Antiwar.com: UN security team delays chemical weapons inspectors from reaching site of supposed attack. Ed: Unbelievable, yet totally believable, that we are inciting another foreign conflict at the very moment that Syria had quelled the “rebels” and peace had been within reach. Unbelievable that just a handful of people in our own government can bypass all of Congress and provoke a widespread, possibly-nuclear conflict over a supposed chemical weapons attack that is said to have killed around 70 people. Why would Assad attack his own civilians at the very moment an end to the conflict was in sight? And also, why does our own government suddenly care about foreign civilians? Where are the airstrikes on behalf of the thousands of dead Yemen civilians? Oh right, the US is funding the airstrikes that are killing those civilians, via the murderous Saudi regime. The danger in this situation lies in the fact that so few Americans are willing to get behind a war against either Syria or Russia. This sets the stage for a convenient attack that will result in the casualties of American citizens, one that will then conveniently be used to steer public opinion in favor of yet another open-ended, decade-long war, conveniently justifying the next trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.
WSWS: As lies of Syrian gas attack unravel, US and UK shift to claims of Russian “cyber war”
Counterpunch: President Trump’s war crime is worse than the one he accuses Assad of Ed: Initiating aggression against a sovereign nation. Punishable by death according to Nuremberg.
BGR: Pay close attention to Facebook’s new passive-aggressive privacy settings
National Review: The bulldozers of social justice
The Intercept: James Comey sees himself as a victim of Trump. He refuses to see the victims of the justice system. Ed: In the interviews of Comey that I’ve watched, I’ve noticed a disturbing trait that I’ve seen before in other people, particularly in political figures and other people who hold positions of power: an absolute belief in their goodness, that they are beyond reproach, that their actions are good in an absolute sense. These people are the most dangerous because they aren’t hindered by guilt, self-reflection, or humility. Which means they are capable of great damage for a longer duration than others. I believe that politics naturally attracts this type of person, due to the nature of the work. “The worst get on top”, as Hayek forcefully argues in The Road to Serfdom. In Comey, it manifests as a vainglorious, petty, sanctimony, and it’s an ugly thing to behold. It’s also the prime move of racists, class-warfare-ists, and general, all-around totalitarians. I believe the instinct is within us all, which is probably the larger point I should be making here, because the nature of government propaganda is to draw it out, to unhinge it from the natural guilt we would feel had our minds not been trained through peer and authoritarian pressure to unleash this primitive prejudice on one group or another. To government, it doesn’t matter what we wish government to do, as long as we wish them to do it. It’s the authoritarian instinct unbound that matters.
Reason: A more infuriating way to think about your tax burden
FEE: Why socialism means slavery
Motherboard: Amazon wins patent for data stream to ‘identify’ Bitcoin users for law enforcement
Nextgov: Army figures out how to use facial recognition in the dark
Daily Beast: Unarmed teen killed by police was simply ‘backing his mom’s minivan’ out of garage, lawsuit claims Ed: Let them unionize, protect them from punishment, and they will predictably behave like thugs.
