootings in Texas, Ohio, and California left 36 dead in the space of a week. The studio has already pulled some TV and internet ads out of concern "for content and placement," according to one high-level source who spoke to the Hollywood Reporter, though another said the matter has not yet been decided.


Comment: The sickest part of it is that 'hunts of deplorables' is what they already do, and have been doing for decades.

Sure, sometimes they hit blue zones more in line with 'their own' (Orlando nightclub massacre, Parkland school massacre), but for the most part they're targeting what we know today as 'the Trump base' - the great majority of ordinary Americans they detest and abuse.

So this movie is just them gloating about it (over and above the mediatized psy-operas that accompany each massacre).

That's how far gone things are. They can do this and get away with it. But you, if you dare to call them out, or mention them by name, you're done for.