The Intercept has the article Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story,

Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.
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Although critical of the Russia coverage, Hersh condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media and its threats to limit the ability of journalists to cover the White House.

One thing that I like about the article is that it shows you can be critical of the Russia coverage and not be a Trump sycophant at the same time. That’s my position.

I previously posted this story.

The Antimedia has the article Seymour Hersh: US Lied About Syrian Chemical Attack Then Bombed Them Anyway.

Those commentators who can review these startling revelations but still condone Trump’s actions with a lazy ‘Assad is still a bad guy and must be overthrown’ mindset argument are being intellectually dishonest, with themselves and others. As was the case in 2013, there is still very little evidence that Assad has ever used chemical weapons — particularly in the attacks that the U.S. has tried to pin on him — yet this is the standard by which the corporate media and our respective governments have instructed us to judge Assad. Even without this conclusive evidence, shortly after the April events, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley stated Assad will fall from power.

People who don’t read stories like this would have no reason to doubt the lies published in the corporate media. I do read these stories, and tend to believe what Seymour Hersh writes. It is very frustrating to have this “knowledge” while reading commentary from people who don’t know or refuse to entertain the possibility of what Seymour Hersh writes.

YouTube has the video MMT for You and Me.

Part 1 rolls right into Part 2 if you keep watching. Part 1 just sets up the question, Part 2 answers it. The whole thing is like 5 minutes long, but it can change the way you view the government and the economy.

If this very short introduction makes you curious, then there are posts all over this blog that point to much more detailed information about MMT.

Black Agenda Report has the opinion piece Why Bernie Sanders is an Imperialist Pig.

Bernie Sanders is a highly valued Democrat, the party’s Outreach Director and therefore, as Paul Street writes, “the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us on the ‘hard radical’ Left said he was.” Sanders is a warmonger, not merely by association, but by virtue of his own positions. He favors more sanctions against Russia, in addition to the sanctions levied against Moscow in 2014 and 2016 for its measured response to the U.S-backed fascist coup against a democratically elected government in Ukraine. Rather than surrender to U.S. bullying, Russia came to the military aid of the sovereign and internationally recognized government of Syria in 2015, upsetting the U.S. game plan for an Islamic jihadist victory.

Although there is a hint that Bernie Sanders may have come to his senses lately. See my previous blog post Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul Buck Party Consensus on Russia and Iran Sanctions.

Naked Capitalism has posted a transcript and a video of The Real News Network‘s interview David Sirota: The Role of Journalism in the Age of Trump.

DAVID SIROTA: Well I mean, you’ve got to ask the question why hasn’t there been more of a forceful, coherent policy resistance to Trump? I think it’s because the Democratic Party is constantly caught between knowing what it should do to win elections, which is propose a positive policy vision on issues that are popular. They’re caught between that and their donor class, and so there is this constant search by Democratic operatives and pundits and politicians to try to find on the Venn diagram, some middle ground. “Where can we satisfy the public and also appease our donors?” That crossover in the Venn diagram is getting narrower and narrower because what the public wants is becoming in direct opposition to what the donor class wants.

On my better days, this is what I try to do on this blog. I try to report important policy facts irrespective of where they come from or who what individual person they impact. I am more interested on the impact on our society as a whole than I am on protecting one person’s privilege.

Truth Dig has posted authorized excerpts of Oliver Stone’s interview – ‘The Putin Interviews’: Excerpt. One issue that I have blogged about numerous times is the U.S. backed coup d’état in the Ukraine.

VP: Remember how the Ukrainian crisis unfolded. [We’ve discussed it.] The three foreign ministers of European countries were acting as guarantors of an agreement between the opposition and President Yanukovych. Everyone agreed to that. President Yanukovych even agreed to hold early elections. At that time, at the initiative of the United States of America, they told us, ‘We ask you to prevent President Yanukovych from using the armed forces.’ And they promised in their term they were going to do everything for the opposition to clear the squares and the administrative buildings. We said, ‘Very well that is a good proposal. We are going to work on it.’ And as you, know President Yanukovych didn’t resort to the armed forces. But the very next day the coup d’état took place during the night. We didn’t have a telephone conversation, we didn’t get a call, we simply saw them [the Americans] actively support those who perpetrated the coup d’état. And we could only shrug our shoulders. Such conduct, the way the Americans acted, even among individuals is absolutely unacceptable. They should have at least told us afterwards that the situation had spun out of control. They should have told us that they would do everything to put them back on a constitutional track. No, they didn’t do that. They started to come up with lies saying that Yanukovych had fled. And they supported those who performed that coup d’état. How can we trust such partners?

OS: Question—is this when Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State, had that conversation with the American ambassador and said, “Fuck the EU”?

VP: Well, it doesn’t matter, honestly. It was on February 21st. Or maybe the 20th. The coup d’état took place the next day. So now that Crimea has become a full fledged part of the Russian Federation, our attitude towards it changed drastically. If we see a threat to our territory, just as any other country, we will have to protect it by all means at our disposal. I wouldn’t draw an analogy with the Cuban Missile Crisis, because back then the world was on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse. Thankfully, the situation didn’t go as far this time, even though we did indeed deploy our most sophisticated, our cutting-edge systems, for coastal defense.

I actually thought that Oliver Stone mischaracterized the Victoria Nuland remarks, so I searched my previous posts about Ambassador Nuland.

I found one, U.S. officials caught in Ukraine plot, that seemed to corronorate Stone’s take on what she said.

In addition, it showed that the U.S. is contemptuous of the role of its EU partners, who are also imperialist rivals.

The very next one I found, NYT Revamps Its False Ukraine Narrative, sort of explains wjhy I thought Stone was wrong.

The Ukraine crisis really emerged from the European Union’s offer of an association agreement that President Yanukovych was initially inclined to accept. But it was accompanied by harsh austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund, which would have made the hard life for the average Ukrainian even harder.

Because of those IMF demands and a more generous $15 billion loan offer from Russia, Yanukovych backed away from the EU association, angering many western Ukrainians and creating an opening for U.S. neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, to urge on protests to unseat Yanukovych

That last blog post had a link to the article, EU Association Agreement with Ukraine Is a Gift to Kleptocrats, that explains what was wrong with the EU offer to the Ukraine.

Knowing all this makes the Putin remarks very credible. More credible than the fiction that the U.S. government and corporate press has tried to sell us.

YouTube has the video of the Oliver Stone production of The Putin Interviews – Part 1 (English Subtitles).

Published on Jun 13, 2017

Oliver Stone interviews the Russian president Vladimir Putin about divisive issues related to the US-Russia relations.

Download Links to the series:

PART 1 (504 mb): https://fil.email/5lMzwL9R

PART 2 (655 mb): https://fil.email/nRvAvpBj

PART 3 (498 mb): https://fil.email/YDd8CART

Since this is subtitled, try to view this full screen on the largest screen you have. Even without enlarging it on my desktop computer, I was able to read the subtitles with my inferior vision, but it was easier when I made it full screen.

It is important to be able to view this cideo with an open mind. Try to free yourself from arguing against it until you have taken in the words that are being said. For some this will be easy to do. I just fear that for others (Stephen Colbert, e.g.), they will be so busy forming a rebuttal as Putin and Stone speak that their minds won’t even understand what is being said.

The Real News Network has the Max Blumenthal interview Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul Buck Party Consensus on Russia and Iran Sanctions.

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal explains that these sanctions punish Russia and Iran unnecessarily intensifies the conflict between the US and these countries.

When I have to say that Senator Rand Paul is one of only two sane senators in the U.S. Congress on this issue, you know the world is about to come to an end. Has someone been importing drinking water from Flint, Michigan into Washington D.C. to deaden the minds of our political “leaders”?

Naked Capitalism has the article The Fiscal Policy Experience Since the Great Recession. The article finishes with a nice summary of how we ought to look at government deficits. (Emphasis added by me.)

The question should always be whether the fiscal position is supportive of a high level of economic activity, and the budget deficit should be large enough to support that level of economic activity—but not larger. When private sector demand is low, then potential savings are high and will become available to support budget deficit of an appropriate size. Debts accumulated from appropriate deficits can similarly be readily accommodated. Instead of fretting about the debt ratios and striving to always balance the (structural) budget, the focus should be on why a deficit is often necessary for a reasonable level of economic activity.

This nicely puts an end to the straw-man argument that austerity fanatics frequently put up. They try to make their point with an argument using reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to absurdity”). They propose the theory that if a deficit is good for the economy, then a bigger deficit must be better. Then they propose absurd levels of deficit to prove that deficits cannot be good. The above summary from the articule talks only about “budget deficit of an appropriate size”. Deficits can be too large, but they can also be too small. Reductio ad absurdum just leads to absurd results. Dismiss the people who try to prove that deficits are never good.

Space Daily has the story Researchers discover shortcut to satellite-based quantum encryption network.

From the ground, researchers measured laser signals that originated from a satellite and traveled through Earth’s gravitational potential and the turbulent atmosphere. The successful characterization of quantum features under such conditions is a precondition for the implementation of a global quantum communication network using satellites that would link metropolitan area quantum networks on the ground.

I have blogged about various quantum mechanical issues. The issue at hand here is quantum entanglement. In particular, I thought I understood it in the post ‘Quantum teleportation’ breakthrough by DARPA-funded physicists. However, I still don’t feel comfortable that I really understand many of the details for practical use of the physics.

I can’t remember the book that I read about quantum entanglement, but perhaps it was The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn. The title doesn’t sound as familiar as it should if this is the book.