The results from Tuesday's Israeli elections have confirmed what many of us have known for a long while. The Jewish state is an ultra-nationalist right-wing swamp. Israel is more hawkish than ever. There is not a single Jewish Israeli Left wing party. The Democratic Party is led and mentored by a war criminal. What is left of Israel's Labour Party has very little to do with peace, harmony and reconciliation. In fact, that Party is also led by a person wanted for war crimes.

As things now stand, although Bibi's right/religious block has shrunk, Israel is more right-wing than ever. The longest-serving Israeli PM cannot form his natural right/religious coalition. Most Israeli commentators agree that the only way out of the current political stalemate is with a wide ultranationalist government led by Likud, Blue and White and others. Such a coalition will be brokered in the coming days by the rabid nationalist zealot Avigdor Lieberman who has skillfully made himself into Israel's king-maker.

Conceding that their grip on the economy is slipping, central bankers are proposing a radical economic reset that would shift yet more power from government to themselves.
Central bankers are acknowledging that they are out of ammunition. Mark Carney, the soon-to-be-retiring head of the Bank of England, said in a speech at the annual meeting of central bankers in August in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, "In the longer-term, we need to change the game." The same point was made by Philipp Hildebrand, former head of the Swiss National Bank, in an August 2019 interview with Bloomberg. "Really there is little if any ammunition left," he said. "More of the same in terms of monetary policy is unlikely to be an appropriate response if we get into a recession or sharp downturn."

"More of the same" meant further lowering interest rates, the central bankers' stock tool for maintaining their targeted inflation rate in a downturn. Bargain-basement interest rates are supposed to stimulate the economy by encouraging borrowers to borrow (since rates are so low) and savers to spend (since they aren't making any interest on their deposits and may have to pay to store them). But over $15 trillion in bonds are now trading globally at negative interest rates, yet this radical maneuver has not been shown to measurably improve economic performance. In fact new research shows that negative interest rates from central banks, rather than increasing spending, stopping deflation, and stimulating the economy as they were expected to do, may be having the opposite effects. They are being blamed for squeezing banks, punishing savers, keeping dying companies on life support, and fueling a potentially unsustainable surge in asset prices.

The role of journalism in a democracy is publishing information that holds the powerful to account — the kind of information that empowers the public to become more engaged citizens in their communities so that we can vote in representatives that work in the interest of "we the people."

There is perhaps no better example of watchdog journalism that holds the powerful to account and exposes their corruption than that of WikiLeaks, which exposed to the world evidence of widespread war crimes the U.S. military was committing in Iraq, including the killing of two Reuters journalists; showed that the U.S. government and large corporations were using private intelligence agencies to spy on activists and protesters; and revealed how the military hid tortured Guantanamo Bay prisoners from Red Cross inspectors.

It's this kind of real journalism that our First Amendment was meant to protect but engaging in it has instead made WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange the target of a massive smear campaign for the last several years — including false claims that Assange is working with Vladimir Putin and the Russians and hackers, as well as open calls by corporate media pundits for him to be assassinated.

We are the Houthis and we're coming to town. With the spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen's Houthis have overturned the geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia - going as far as introducing a whole new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing in a push to drive the House of Saud out of power.

Blowback is a bitch. Houthis - Zaidi Shiites from northern Yemen - and Wahhabis have been at each other's throats for ages. This book is absolutely essential to understand the mind-boggling complexity of Houthi tribes; as a bonus, it places the turmoil in southern Arabian lands way beyond a mere Iran-Saudi proxy war.

Still, it's always important to consider that Arab Shiites in the Eastern province - working in Saudi oil installations - have got to be natural allies of the Houthis fighting against Riyadh.

The Liberal Democrats conference in Bournemouth has shown us where 'liberalism' is today, and it's a pretty dark place. If you have the wrong (i.e. unenlightened) views, the party which preaches 'tolerance' will not tolerate you.

Britain in 2019 presents a topsy-turvy political landscape straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy Opera. 'Conservatives' who don't conserve anything. 'Luxury communists' who oppose communism. And Liberal Democrats who aren't very liberal, or very democratic.

The Lib Dem conference had to be seen to be believed - and even then it was scarcely believable.

First, there was the party's decision to cancel Brexit, without even a second referendum.

In saying 'Boll**ks' to Brexit, and pledging to scrap Article 50 on their 'first day in power' - if that ever happens - the Lib Dems are effectively saying 'Boll**ks' to the 17.4 million people who, rightly or wrongly, voted to leave the European Union in 2016, a large percentage of whom were working class and/or elderly.

Ryan Murphy, an economist at Southern Methodist University, recently published a working paper in which he ranked each of the states by the predominance of — there's no nice way to put it — psychopaths. The winner? Washington in a walk. In fact, the capital scored higher on Murphy's scale than the next two runners-up combined.

"I had previously written on politicians and psychopathy, but I had no expectation D.C. would stand out as much as it does," Murphy wrote in an email...

On a national level, it raises the troubling question as to what it means to live in a country whose institutions are set up to reward some very dubious human traits. Like it or not, we're more likely than not to wind up with some alarming personalities in positions of power.

- From last year's Politico article, Washington, D.C.: the Psychopath Capital of America

One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American politics — and the culture in general — is our all encompassing fixation on the superficial. It's also one of the main reasons I have very little interest in presidential politics, which basically consists of a bunch of billionaire friendly puppets auditioning to become the next public face of imperial oligarchy. Though I understand the desire for quick fixes, our focus on highlighting and mitigating only the symptoms of societal decay as opposed to the root causes, ensures we'll never achieve the sort of positive paradigm-level shift necessary to bring humankind forward.

Fringe practicing wanton destruction for destruction's sake surely have learned tactics from European black blocs

What's going on deep down in Hong Kong? For a former resident with deep cultural and emotional ties to the Fragrant Harbor, it's quite hard to take it all in just within the framework of cold geopolitical logic. Master filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai once said that when he came up with the idea for Happy Together, he decided to shoot the story of his characters in Buenos Aires because that was as far away from Hong Kong as possible.

A few weeks ago I was walking the streets of far away Buenos Aires dreaming of Hong Kong. That Hong Kong that Wong Kar-Wai refers to in his masterpiece no longer exists. Unfortunately deprived of Christopher Doyle's mesmerizing visuals, I ended up coming back to Hong Kong to find, eventually, that the city I knew also no longer exists.

Vladimir Lenin is said to have opined that the only thing certain about British elections is who is going to lose. He meant the British working class, at a time when they were effectively unrepresented in the political system.

Equally, whatever the outcome of the Israeli elections, the Palestinians will be the big losers. According to preliminary results, Netanyahu has lost his majority of course - having failing to reach the magic number of 61 seats in the Knesset.

But his opponents - the Palestinians living under siege in Gaza, under occupation in the West Bank, or under annexation in East Jerusalem, an annexation Netanyahu threatened to visit upon the whole of the Jordan Valley - are no better off. Neither, for that matter, are the so-called "Arab-Israelis" who increasingly identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel and whose treatment as the 'enemy within' reached its apogee in Likud hate-speech about them. This saw them briefly banned from Facebook last week.

Neither is an election the final say on the matter - this is the second in five months - and the fact that no-one seems likely to gain a majority will see the attention swiftly turn to horse-trading. And that, for the Palestinians, is the danger.

When President Trump fired National Security Adviser John Bolton last week rational people the world over cheered.

When there was news that Trump would meet on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly with Iran's President Rouhani in a few weeks there were sighs of relief.

When Benjamin Netanyahu goes to Moscow to get Vladimir Putin's blessing to continue airstrikes in Syria and was told no, the world said, "Finally! Enough is enough."

The problem is that there were also very powerful people who were not happy about these things.

Moreover, there are a lot of nervous people out there worried that Tuesday's election in Israel will not go the way they want it.

A lot of people have invested a lot of time and money in ensuring Netanyahu stays in power. And I don't just mean Bibi himself, who will likely go to jail on corruption charges if he doesn't win.

I mean a lot of people in the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the U.K. and in Europe, all of the places where anti-Russian, anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli sentiments abound.

And this brings up the main question I always have in the wake of one of these major escalations of tensions with the country currently catching the Twin Eyes of Sauron in D.C. and Tel Aviv.

I don't know whether the supposedly Chinese curse really comes from China, but whether it does or not, we most certainly are cursed with living in some truly interesting times: Iran won the first phase of the "tanker battle" against the AngloZionists, Putin offered to sell Russian hypersonic missiles to Trump (Putin has been trolling western leaders a lot lately) while Alexander Lukashenko took the extreme measure of completely shutting down the border between the Ukraine and Belarus due to the huge influx of weapons and nationalist extremists from the Ukraine. As he put it himself "if weapons fall into the hands of ordinary people and especially nationalist-minded people, wait for terrorism". He is quite right, of course. Still, there is a sweet irony here, or call it karma if you prefer, but for the Ukronazis who promised their people a visa-free entrance into the EU (for tourism only, and if you have money to spend, but still...), and yet 5 years into that obscene experiment of creating a rabidly russophobic Ukraine and 100 days (or so) into Zelenskii's presidency, we have the Ukraine's closest and most supportive neighbor forced to totally shut down its border due to the truly phenomenal toxicity of the Ukrainian society! But, then again, the Ukraine is such a basket-case that we can count on "most interesting" things (in the sense of the Chinese curse, of course) happening there too.

Interestingly, one of the people the Ukrainians gave up in this exchange was Vladimir Tsemakh, a native of the Donbass who was kidnapped by the Ukie SBU in Novorussia (our noble "Europeans" did not object to such methods!) and declared the "star witness" against Russia in the MH-17 (pseudo-)investigation. Even more pathetic is that the Dutch apparently fully endorsed this load of crapola. Finally, and just for a good laugh, check out how the infamous' Bellingcat presented Tsemakh. And then, suddenly, everybody seem to "forget" that "star witness" and now the Ukies have sent him to Russia. Amazing how fast stuff gets lost in the collective western memory hole...