According to the Chinese zodiac, 2017 has been the Year of the Rooster. Myself, I've decided to designate it the Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken. I don't mean that to be insulting ... or, all right, I guess I do, a little. But my heart goes out to liberals, seriously. At this point, the amount of utterly baseless, contradictory propaganda, mass hysteria, and just flat out insanity the ruling classes have demanded they swallow is more than any human mind, no matter how medicated, could possibly handle. Is it any wonder so many of them of lost it and started seeing Nazis and Russians coming out of the woodwork? Just consider what the average liberal has been forced to try to cognitively reconcile since the tragic events of last November ...

First came the overwhelming shock of Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump, a repulsive, word salad-babbling buffoon with absolutely no political experience who the media had been portraying to liberals as the Second Coming of Adolf Hitler. This was a candidate, let's recall, who jabbered about building a "beautiful wall" to protect us from the hordes of "Mexican rapists" and other "bad hombres" who were invading America, and who had boasted about grabbing women "by the pussy" like a prepubescent 6th grade boy. While he had served as a perfect foil for Clinton, and had provided hours of entertainment in a comic book villain kind of way, the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was inconceivable in the minds of liberals. So, when it happened, it was like the Martians had invaded.

On Tuesday 19th December 2017 it was the turn of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe to give evidence about Russiagate behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee. Judging by this report on Fox News the Republican members of the Committee found it a frustrating experience

Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Tuesday's seven-hour interrogation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas next week on Justice Department and FBI personnel....

"It's hard to know who's telling us the truth," said one House investigator after McCabe's questioning....

Sources close to the investigation say that McCabe was a "friendly witness" to the Democrats in the room, who are said to have pressed the deputy director, without success, to help them build a case against President Trump for obstruction of justice in the Russia-collusion probe. "If he could have, he would have," said one participant in the questioning.

Investigators say McCabe recounted to the panel how hard the FBI had worked to verify the contents of the anti-Trump "dossier" and stood by its credibility. But when pressed to identify what in the salacious document the bureau had actually corroborated, the sources said, McCabe cited only the fact that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had traveled to Moscow. Beyond that, investigators said, McCabe could not even say that the bureau had verified the dossier's allegations about the specific meetings Page supposedly held in Moscow....

The sources said that when asked when he learned that the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall - despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe's own signature on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier's financing and provenance. (bold italics added)

The key words are the ones I have highlighted and they go to the heart of the FBI's - and Robert Mueller's - problem.

Shortly after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, made a candid confession to the Army Times, "I'm running out of demons, I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung." Amid the general bonhomie of the military interview, Powell nicely encapsulated a central truth of empire: it doesn't want peace. Never did. Imperialism, the monopoly stage of capitalism, is based on conquest. Peace is little more than an aftermath in the imperialist vision. It is the dusty rubble-strewn silence that descends on Aleppo when the jihadists have been bussed out. It is the silent pollution of the Danube when the NATO jets have flown. Peace is an interlude between the birth of avarice and the advent of aggression. Little else.

If Powell confessed empire's disinterest in peace, he also expressed the need of the imperials state for a steady supply of new enemies. Conflict is the lifeblood of imperial capitalism. It is how the ruling class further enriches itself. It is how the global elite expand their dominion over the planet. Those who will not pay tribute under threat of menace, must ultimately face the menace. But this truth, that the imperial state is the carmine tip of elite expropriation, must not be aired among the hoi polloi. It is the unseemly underbelly of power and if it were widely understood it would hack away the legitimacy of the state, which is only justified by its nominal commitment to the welfare of the nation. That claim only appears legitimate in the face of some grim and ghastly threat. Powell understood that with the nasty specter of the evil empire crumbling to ash on an Asian plain, a spine-chilling new antagonist would have to be invented to replace it.

Almost eighteen months after Obama's Justice Department and the FBI launched the Russiagate investigation, and seven months after Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the investigation over, the sum total of what it has achieved is as follows:

(1) an indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates which concerns entirely their prior financial dealings, and which makes no reference to the Russiagate collusion allegations;

(2) an indictment for lying to the FBI of George Papadopoulos, the junior volunteer staffer of the Trump campaign, who during the 2016 Presidential election had certain contacts with members of a Moscow based Russian NGO, which he sought to pass off - falsely and unsuccessfully - as more important than they really were, and which also does not touch on the Russiagate collusion allegations; and

(3) an indictment for lying to the FBI of Michael Flynn arising from his perfectly legitimate and entirely legal contacts with the Russian ambassador after the 2016 Presidential election, which also does not touch on the Russiagate collusion allegations, and which looks as if it was brought about by an act of entrapment.

Of actual evidence to substantiate the claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election Mueller has so far come up with nothing.

Here I wish to say something briefly about the nature of "collusion".

"The goal of mainstream politicians of both parties should be to drive a wedge between the viciousness of white supremacy and people who are basically decent but tired of what they see as 'political correctness' that ignores the very considerable challenges faced by working-class whites while directing them to feel sorry for a whole range of other groups."

-Joan C. Williams, White Working Class - Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

"We're voting with our middle finger."

-South Carolina Trump supporter

"There was no reason why the Left had to abandon its old blue collar base."

-Milo Yiannopoulos

My apologies to Ta Nehisi Coates and the "it's all about race" school of politics, but by now it should be clear to just about everyone that attempting to achieve a democratic majority by multiplying victim minorities is doomed to failure.

For the four decades we have seen neo-liberal economics at work, white working class fortunes have gone steadily down the drain while diversity enthusiasts aggressively demanded universal sympathy for a growing list of victim groups: the poor, blacks, Latinos, "native" Americans, Asians, the disabled, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, the transgendered, queers, non-binary people, the asexual, along with every possible "intersection" of these identities. Meanwhile, legitimate anger at the economic squeeze imposed on working people from outsourcing and mass immigration from the Third World has been written off as racism, sexism, nativism, and xenophobia. By 2016, the longstanding depression visible throughout rural America was a key factor in elevating Donald Trump to the presidency.

'This is the fastest moving social change we have seen in decades,' says Time editor-in-chief

The Hollywood abuse "silence breakers" have been named as Time magazine's 2017 Person of the Year.

The decision to grant people who have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct with the accolade was announced on NBC's Today show on Wednesday morning.

The award is decided by Time's editors and goes to the person or group who has had the most influence on the year's news for better or worse.

"This is the fastest moving social change we have seen in decades," Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal told the programme.

"It began with individual acts of courage by hundreds of women - and some men, too - who came forward to tell their own stories".

A US military agency is investing $100m in genetic extinction technologies that could wipe out malarial mosquitoes, invasive rodents or other species, emails released under freedom of information rules show.

The documents suggest that the US's secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has become the world's largest funder of "gene drive" research and will raise tensions ahead of a UN expert committee meeting in Montreal beginning on Tuesday.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is debating whether to impose a moratorium on the gene research next year and several southern countries fear a possible military application.

UN diplomats confirmed that the new email release would worsen the "bad name" of gene drives in some circles. "Many countries [will] have concerns when this technology comes from Darpa, a US military science agency," one said.

The technology is capable of splicing DNA strands in order to insert, alter, or remove targeted traits, and "drive" them through a population by ensuring all the offspring of the targeted organism inherit the alteration. Proponents of the gene-editing technology say it can be used to wipe out malaria-spreading mosquitoes, for example. Critics point out that the method could have unforeseen environmental consequences.

British intelligence has allegedly foiled a terrorist plot to assassinate Prime Minister Theresa May, one of nine terrorist schemes thwarted so far by UK spies in 2017, local media report.

Two men were arrested last week for plotting terrorist atrocities in the UK, British news outlets reported Tuesday. Naa'imur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, from north London, and Mohammed Aqib Imran, 21, from Birmingham, were apprehended during security raids and charged with preparing and assisting in acts of terrorism. They are due to appear before the Westminster Magistrates court Wednesday.

The smoke is clearing from an explosive Mueller investigation weekend of charges, chattering, and tweets. Before the next aftershock, it might be helpful to make three points about where things stand.

In ascending order of importance, they are:

1.) There is a great deal of misinformation in the commentariat about how prosecutors build cases.

2.) For all practical purposes, the collusion probe is over. While the "counterintelligence" cover will continue to be exploited so that no jurisdictional limits are placed on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, this is now an obstruction investigation.

3.) That means it is, as it has always been, an impeachment investigation.

President Donald Trump's short-lived national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Most US media jumped on the plea as proof of Trump's collusion with Russia. Actual documents, however, tell a different story.

A court document signed by special counsel Robert Mueller, dated Thursday, specifies two instances of Flynn telling FBI investigators things that were not true. They relate to two conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in December 2016.

In the Statement of Offense signed by Flynn at his court appearance on Friday, he admitted to acting on instructions from a senior "Presidential Transition Team" (PTT) official, prompting breathless speculation if that was Trump himself, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, or someone else altogether. The one question nobody seems to be asking is, "So what?"

It is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that Flynn's "crime" is a procedural one: he told FBI investigators he hadn't done a thing that he actually did. But was the thing he did - namely, speak with the Russian ambassador to the US - against the law? Not really.