Another Slice of Pizzagate
By Alan Smithee | Counter-Currents | December 8, 2016
Any discussion of the plausibility of conspiracies has to start with MK Ultra—one of the most bizarre “conspiracy theories” that turned out, by all official accounts, to be completely and entirely true. MK Ultra was a CIA program that began in the early 1950s and operated at full scale from then until around 1964. The program was reduced in scope in 1964 and then again in 1967 and wasn’t officially put to an end until 1973 [1]—although 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti claimed in 1977 that the CIA’s assurances that it had stopped the program were nothing more than a “cover story.”
It is unambiguously acknowledged that the MK Ultra program was extremely illegal, as it involved performing covert tests and experiments altering the mental state and brain functioning of unwitting, non-consenting, oblivious U.S. citizens. These tests involved everything from hypnosis and sensory deprivation, to verbal and sexual abuse and other forms of psychological torture,[2][3] to giving potent psychoactive drugs like LSD to unsuspecting U.S. citizens. On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy explained that the Deputy Director of the CIA had revealed to the Church Committee (the arm of Congress tasked with investigating the scandal in 1975) that these kinds of tests had been performed “at all social levels, high and low, [to] native Americans and foreign.”
Again, all of this is universally acknowledged in the public record: the U.S. General Accounting Office reported in 1984 that “the program consisted of . . . drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects.” Forty-four colleges and universities, fifteen pharmaceutical companies, twelve hospitals, and three prisons are also known to have participated, and yet despite how many people were involved in these severe abuses of the public trust, it took more than twenty years for any information to actually surface about what was happening.[5] These institutions are also known to have collaborated in abusive and nonconsensual experimentation with drugs like LSD on children, including children with schizophrenia and autism. As Dr. Jeffrey Kaye’s article notes, “[R]eading the professional papers of such scientists and researchers . . . [n]ot once do any of these papers express concern for the subjects at hand or denote any pangs of conscience at violating any oaths, codes and statutes regarding patient rights, human rights or human dignity.”
And yet, even now, we still don’t have anything close to the full story. What we know about MK Ultra is disturbing enough. But most of the records describing what MK Ultra entailed were destroyed before they could even be accessed by Congressional investigation. A cache of 20,000 documents incorrectly stored in a financial records building is all that survived destruction by CIA Director Richard Helms after the Watergate scandal broke. These documents allowed the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission to uncover what it did.
Thus, to this day, we only know about some 150 individually funded sub-projects of MK Ultra.[4] The official records of the investigation, once again, acknowledge that only a fraction of what the project actually entailed is known: Chapter 3, part 4: “Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals” of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report acknowledges clearly that “. . . most of the MK–ULTRA records were deliberately destroyed . . .”
Furthermore, the established record even strongly suggests that murder was used as a means to keep the record clean.
One of several deaths universally known to have been associated with Project MK Ultra was that of Frank Olson, a U.S. Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher. According to the earliest account, Olson supposedly committed suicide by jumping from a window on the thirteenth story of a New York City hotel as a result of a psychotic episode. The CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in the hotel when Olson’s suicide occurred. However, the CIA’s own internal investigation found that CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, head of the MK Ultra project, had experimented on Olson with LSD without Olson’s prior knowledge and that this had directly led to his death; and in 1975 the Olson family received a $750,000 settlement along with apologies from President Ford and CIA Director Colby over the irresponsible administration of LSD.
But the Olson family disputes that even this is the full story. They claim that Olson was murdered because, especially after his own experience of being given LSD without foreknowledge, he became a security risk because he might reveal information about what MK Ultra had involved. Just a few days before his death, he had quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland, claiming a growing crisis of conscience over his work. And forensic analysis of Olson’s body after it was exhumed in 1994 revealed cranial injuries which indicated that Olson had in fact been knocked unconscious before exiting that window on the thirteenth floor[4]; in 2012, the Olson family filed suit for the wrongful death of Frank Olson again.
The Church Committee’s 1976 “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities” states that:
Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKUltra/MKDelta materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.
So why do I bring all of this up? Am I just trying to make the argument that if one conspiracy theory is true, all the others must be, too?
Not at all. Of course, case histories of bizarre government crimes and coverups makes our suspicions about Pizzagate more plausible. But there is a much more relevant reason for discussing MK Ultra here. People are asking where are the victims of the sort of high-level sex trafficking that #Pizzagate alleges. This is part of the answer.
Cathy O’Brien has claimed to have been a childhood victim of MK Ultra experiments for years.
And you can hear her testimony to The Granada Forum in 1996 right here:
At that time, it was 1978, and it was determined that I had endured sufficient trauma to carry out my first trial run operation. An enormous quantity of cocaine had been flown in on one of these operations and I was to deliver it into the neighboring state of Arkansas. By that time, Bill Clinton’s drug operation was in full swing. He was governor of Arkansas.
I delivered this cocaine to a remote airport on Ouachita Forest, which I have since identified as Mena Airport. I also delivered a little packet of information and a small quantity of cocaine, a personal stash from J. Bennett Johnston to Bill Clinton. I delivered it to Bill Clinton and he cut out two lines of the coke, and he did inhale . . .
That certainly wasn’t the only time I saw Bill Clinton using cocaine.
My sexual experience with Bill Clinton was extremely limited . . . my experience was much more prevalent with Hillary Clinton because Hillary is also bisexual, leaning more towards a homosexual. It was she who accessed my sex programming to fulfill her perversions.
While some are skeptical of her account on the grounds that most of her claims can’t be verified independently,
- We know for a fact that children were exploited by high-ranking officials, doctors, etc. during the era of MK Ultra.
- We know that most of the documents revealing the full depths of what MK Ultra programs involved were permanently destroyed.
- We also know that childhood abuse of a nature this extreme leaves people emotionally and psychologically unstable.
Thus, were any of the children abused by these programs to come forward, an emotionally disturbed individual making unverifiable claims is exactly what it would look like. Whether you find her claims plausible enough to deserve investigation or not, they do refute the suggestion that there hasn’t been anyone claiming to have been the victim of a sex ring of the sort alleged in Pizzagate.
And again, I think when we look at things lying in plain sight, right in the official public record, the possibility doesn’t sound so implausible. Many have now heard that Hillary Clinton laughed gleefully over securing the acquittal of a 41-year-old man who she thought was guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl before sending her to the hospital in a coma. The victim is still clearly emotionally scarred by the experience: “Hillary Clinton put me through Hell . . . You lied on me, and you’re supposed to be for women? You call that ‘for women,’ what you did to me? I hear you on tape, laughing!”
The only defense I’ve ever heard for this behavior is that it’s “normal for a lawyer.” I doubt that. But it is definitely normal for a sociopath. I think many lawyers, no matter how much pride they take in their ability, would at least feel conflicted if they truly knew they’d helped secure a guilty individual’s freedom. Only a sociopath would express unmitigated glee over it without the slightest pang of conscience shining through.
But even if this is “normal for a lawyer,” maybe that’s because the legal profession attracts sociopaths, which is why we keep finding so many lawyers in high-level sex rings, like this one just uncovered in Norway last month.
Either way . . . add that to Hillary calling Gennifer Flowers (with whom Bill Clinton later admitted to having an affair) a “trailer trash failed cabaret singer” in attempt to discredit her true story, or the story of Hillary allegedly intimidating Juanita Broaddrick, Bill’s alleged rape victim, or any of the many other well-established stories of Hillary’s enabling Bill’s abuse of women (as this article notes, the Clinton campaign reportedly spent $100,000 on private detective work in 1992 to try to discredit often true stories brought forward by women who’d had sexual encounters with Bill).
I’ll close with a few notes related to discussions I’ve seen following the last #Pizzagate article.
First, in my “Pizzagate” article, I noted that Reddit shut down the r/pizzagate subreddit while keeping r/pedofriends. Since then, I’ve discovered that there is documented evidence http://archive.is/lJKGJ :
- That Reddit was pressured by Twitter to shut down the r/pizzagate and r/Operation_Berenstain subreddits;
- That Twitter has been taking no action to shut down accounts sharing child pornography https://archive.is/XlM7B ,
- even as it has censored not only conservative figures and people within the Alternative Right, but
- in fact, has even banned the accounts of people who have called attention to the existence of that very child pornography on Twitter.
In other words, in response to child pornography being called out, Twitter has banned the people calling attention to it rather than banning the child pornography itself.
Second, some readers wondered how we know that the photos taken from James Alefantis’ Instagram account are real. The answer is that, although they’ve been scrubbed, people following this story archived the images on archive.is, a site that keeps a permanent record of web pages in their current status. As you can see there, that page links straight to Alefantis’ account at https://www.instagram.com/jimmycomet/, and that isn’t something that the archiving website allows you to fake: the links contained in that archive are the links that were present on the original page at the time that it was archived, so there is no question that this is the image posted on Alefantis’ account. You can even find the other original records by simply searching archive.is for terms like “Alefantis.”
Third, here’s another interesting detail on Alefantis’ account. Take a look at Alefantis’ profile picture. It just so happens to be a bust of Antinous. Specifically, you can verify here that it is a picture of the bust held at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, next to the same exact window).
Who was Antinous?
Antinous was a Greek boy who was involved in a pederastic relationship with the Roman Emperor Hadrian. As the author Royston Lambert describes it, “The way that Hadrian took the boy on his travels, kept close to him at moments of spiritual, moral or physical exaltation, and, after his death, surrounded himself with his images, shows an obsessive craving for his presence, a mystical-religious need for his companionship.” The remaining sculptures of Antinous, Lambert tells us, are “without doubt one of the most elevated and ideal monuments to pederastic love of the whole ancient world.”
Fourth, if you search “Podesta Madeleine McCann,” there are a number of coincidences suggesting the possibility the brothers could have had a role in her disappearance. The key point is that Clement Freud, the convicted pedophile with whom the brothers remained close friends, has a mansion less than half a mile away from where the young girl disappeared in Portugal. We know that the Podesta brothers traveled there on occasion, there’s reason to think they may have been there during the month she disappeared, and the police sketches look disturbingly identical to both John and Tony Podesta—see here for a side-by-side comparison. While the police put out these two images on the assumption that they were two different people, it is entirely possible that two different witnesses could have separately only seen one man, although more than one man was involved. Also see this article, which demonstrates that it’s public knowledge that Clement Freud had contact with Madeleine McCann’s parents and again shows that while some of the evidence people are collecting in Pizzagate is Jesus-in-toast pareidolia and coincidence, at least some of it really is genuinely disturbing.
Fifth, some readers accused my opening article of partisanship for its focus on the Democratic Party, noting that Donald Trump has connections to Epstein as well.
Now, I want to say that I am in no way averse to discovering the possibility that Trump or individuals associated with him could be linked to events of this nature, and I would have no inclination to defend them if credible evidence should emerge. Furthermore, it has been claimed that the Trump campaign fired the son of his transition team’s national security adviser Michael Flynn for tweeting “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story,” and if that was indeed the real reason for the firing, I’m not sure what to make of it.
However, it bears noting that Donald Trump did in fact ban Jeffrey Epstein from his Mar a Lago club before Epstein was ever even convicted of soliciting a child prostitute, over an incident where Epstein was claimed to have made inappropriate comments to an attendant’s daughter; meanwhile, after Virginia Roberts (a woman who claims to have spent years as Epstein’s sex slave and is the only such claimant to have taken her defense public) admitted she didn’t recognize the woman who alleged she had been raped by Trump and Epstein, evidence emerged that the accusation was orchestrated by Norm Lubow, anti-Trump campaigner and former producer of the Jerry Springer TV show. Also interestingly enough, Trump has openly and publicly discussed Bill Clinton’s rides on Epstein’s Lolita Express, which at least suggests to me that Trump isn’t afraid of the story getting out. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. But I think it’s clear that I’m justified to put more focus on the far greater amount of circumstantial (and direct) evidence surrounding the Clintons.
Finally, as far as whether the previous article was “partisan” on the whole, note that Lawrence King who I discussed for his involvement in the Franklin Scandal in the 1980s, was the man chosen to sing the national anthem in the 1984 Republican convention, and was the leader of the Black Republican Congress. In the next entry to this series, I plan to discuss some historical cases, including the Franklin Scandal that King was at the center of, that once again demonstrate just how surprising the scale at which “cover-ups” of abuses of this nature really can take place. Events collected in the public record, just like Rotherham, that show how wrong assumptions like “Wouldn’t we expect their wives to come forward?” (I’m afraid not) or “Wouldn’t we expect X number of victims to have come forward by now?” can be.
Notes
1. Jo Thomas (3 Sep 1977). “C.I.A. Says It Found More Secret Papers on Behavior Control: Senate Panel Puts Off Hearing to Study Data Dozen Witnesses Said to Have Misled Inquiry C.I.A. Tells Of Finding Secret Data.” New York Times.
2. Otterman, Michael (2007). American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. Melbourne University Publishing. p. 24.
3. McCoy, Alfred (2007). A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Macmillan. p. 29. ISBN 1429900687.
4. John D. Marks (1979), The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences, Penguin Books Ltd.
5. Mills, Ami Chen (1991). CIA Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research (2nd ed.). Boston: South End Press. p. 38.
The US Government Is Stealing A Significant Part Of Its Own Aid To Afghanistan
By Grigory Trofimchuk | One World | July 6, 2020
Despite the statements of the US President D. Trump on the need for an early withdrawal of the US military from Afghanistan, the interest of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the industrial complex in maintaining a military presence in this country is obvious. We are talking about the use of American financial aid flows to Afghanistan for selfish purposes.
For almost two decades of the Afghan campaign and the presence of the NATO and US contingent, Washington formally allocated large-scale funds not only for security assistance, but also for the civil reconstruction and development of this country.
Since 2001, approximately $130 billion was sent to Afghanistan. However, not all the money reached the country in need.
A significant part of the “aid” remained in the United States in the form of kickbacks, as evidenced, in particular, by the numerous reports of the US Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, J.Sopko. This is also confirmed by an article about US corruption in Afghanistan on the Turkish “Aydinlik”.
As a result, corruption schemes for appropriating funds allocated to Afghanistan by the Americans themselves only worsened the already difficult economic situation in the country, which is trying to recover from military and political turmoil.
The question arises as to how those involved in the contract manage to retain a significant share of all tranches. The fact is that for the distribution of financial assistance to Afghanistan, there is a multi-level system of contracts, with the participation of American contractors and subcontractors.
To assign financial aid to Afghanistan, first of all, USAID is used, through which corrupt officials take about 50% of financial flows. For example, in the case of the program for the advancement of women in Badakhshan and Khost provinces, the share of appropriated funds reached 90-95%.
As a standard scheme, USAID transfers funds for the project to an Afghan agency that justifies its deliberately inflated cost to the local Ministry of Finance. After the contract is cashed out, half of this amount is given to USAID-related individuals. Grants from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are probably used in the same way, but in smaller amounts due to the greater number of witnesses in international organizations.
The very scale of American financial assistance, the feasibility of which is ambiguously assessed within the United States, also raises questions. In a report to the US Congress in February 2020, the above-mentioned J.Sopko noted that the amount of aid allocated significantly exceeds the capabilities of the Afghan economy.
According to the Inspector General, the amount of funds should be from 15 to 45% of the country’s GDP, while in 2007 and 2010, US grants to Afghanistan amounted to more than 100% of Afghanistan’s GDP. Obviously, such spending is not effective, but creates opportunities for plunder. At the same time, attempts by American politicians to reduce spending on Afghanistan are met with resistance from the military, who are interested in maintaining a significant source of income, as well as contractors involved in this area.
On March 23, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a $1 billion reduction in aid to Kabul due to the inability of two presidential contenders (A. Ghani and A. Abdul) to agree on power-sharing over highly questionable election dates. However, there is no confirmation that Washington is fulfilling the promises of the head of the Department of State. Recently, Democrat Senators even asked US Secretary of Defense M. Esper to report on cost reduction.
However, the report was not provided. Apparently, the Pentagon leaves this issue open, and the military clearly does not want to cut aid by reducing its articles.
The American defense industry has a special interest in the funds allocated to Afghanistan. Purchases and deliveries of goods to US and NATO contingents, as well as to Afghan security forces, are often carried out without regard to economic expediency and at inflated prices that are favorable to American manufacturers.
So, instead of building a factory in Afghanistan that would produce cartridges for M-4 and M-16 rifles at 12 cents apiece, Washington continues to buy cartridges from its suppliers for the needs of the Afghan security forces at the price of 57 cents apiece. In addition, the US military refused Russian kerosene at 94 cents per litre, buying it in Greece at $1.4 per litre. In order to maintain control, the United States provides financial assistance to the Afghan security forces through its own fund, not international structures.
American contractors on civil projects use the same principle with overstating the real cost of goods and services, including those supplied through USAID. For example, recently, not without their participation, the Ministry of Health of Afghanistan sold about 10,000 tests for coronavirus at a price of $48 each when their real cost is no more than $5.
The most “tasty” contracts are the supply of oil products and the supply of the Afghan army and the NATO contingent with weapons, military equipment and uniforms, which are lobbied by American congressmen whose wives get good positions on the boards of directors of the respective companies. At the same time, the real recipients of kickbacks are engaged in dirty work and are not “advertised”.
It is not surprising that American aid to Afghanistan, despite its astronomical size (the amount of aid exceeded the funds allocated under the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of post-war Europe), only allows the American military and contractors involved in its distribution to enrich themselves, while in Afghanistan the result of such assistance is not felt and its effectiveness, in general, is almost zero.
Recently, the media reported on the attempt of the top leadership of Afghanistan to redirect the flow of foreign financial assistance to themselves.
In April 2020, President Ghani bypassed the Parliament and announced the reform of the Ministry of Finance and the re-subordination of a number of its departments responsible for budget issues, state duties, and customs duties to the presidential administration.
However, the Department of State criticized Ghani’s decision as “corrupt”. It is noteworthy that immediately after such comments, the Afghan President withdrew his initiative. The political dependence of Kabul on Washington plays into the hands of US corruption schemes. The Americans clearly do not want to lose control over external financial flows to Afghanistan and do not allow even their wards to distribute them.
New evidence shows the FBI knew General Flynn was not ‘agent of Russia’ but prosecuted him anyway
RT | July 10, 2020
President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn was “not acting as an agent of Russia” by the FBI’s own determination, yet the Mueller probe was based on that claim and his legal odyssey still continues.
New evidence provided by the Justice Department to Flynn’s legal team this week, and made public on Friday as part of a court filing, shows that the FBI determined Flynn wasn’t a Russian agent, and believed he did not deliberately lie to agents during his January 2017 interview.
A handwritten document shows the officials believed there were no reasonable grounds for prosecution under the Logan Act, an arcane old law prohibiting US citizens from engaging in foreign policy.
After the Washington Post published fragments of leaked information from the FBI suggesting the opposite, however, Flynn was forced to resign in February 2017, and later that year faced perjury charges from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ‘Russian collusion’ by the Trump campaign.
What makes these revelations particularly egregious is the fact that the scope memo for Mueller’s probe, written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 and kept classified for years, cited the Logan Act as one of the predicates for going after Flynn.
The fourteen pages of additional evidence provided by the government on July 7 demonstrate Flynn’s innocence, the “absence of any crime,” as well as “government misconduct” in investigating Flynn and “prosecutorial misconduct in the suppression of evidence favorable to the defense,” his legal team said in a statement.
Flynn initially pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, but later changed legal counsel and claimed prosecutorial misconduct. A steady drip of evidence from the DOJ ever since has revealed the plot to catch him in a perjury trap, the role of disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok in keeping the case improperly open, and that Flynn did nothing wrong in his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – among other things.
Despite the overwhelming evidence against the prosecutors, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan has refused to approve the DOJ motion to drop the case. Instead, he appointed a retired judge who had just denounced the DOJ in the Washington Post to help him challenge it as amicus curiae.
Flynn’s lawyers took their case to the appeals court, which ruled on June 24 that Sullivan had to dismiss the charges. He refused, asking for a full-bench (en banc) review, with Flynn and the government now given ten days to respond.
The entire process is without precedent in Washington, but is hardly surprising given the political implications of the trial. Mueller’s probe was supposed to get Trump impeached and invalidate the 2016 presidential election, and though it failed the mainstream media and Democrats continue to insist on ‘Russiagate collusion.’ As the new documents show, all of it rests on the prosecution of Flynn, and falls apart entirely if he walks.
Pizzagate
By Alan Smithee | Counter-Currents | December 2, 2016
Beginning in 1997, in an English town of more than 100,000 people, eight Pakistani men stood at the core of a group involving as many as three hundred suspects who abused, gang-raped, pimped and trafficked, by the most conservative estimate, well over a thousand of the town’s young girls for years.
The police were eventually accused of not just turning a blind eye, but of participating in the abuse — even supplying the Pakistani gangs with drugs and tipping them off when they heard of colleagues searching for children they knew to be in the gangs’ possession.
Others were afraid of investigating the gangs or calling attention to their behavior because it would have been politically incorrect to accuse the town’s ethnic community of such a rampant and heinous crime — in the words of one English writer, “Fears of appearing racist trumped fears of more children being abused.”
But when this story first broke, guess where it appeared?
Here’s how a blogger writing under the name Mehrdad Amanpour tells the story of how the story first started reaching people:
Some years ago, a friend sent me a shocking article. It said hundreds of British girls were being systematically gang-raped by Muslim gangs. It claimed this was being covered-up.
I’ve never had time for conspiracy theories, especially when they look as hateful as those in the article. So I checked the links and sources in the piece. I found an American racist-far-right website and from there, saw the original source was a similarly unpleasant website in the UK.
I did a brief search for corroboration from reputable mainstream sources. I found none. So I wrote a curt reply to my friend: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send me made-up crap from neo–Nazi websites.”
Some months later, I read the seminal exposé of the (mainly) ethnic-Pakistani grooming gang phenomenon by Andrew Norfolk in The Sunday Times.
I was stunned and horrified — not just that these vile crimes were indeed happening and endemic, but that they really were being ignored and “covered-up” by public authorities and the mainstream media.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal first “broke” in the far-right blogosphere. The accusation they made was that these gangs were being allowed to operate undisturbed because everyone was too afraid of “appearing racist” to properly investigate them . . . and nobody listened to the far-right bloggers who were breaking this story because they were afraid of “appearing racist” if they gave any credibility to those far-right sources, too. Never mind that it seemed paranoid to rely on bloggers to report truths like these when the allegations were so wide-reaching, involving a literal conspiracy within the police force.
And yet, years after no one was willing to take them seriously, the far-right blogosphere turned out to be right.
Well over a thousand (mostly) white young girls were being abused by (mostly) Pakistani gangs.
And the authorities were covering it up.
We are now, once again, in the stage of an evolving scandal that Mehrdad Amanpour described his experience with above. Just to be clear, I’m not going to commit myself to the idea that this is going to be as huge as Rotherham was. We should be careful: we don’t know what would or wouldn’t be confirmed with a proper investigation. The question here is not whether we’ve gotten to the bottom of this online. The question is whether there is enough here to justify thinking there should be a proper investigation.
And the parallel with Rotherham is that the relatively small number of people asking for that are mostly the loathsome kinds of people who run “racist far-right websites.” So, since the claims are inherently conspiratorial, and the mainstream doesn’t want to be associated with those people who are talking about it, it is once again all too easy to just dismiss the claims out of hand as paranoia run wild.
Again, the evolution of the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was an extremely painful lesson that the mainstream can be wrong and the “paranoid racist far-right” can be right. And that lesson was far too expensive to simply let go to waste.
The name of this scandal is Pizzagate.
It gets the name for two reasons: first, because at the center of the scandal are high-level Washington insiders who own a handful of businesses in the DC area, including a couple of pizzerias (Comet Ping Pong and Besta Pizza), who have fallen under suspicion for involvement in a child sex abuse ring. Second, because the first questions arose in peoples’ minds as a result of some very bizarre emails revealed by Wikileaks in The Podesta Emails that, quite simply, just sound strange (and usually involve weird references to pizza). One of the strangest emails involves Joe Podesta being asked this question: “The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related). Is it yours?”
The evidence is of wildly varying levels of quality, ranging from the pareidolia of “Jesus is appearing to me in my toast” to “wait, that’s actually pretty damn creepy.” The mountain of claims and observations and speculations being compiled in places like Voat and Steemit are too overwhelming for any one person to hope to wade through sorting wheat from chaff, and while I don’t intend to try, I will summarize some just a little bit of it here.
While many of these claims are wild speculation over coincidences (though by no means all of them are), at some point I think a bunch of weird coincidences involving pedophilia and kids becomes sort of damning in and of itself. In one email, Podesta is among those being invited to a farm and the host says, “Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport Ruby, Emerson, and Maeve Luzzatto (11, 9, and almost 7) so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in [the] pool for sure.”
Could that have an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. But inviting a group of adult men to a gathering and calling young children “further entertainment” while listing their ages is weird, whether it ends up having an explanation or not.
If I was getting messages that listed the ages of young children that would be in a pool . . .
And it turned out that the logo for my business contained a symbol strikingly close to the “little boy lover” logo used by pedophiles to signify that their interest is in young boys rather than girls . . .
And the bands that showed up at my restaurant had albums called All the Children with images on the cover of a child putting phallic-shaped objects into his mouth . . .
. . . and were found making creepy jokes about pedophilia (in reference to Jared Fogle: “we all have our preferences . . .”) . . . and there were Instagram photos coming out of kids (“jokingly?”) taped to the tables in my restaurant . . .
. . . frankly, I would start asking questions about myself.
Here are just a few of the more “institutional” coincidences involved in the story: one of the men on the small list of people found “liking” photos like this one on these individuals’ Instagram accounts is Arun Rao, the U.S. Attorney Chief, charged with prosecuting cases of child pornography.
Besta Pizza, the business whose logo so closely resembled the “little boy lover” logo, is owned by Andrew Kline, who was one of four attorneys in the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit of the Department of Justice. Isn’t it just a little unusual that someone that high up in a human trafficking division would fail to notice the symbolism?
For yet another coincidence, Lauren Silsby-Gayler is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge in Haiti. It is a matter of public record that she was caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail while in that role for trying to abduct dozens of children, most of whom had homes and families. The main lawyer paid to represent Silsby-Gayler, “President of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” was himself suspected of involvement in human trafficking.
When the Clintons gained influence in the region, one of their first acts was to work to get Silsby-Gayler off the hook. Among the Podesta Wikileaks are State Department emails discussing their case. Meanwhile, she now works on the executive board of AlertSense . . . which collaborates with IPAWS to send out nation-wide Amber Alerts.
While some of the supposed “codewords” people have claimed to have identified in Pizzagate appear to be made up, there is at least one unambiguous instance: here is an Instagrammed photo posted by James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong that appears innocent enough: a man carrying a young child with a beaded necklace draped around both of their necks.
The disturbing bit is that the photo uses the tag “#chickenlovers,” and “chicken lover” is in fact an established term to refer to a pedophile — someone who loves “chicken,” which is also unambiguously an established term to refer to underage children (you can see this in the gay slang dictionary subset of the Online Dictionary of Playground Slang).
Complain all you want about the “speculative” and “paranoid” online discussions of Pizzagate, but when you have clearer-cut cases like this one where James Alefantis absolutely, unquestionably did in fact post a photo of a man holding an infant and the one and only hashtag he used for the photo involved a term that unquestionably is a reference to pedophilia, in a context where it is clear that there is nothing else here that “chicken” could possibly have been referring to, the likelihood that more speculative claims might have truth to them is increased.
There is a 1994 documentary exposé on NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) called Chicken Hawk. Here is yet another reference from a watchdog group from 2006, proving that this one existed well before Pizzagate surfaced. Another confirmed fact dug up by the paranoid right-wing conspiracy nuts on the Internet?
So here are a few more things we do know. We know that Bill Clinton has taken dozens of international flights on a plane colloquially known as the “Lolita Express” with Jeffrey Epstein, a man who spent 13 months in jail after being convicted of soliciting a 13-year-old prostitute. We know that Hillary Clinton’s staff knew that Anthony Weiner was sexting underage girls all the way back in 2011 — and covered it up. Guess whose laptop revealed evidence that Hillary Clinton went on flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” along with Bill? That’s right: Anthony Weiner’s.
Now do you understand why the mainstream media was so eager to spin these emails as just a “distraction” during the election?
The staff that ignored Weiner’s sexting of young children included John Podesta himself, whose brother Tony is one of the very men at the center of Pizzagate. Tony Podesta has rather warped tastes in art. For instance, he owns a bronze statue of a decapitated man in a contorted position identical to a well-known photograph of one of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims:
Creepy Tony Podesta with bronze statue of Dahmer sex crime/cannibalism victim
(See here for the disturbing photo of the real victim.)
The same news story that features the image above also mentions the fact that John Podesta’s bedroom contains multiple images from a photographer “known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes.”)
Furthermore, Tony Podesta’s favorite artist is Biljana Djurdjevic, whose art heavily features images of children in BDSM-esque positions in large showers. Here’s one with a row of young girls in a shower with their hands behind their backs in a position that suggests bondage:
Here’s one with a young boy in a shower tied up in the air with his hands over his head:
In addition to Jeffrey Epstein, the Podesta brothers are also friends with convicted sex offender Clement Freud as well as convicted serial child molester Dennis Hastert.
We do know that the New York Times, which is now dismissing Pizzagate in its entirety as a hoax, is run by Mark Thompson — who was credibly accused a few years back of lying to help cover up a scandal involving another high-profile public figure involved in child sex abuse, Jimmy Savile, during his time as head of the BBC.
And we do know that this has happened before.
Lawrence King
Lawrence King, the leader of the Black Republican Caucus, who sang the national anthem at the Republican convention in 1984, was accused by multiple claimed victims of trafficking and abusing boys out of the Boys Town charity for years. You can hear the chilling testimony from three people who claim to have been victimized by King in a documentary produced shortly after the events transpired.
You can hear the FBI, even after they received extensive testimony from victims, explain in their own words that they weren’t going to prosecute King because if anything were wrong with him, he would have been prosecuted by a lower authority already. Eventually, King was found “O. J. guilty” of abusing Paul Bonacci — convicted in civil court, acquitted in criminal court.
The best written source for information about the depths of corruption and cover-up involved in this scandal is Nick Bryant’s The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal (if you can’t find a free copy on your own, contact me through my website, www.zombiemeditations.com and I tell you where to find it).
Could all of this turn out to be nothing?
Of course it could.
But that’s not the question here. The question is how we should respond to the possibility.
Do we take the possibility seriously? History clearly indicates that we should. Even if it did turn out to be nothing at all, I would still be more proud to belong to a community willing to take the possibility seriously and call for investigation than I would to belong to a community that dismissed the possibility far too hastily and luckily turned out to be right — even as it did this and turned out to be wrong in so many cases like Rotherham before.
The real horror here would be to live in a society that responded as Reddit has — by shutting down the whole conversation entirely, banning r/pizzagate even while keeping subreddits like r/pedofriends, “a place for (non-offending) pedophiles and allies to make friends with each other!” alive.
Over on his blog, Scott Adams asks us to keep in mind cases where confirmation bias did lead to false allegations of institutional pedophilia, to caution against excessive confidence. (He hastens to add: “I want to be totally clear here that I’m not saying Pizzagate is false. I see the mountain of evidence too. And collectively it feels totally persuasive to me. It might even be true. I’m not debating the underlying truth of it. That part I don’t know.”)
But which is worse? If all the evidence coming out of Pizzagate is entirely false, what have we lost by spending time on it? On the other hand, if even five percent of the allegations that have been made surrounding the topic are true, what have we lost by ignoring them? Which is worse: spending too much time pursuing and thoroughly vetting false leads, or looking the other way while any amount of child abuse goes on?
According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, nearly 470,000 children disappear in the United States alone each year. This number is dubious for a number of reasons [custody order violations?]. It looks like some number of runaways end up in the NCIC count, and to make matters worse, repeat offenders can make it into the data multiple times. So that would suggest that the real number must be lower than this tally; but on the other hand, we also know that many missing children are never reported in the first place, so it’s possible that that could boost the number back up. The bottom line, however, seems to be that there is no reliable way to determine how many total children are actually missing in the U.S.
Either way, though, even if correcting for these errors took out 90% of the disappearances in the NCIC database, and there were no unreported disappearances to account for at all, I think even the resulting 50,000 per year would still be enough to call the problem systematic and justify suspicion that these disappearances could well involve organized efforts—given that we already know of so many pedophile rings in so many powerful institutions.
In 2013, Canada busted a ring involving more than 300 adults, who had teachers, doctors, and nurses heavily represented among them. A pedophile ring has just been identified in the highest levels of UK football (Americans know the sport as soccer). Norwegian police also just uncovered a ring of 50 organized pedophiles mostly working in the tech sector, once again including elected officials, teachers, and lawyers. The Vatican scandals can practically go without mention — institutional involvement in child sex exploitation is nearly an a priori given.
And the children that are being raped and murdered in the photos passed around by these child porn rings are coming from somewhere. And when figures like politicians, teachers, and lawyers are involved in the rings, it’s hardly inconceivable that they could be involved in disappearances.
Have we identified one here?
Only time will tell. But we deserve to be paid attention. We deserve to have the matter taken seriously. And we deserve a media bringing the most relevant facts to our attention after having actually done some due diligence on the matter, which we do not currently have. The mainstream media has lied to us long enough about things like Trump having only a 1% chance of winning the election that the public has increasingly woken up to this fact — which is why Pizzagate is getting so much more attention than the Franklin scandal did. If Pizzagate turns out to have even a single-digit fraction of truth behind it, it may not just bring down the Clinton machine and Democratic Party, it may sound the death knell for the mainstream media as well.
Judgement Day for Ghislaine Maxwell Finally Arrives. Or Maybe Not
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 9, 2020
That Ghislaine Maxwell is finally in custody is certainly satisfying for all of us who believed her completely complicit in the horrible crimes against young girls committed by her associate Jeffrey Epstein. The internet is already alive with speculation regarding how long she will last in prison given the alleged death by suicide that eliminated Epstein in a Manhattan maximum security prison back in August 2019. Before jumping to too many conclusions, however, there are a number of additional developments in her case that should be considered.
First of all, Maxwell’s arrest was not fortuitous. She clearly made some efforts to hide the bulk of her multi-million-dollar fortune, but she has been visible for those who knew where to look. She moved about freely, though keeping a low profile, and made “intentional efforts to avoid detection including moving locations at least twice, switching her primary phone number (which she registered under the name ‘G Max’) and email address, and ordering packages for delivery with a different person listed on the shipping label.”
The 18-page prosecutorial indictment stated that “The Government has identified more than 15 different bank accounts held by or associated with the defendant from 2016 to the present, and during that same period, the total balances of those accounts have ranged from a total of hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than $20 million.” Maxwell was charged with recruiting and “grooming” young women for Epstein to abuse, which could carry as much as a 35 year prison sentence.
As the 58-year old Maxwell, who has British citizenship as well as that of the United States, France and Israel, was considered to be a considerable flight risk she was not allowed bail after her arrest.
During the time while Maxwell was moving about freely, the FBI apparently did not even attempt to interview her. She spent a good deal of time with her lawyers and was reportedly seen having coffee in Los Angeles, shopping near her apartment in Paris, visiting Britain and also staying under protection in Israel. She was born in France and her father, the Israeli spy Robert, is presumed to have had citizenship in the Jewish state, which would have been transferrable to her. Both France and Israel are extremely difficult to deal with when it comes to extradition, so she presumably could have stayed in either country and would have avoided prosecution in the United States. One might also recall that Epstein had a genuine Austrian passport in a false name, a probable indicator of his intelligence agency ties. It is quite possible that Ghislaine also has some form of false identification.
When she was arrested, Ghislaine was living in a luxurious country house on 156 acres in a rural part of New Hampshire. She had bought the property in December for $1.07 million through a limited liability company that does not bear her name which was set up by one of her lawyers. Clearly the police knew exactly where she could be found. The house is a two-hour drive from the Canadian border, which might have been an intended refuge if she felt that the forces of law and order were moving in, but it begs the question as to why she would want to return to the U.S. at all. I rather suspect that she and her lawyers had actually been in touch with the authorities and some kind of plea bargain has been under consideration.
Why now? The timing would seem to relate to other developments. Only last week Federal judge Loretta Preska ruled that the documents relating to Epstein and Maxwell in the possession of litigant victim Virginia Giuffre had to be destroyed. Information about Epstein and Maxwell, extracted from a 2015 civil suit filed against Epstein by Giuffre, appear to have contained the names of individuals with whom Epstein had conducted business, both those he recorded in flagrante as well as his other clients and even his victims.
Preska ruled that Giuffre’s lawyers had obtained the documents improperly and ordered that all the materials in the files “shall be destroyed.” She also demanded proof that the material had been destroyed. The whereabouts of Epstein’s secret tapings is not definitely known, but the FBI did seize all of the papers and other data at the Manhattan mansion after he was arrested. Some believe, however, that Ghislaine has some of the tapes, presumably hidden or in the custody of her lawyers.
The loss of the Giuffre files will seriously damage the criminal case being made by the government against Maxwell as well as the lawsuit being pursued by the victims against the Epstein estate. Ghislaine has been charged with procuring young girls and “grooming” them for sex with Epstein and his prominent clients, all of which she has denied. The upcoming trial could easily end relatively quickly with a toothless admission of guilt by Maxwell and a plea-bargained minimum prison sentence. All documents relating to the case, including any recordings, would be sealed, which would inter alia protect other perceived government equities, namely the prominent individuals and the spy agencies that might have been involved either as victims or perpetrators.
There is every indication that the Justice Department aided and abetted by the media is seeking to bury certain aspects of the Epstein case. A recent documentary on Netflix “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” carefully avoids any discussion of the likely Israeli espionage aspect of Epstein’s activities. Ghislaine’s father, who introduced Jeffrey to his daughter, was a prominent Mossad spy who received a state funeral in Israel after his mysterious death in 1991 which was attended by the prime minister as well as by all the former and serving heads of that country’s intelligence services.
Additional confirmation of the Israeli connection comes from a recent book by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who claims that Epstein and partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell were engaged in blackmailing prominent politicians on behalf of Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad. According to Ben-Menashe, the two had been working directly for the Israeli government since the 1980’s and their operation, which was funded by Mossad and also by prominent American Jews, was a classic “honey-trap” which used underage girls as bait to attract well-known politicians from around the world. The politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls. Prince Andrew and both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were visitors to the Epstein New York City mansion where the recordings were made, while Clinton was a regular traveler on the “Lolita Express” airplane that Epstein used to transport his “friends” to his estate in Florida and his private Caribbean Island, referred to by locals as the “Pedophile Island.”
Concerning Maxwell and Epstein, no one in the Justice Department appears to want to ask one simple question that would provide significant clarity if it were to be answered honestly. Conclusive evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli or even American intelligence agent might well be derived from the former U.S. Attorney in Miami Alexander Acosta’s comments when being later cleared by the Trump transition team. He was asked “Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” … “Acosta testified that he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.’”
Why is no one in the various government investigative agencies or the mainstream media interested in what Acosta meant, even though it would be easy enough to ask him? Who told him to back off? And how did they explain it? The simple answer just might be that Epstein was in fact an Israeli spy preying on prominent figures and anything having to do with the Jewish state, no matter how malodorous, is a political hotwire and off limits to Democrats and Republicans alike. If all of that is true, we the public will not be seeing anything like a “show trial” of Ghislaine Maxwell that reveals all and names names. She will quietly disappear into the legal system and before too long she will be out and around again, taking her secrets with her.
Venezuela: Arrest Warrants Issued for Guaido’s Foreign Commissioner & US, UK Reps
By Paul Dobson | Venezuelanalysis | July 6, 2020
Mérida – Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab issued arrest warrants for eleven members of Guaido’s inner circle on Friday, including his US and UK representatives.
The citizens were targeted following their reported involvement in the “plunder” of 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England (BoE) and follows a contested London court ruling blocking the government’s efforts to regain control over the assets.
Guaido’s representatives in London and Washington, Vanessa Neumann and Carlos Vecchio, have both been accused of treason, usurpation of office and criminal association, as has his appointed “special commissioner for foreign relations” Julio Borges, who is based in Colombia.
Warrants on the same charges were also issued for Ricardo Villasmil, Giacoma Cortesia, Manuel Rodriguez, Nelson Lugo and Carlos Suarez, who make up Guaido’s ad-hoc Central Bank (BCV) board, which will now attempt to access the US $1.2 billion assets, and Jose Hernandez, Irene de Lourdes and Geraldine Afiuni from Guaido’s Special Attorney’s office.
In addition to the warrants, Saab announced that any local assets belonging to the citizens are to be frozen, and that his office is considering appealing to international policing bodies to assist in their capture. All of the eleven citizens currently live abroad.
“These criminals have acted in favour of foreign power’s interests, concocting to make the Venezuelan people suffer from food, medicine and fuel shortages so as to enrich themselves at the expense of the country,” the attorney general argued, before going on to describe Borges, Neumann and Vecchio as “false representatives” of the country.
Friday’s charges are just the latest in a number of criminal accusations against Guaido’s team, including embezzlement, corruption, and association with Colombian paramilitaries and US mercenaries.
Both Vecchio and Borges have pre-existing arrest warrants open against them in Venezuela following their alleged roles in failed attempts to overthrow the Maduro government. Borges has been previously linked to the 2018 drone assassination attempt against the president.
For her part, Neumann has been accused of looking to bargain off Venezuela’s historical claim to the oil-rich and disputed Essequibo Strip to the neighbouring Cooperative Republic of Guyana in exchange for diplomatic recognition from London. The US-Venezuelan citizen was additionally accused by the government of “working with paramilitary groups in Colombia in 2009 and 2010” and “being a US government agent” last week.
In response to Saab’s announcement, Guaido’s “Commission for Foreign Relations” described the charges as “repression,” while the opposition leader defended his team’s efforts to “protect Venezuelan gold in the UK.”
Last Thursday, a UK High Court ruling blocked Maduro’s efforts to regain control over the gold, with Judge Nigel Teare arguing that the court was “bound” by 10 Downing Street’s “unequivocal recognition [of] opposition leader Juan Guaido as president.” While the assets remain blocked, Guaido’s ad-hoc BCV board is expected to file for control in the near future.
In response, the Venezuelan Central Bank pledged to appeal the “outrageous” decision. Government lawyers also claim that it fails to recognise the “reality of the situation on the ground,” in which the Maduro government is “in complete control of Venezuela and its administrative institutions.”
The gold was initially frozen by BoE authorities in November 2018 citing “standard” anti-money-laundering measures.
Following Guaido’s self-declaration as “interim president” in January 2019, gaining immediate recognition from Washington and London, the UK foreign office has since supported a number of regime change attempts and formed a special government-run “Venezuela Reconstruction Unit.”
Similarly, the UK followed the European Union in strengthening its sanctions regime against the country last month, applying asset freezes and travel bans on a number of Venezuelan officials in addition to previous measures. Despite its recognition of Guaido, the UK maintains dual diplomatic relations with both his representative and Maduro’s ambassador to the island, Rocio Maneiro.
After previous attempts to repatriate the reserves, Caracas looked to force the BoE to release the gold in May. Under the proposed resolution deal, the gold was to be sold and the funds directly channelled through the United Nations Development Program to acquire food and medicine to assist in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite registering far fewer cases than neighbouring countries, the coronavirus is increasingly taking hold in the sanction-hit Latin American nation. On Sunday, a record 419 coronavirus cases were identified by authorities, taking the total to 7,169, of which 2,100 have recovered and 65 have passed away. With a rapid increase in recent weeks, the country returned to a “strict” nationwide quarantine this week as part of the week-on-week-off lockdown program which Maduro claimed will be in place “until a vaccine appears.”
How Climate Trickery Infiltrated the American Geophysical Union
11 presentations – based on private, agenda-driven research – were delivered to the world’s largest gathering of climate scientists.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | July 6, 2020
I’ve been writing about a far-fetched climate fairy tale that was repackaged and re-positioned – with the result that it now gets taken seriously by supposedly serious scientists (see here and here).
How did this happen? First, billionaire climate activists hired consultants to produce a brand new climate analysis. Because, you know, the world doesn’t have enough climate research, what with governments spending billions on it every year.
This custom research was conducted by a team of noticeably young people. One is still working on his doctorate. Two others were doctoral students at the time. The lead scientist had earned his geobiology PhD seven years earlier. The lead economist had earned his, in sustainable development, a mere three years earlier.
This team produced a 2014 report titled Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States. It features a graphic that wildly misrepresents the scientific literature.
Six months after that report appeared, fully 11 presentations based on it were delivered at the world’s largest annual gathering of earth scientists – the American Geophysical Union’s December 2014 conference.
click for source
The first presenter was Kate Gordon. But she isn’t an earth scientist. She’s a lawyer. And a trained community activist. And the Risky Business Project’s founding director. Who’s considered “a leader in the national ‘green jobs’ movement.”
At the time she delivered her AGU presentation, she was employed by The Next Generation, which describes itself as a “political consulting and issue advocacy firm, specializing in progressive and environmental candidates and causes.”
So a professional activist was invited to give a talk to earth scientists. That talk, according to its abstract, told people the Risky Business Project had conducted “groundbreaking new analysis.” After employing “methodological innovations,” she said, it had arrived at “novel insights.”
The thing about lawyers is they can make even a dumpster of stinky trash sound sublime.
Risky Business lead scientist Robert Kopp; click for source
Presentations #2, #8, #9 and #10 were delivered by Risky Business lead scientist Robert Kopp. He was then associate director of Rutgers University’s Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences. Which sounds eminently respectable.
So why does the abstract of his first AGU talk tell people that
Projected sea-level rise for 2100 under RCP 8.5 would likely place $80-$160 billion of current property in New York below the high tide line… it would likely increase average annual storm damage by $2.6-$5.2 billion… [bold added]
without mentioning the salient point that the hypothetical climate scenario known as RCP8.5 represents an implausible vision of the future?
Why does the abstract for Kopp’s second presentation mischaracterize RCP8.5 as a “moderately-high business-as-usual emissions scenario”? (italics mine)
Risky Business economist Amir Jina, click for source
Presentations #3, #6, and #11 were delivered by Amir Jina, an economist who earned his PhD in sustainable development that same year. Presenting at the AGU’s premiere event, his talks relied on a background document he himself had coauthored with Kopp and other members of the Risky Business squad.
The background document runs to 206 pages – and mentions RCP8.5 approximately once a page – for a total of 196 times. Outrageously, it declares:
RCP 8.5 is a reasonable representation of a world where fossil fuels continue to power relatively robust global economic growth, and is often considered closest to the most likely “business-as-usual” scenario absent new climate policy by major emitting countries. [bold added; see page numbered 14 (p. 18 of the PDF)]
Say, what? Remember how I’ve described RCP8.5 recently? An implausible hallucination predicated on:
1. the burning of more coal than some people think even exists
2. the abrupt reversal of longstanding population trends
3. a slowdown in technological innovation (which has, instead, been accelerating for decades)
Yeah, that all sounds realistic.
Please observe what has happened here. Private, agenda-driven money (aka billionaire climate activists Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and others) hired consultants who hired a handful of young researchers keen to make a name for themselves.
Those researchers produced a new, hefty, custom climate analysis. Which was privately published (rather than appearing in its entirety in a peer-reviewed scientific journal).
This research took the absurd seriously. It insisted an outlier climate scenario was reasonable. Neglecting to say by whom, it claimed RCP8.5 was often considered to be closest to the most likely scenario.
The hope was that other people would fall for this sleight of hand. The hope was that other people would join the parade and promulgate this fiction.
In the words of climate analyst Roger Pielke Jr.:
There is no hidden conspiracy, all of this is taking place in plain sight and in public…We have a well-funded effort to fundamentally change how climate science is characterized…This effort has been phenomenally successful.
The AGU helped make this happen. When it extended invitations to a professional activist, an individual employed by a consultancy being paid by climate activists, and doctoral students funded by those same climate activists, it legitimized this corruption of science.
LINKS:
- Part 1 of this discussion: How the Ugliest Climate Fairy Tale Won
- Part 2: Fooling Us With Climate Trickery
- my investigation was sparked by a series of articles written by Roger Pielke Jr., including How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science
- here’s the list of the 11 AGU presentations (posted on the website of the consultancy, Rhodium Group)
- the slick, privately-published, 56-page Risky Business report can be downloaded here
- the 206-page, privately commissioned and privately published background document, American Climate Prospectus: Economic Risks in the United States, can be downloaded here.
- this Berkeley News article, dated August 2014 (after the June 2014 release of both the American Climate Prospectus (version 1.0) report and the Risky Business report), describes Amir Jina as “a doctoral student at Columbia University.”
In 2014, D.J. Rasmussen was on the Rhodium Group’s payroll, as a “scientific research associate.” 5.5 years after he delivered presentation #5 to the AGU, he’s still working on his PhD. (It’s worth noticing that his advisor is activist scientist Michael Oppenheimer.) Rasmussen’s private website has been updated, but in 2019 its official photo indicated a markedly youthful individual.- Earlier this year, Tom Steyer withdrew his candidacy for US president. His personal website describes him as an activist. It prominently features a quote from the Washington Post: “Steyer has played a critical behind-the-scenes role in helping shape the country’s national energy policy.” A billionaire who boasts about his behind-the-scenes manipulations. How demoralizing for individual voters.
Veteran activists called out BLM as a tool of the Democrats from day 1. But agenda-driven $Millions drown out the grassroots
By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 6, 2020
The Black Lives Matter movement has made millions off black Americans’ suffering. A St. Louis activist explains how it comes from a long tradition of white liberals coopting grassroots movements to push a Democratic Party agenda.
The foundation-funded social justice activism of Black Lives Matter is using black pain to cash in on white liberal guilt, dividing American society in pursuit of a Democratic political agenda, St. Louis activist Nyota Uhura told RT.
Uhura founded her website handsupdontshoot in August 2014 to counter false narratives coming out of the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Having witnessed BLM’s rise up close as the nascent organization swooped into Ferguson amid the calls for justice triggered by Brown’s killing, methodically co-opting the genuine protest energy while ignoring or even obstructing those protesters’ demands, Uhura has fought to warn others of what the organization really represents – leveraging black activism into a boost for the Democratic Party.
The science of co-opting movements
Plucking a few Ferguson residents from the streets for a veneer of local credibility, BLM raised $33 million on the back of Brown’s death – money Uhura says her community never saw. Six years later, black St. Louis remains poor and plagued with violence, while BLM has found a new community to exploit.
“They overshadow the work of the grassroots, then they insert themselves as leaders and they go out in the media and claim to be leading these movements,” Uhura said.
Outlining the methodology of BLM and other astroturfed movements, she added that sometimes they literally just showed up at a protest they didn’t plan and did a news conference. This is a tradition she traces back to white liberals’ hijacking of the 1963 March on Washington.
That tradition has been boiled down to a science, she says, with organizations like NetRoots turning out phony ‘activists’ with the ruthless efficiency of an assembly line. “NetRoots is where activists go to audition to be puppets of the Democrats, special interest and white elite nonprofit,” she continued.
“It happens so fast that all the pieces are in place before you even have a chance to know what hit you… Before you even know it, you’re watching the news and they have coopted your movement.”
White liberal and progressive groups “use the energy of our movement to push their agenda” – in BLM’s case, weaponizing the concept of “intersectionality” to broaden the movement’s scope from race to feminism, immigrant rights, LGBT issues, and other causes that directly affect white people.
“In order to mobilize people, they need those black faces out front – because what are they going to look like protesting? Just in terms of optics it’ll look like a Klan rally,” Uhura joked. She has a point – just 17 percent of last month’s protesters were black, according to a Pew Research poll published last week, a statistic the organization’s foes are unlikely to let it forget.
Real activists disenfranchised
Uhura is far from the only grassroots activist to publicly speak out against BLM for pulling a bait-and-switch, substituting the Democratic Party’s pet causes in place of justice for the victims of police violence. The group’s Cincinnati chapter dropped the iconic phrase from its name in 2018, alleging the national organization “capitalized off a nameless groundswell of resistance sweeping the nation, branded it as their own, and profited off [black people’s deaths]” without making an effort to get justice for victims’ families.
The Cincinnati chapter also says that BLM’s 2015 conference in Cleveland – where 12-year-old Tamir Rice had just been gunned down by a cop for holding a toy gun – focused almost exclusively on black transgender rights, further dividing a suffering community.
Los Angeles activists slammed BLM’s local chapter for ignoring the killing of Ezell Ford, a mentally-ill man shot by police in 2014, to travel to Ferguson and piggyback on the Michael Brown shooting. Upon their return to Los Angeles, where the activist community was demanding the city’s district attorney indict Ford’s killers, BLM Los Angeles not only continued to ignore the injustice, one of its leaders actually bestowed a ‘Women in Action’ award on the same DA who exonerated the cops who killed him.
Others take issue with what they see as obvious grifting by some of BLM’s most prominent representatives. DeRay McKesson has promoted brands from Apple to McDonald’s, and even got himself arrested in a Twitter T-shirt in what many activists believe was a staged promotion.
Shaun King is so legendary for making large sums of money raised “for the movement” disappear that the Daily Beast wrote a story about it. King recently announced a “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission” in conjunction with three of the same “progressive prosecutors” that activists like Uhura have denounced for failing to police the police.
‘They always march us back into the voting booth’
Like all controlled opposition movements, one of BLM’s primary functions is to derail meaningful change. Uhura explained, “They always march us back into the voting booth.”
Well-heeled movement activists consistently divert money and energy into electing Democratic Party candidates or “progressive” prosecutors, none of whom hold police accountable when they murder innocent black men, whether it’s in Ferguson, Los Angeles, or New York City.
For this reason, she’s not convinced by the group’s recent calls to defund police, or the Minneapolis City Council’s pledge to do just that – the governments of Ferguson and St. Louis promised all manner of reforms they didn’t deliver. Many that did pass were hopelessly watered-down or have since been rolled back, and Uhura sees ‘defund the police’ as just another fundraising tactic.
The only electoral solution to the black community’s problems is “weaponizing our politics,” according to the veteran activist – all incumbents have to go. They’ve had their chance to make a difference, and proven themselves unwilling to deliver. “It might take one or two election cycles to mold a person into what we need, but right now we’re losing anyway,” she explained. “We have to just clean house and get rid of everybody. How can it be worse?”
BLM recently came under fire for doling out just six percent of its donations to local chapters over the past three years, with a whopping 83 percent going to pay consultants and travel costs. The complicated route the money takes from donor to chapter has elicited extensive speculation about the possibility of money laundering, and BLM representatives have been almost cartoonishly cagey when asked by reporters about their finances
Co-founder Alicia Garza has denied the group is backed by foundations at all, even though billionaire currency speculator George Soros alone has given over $33 million to BLM, its founders, and associated groups, and the Ford Foundation pledged to raise $100 million in 2016. Fellow co-founder Patrisse Cullors has held up a fact-check by PolitiFact, funded by the same Omidyar Network that funds BLM, as “proof” the group isn’t linked with the Democratic Party.
But it’s the group’s function as an ideological launderer that has thus far insulated it from accountability. From the corporations pouring millions of dollars into its coffers to burnish their woke cred, to the politicians donning Kente cloths and pandering their way to re-election, BLM positions itself as ‘the’ black activism group, overshadowing grassroots campaigners and sucking up all available cash – literally starving out the competition, as genuine movements struggle to be heard by the media and greater public over the foundation-funded din.
This model of activism has been so successful over the decades that it has come to dominate every cause from environmentalism to civil liberties, offering young people a “romanticized view of activism where it’s all hashtags, all patty-cake, all sugar and cream, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
Uhura, however, is confident that BLM’s true nature will be exposed, citing the movement’s own inherent discrimination: “How does Black Lives Matter get to decide WHICH black lives matter when they purposefully omit straight black people and straight black men whose death they profit from?”
But as long as grassroots activists are losing ground to foundation-funded rivals, new BLMs will keep popping up. Real activists must “create an alternative” to foundation-funded movements, she says – or risk losing the next generation to the Democratic operatives and keeping justice out of the reach of black communities forever.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Reparations and Other Scams: Israeli Survivors Live in Poverty and Are Starving?
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | July 5, 2020
The issue of reparations and other compensation has been much in the news of late, most particularly in relationship to possible payments to descendants of slaves in the United States to compensate them for their disadvantages brought about by what is claimed to be a persisting racist culture in the country. There is, of course, considerable resistance on the part of millions of non-black citizens who will have to foot the enormous bill even though they were not involved in slavery in any way, having arrived in the U.S. long after 1865, when involuntary servitude was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Reparations have been around for a long time, normally being exacted by the winners in a war against the losers, who automatically are blamed as the aggressors and therefore liable for the damages. Often the compensation comes in the form of territory, witness for example the German acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine from the French after the Franco-Prussian war followed by its return to France after the First World War. The Germans also were made to endure considerable cash and in-kind payments, primarily to France, after losing the First World War. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were so onerous that they were subsequently blamed for perpetuating Franco-German hostility, leading inevitably to the Second World War.
Israel and Jewish groups were major beneficiaries of the reparations and restitution programs that were created as a result of World War Two. The Luxembourg Agreement signed in 1952 committed West Germany to pay Israel a sum of 3 billion Deutsche Marks over the next fourteen years, which was at the time an enormous sum. An additional 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress. The payments that were made to the State of Israel regarded the government as the de facto heir to war victims who had no surviving family or who could not otherwise be identified. The money was mostly invested in the Israeli infrastructure and was significant in aiding in the initial development of the economy of the new state, but there were also considerable barter arrangements whereby Israel purchasing agents obtained German manufactured goods and raw materials.
The reparations program was modified at various points to expand those eligible for benefits and continued to operate long after the fourteen-year term initially envisioned had expired. As of 2012, when the program was 60 years old, it was still fully operational and Germany had paid the Jewish state an estimated $89 billion.
In the 1990s, Israel and Jewish groups began to go after other property that they claimed had either been sold at below market prices as Jews began to flee Germany or otherwise lost. Money trails in Swiss banks were investigated to chart the movement of funds that had originally been derived from Jewish owned property. Individual companies, mostly in Germany, were pressured by survivor groups to provide reparations to former forced laborers, leading the Berlin government in 1999 to establish a separate fund to assist survivors of the so-called holocaust. The Swiss and Hungarians set up similar funds and The World Jewish Restitution Organization was established to organize these efforts. In America, the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission pressured Germany in 1998-9 to compensate Jewish survivors who had arrived in the United States after the war.
Israel, of course, has a vested interest in continuing the flow of Euros by making Germans and other Europeans continue to feel guilty over the war. In 2007 the Israelis pressured the German government to expand the pension program for Jewish survivors of 1939-1945 who had wound up in Israel. In 2009 Israel demanded compensation of between 450 million and 1 billion Euros ($1,120,000,000 currently) for 30,000 claimed former slave laborer-survivors. And the requirements for eligibility for a payment or pension continue to become more permissive. A Jewish survivor qualifies if he lived in “a ghetto” for 12 months as will anyone who can demonstrate that he “hid from” the Nazis for at least six months. One acceptable “ghetto” is in Shanghai China. And given the destruction of many public records, there has been considerable fraud. In 2010 auditors found evidence of a scheme to use fake identification documents to defraud the German government of more than $42 million.
And new and innovative sources of money are constantly being developed. The United States and Israel are currently pressuring Poland, which was occupied by the Germans, to compensate Jewish property owners. It is particularly difficult to do as much of Warsaw and nearly all its public records were destroyed in 1944. In August 2019, no less than 88 U.S. Senators signed a letter urging Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “act boldly and with urgency” to compel Poland to resolve the property issue. The Poles have argued that the proceedings would be subject to massive fraud and “frivolous lawsuits” while the demands could bankrupt the country.
Meanwhile the French and Dutch rail systems, also under German control, have been forced to pay compensation to survivors because their trains were used to transport Jewish prisoners to camps.
The story of reparations and compensation is of particular interest, not only because the Second World War ended 75 years ago last month, but also because of attempts by Israel and Jewish groups to squeeze some final payments out of the remaining survivors. Quite astonishing is a “campaign” email currently being circulated by an organization calling itself LATET – Israeli Humanitarian Aid. It promotes itself as a charitable foundation with “All donations…tax-deductible in Israel, the U.S., Canada, Australia, France and the U.K.” It describes its activity as:
“Due to Covid-19, many impoverished Holocaust survivors experience an extended stay in deficient and insecure homes. MORE THAN EVER, SUPPORT URGENT HOME REPAIRS THE SURVIVORS CAN’T AFFORD. 1 in 4 Holocaust survivors in Israel lives in poverty. As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, our elders spend all their time at home, mostly alone, in run-down apartments and they have nobody to turn to. The need to eliminate all safety hazards and obstacles relating to mobility, safety and comfort has grown and dozens of survivors are waiting for urgent assistance. Latet is the only organization in Israel providing Holocaust survivors in need with a complete aid package, including monthly food boxes, social support and an Emergency Fund for crucial needs. Since 2013, Latet has carried out more than 1,200 home repairs to increase the survivors’ quality of life, at no cost to them. Everyday, 40 Holocaust survivors die. Let’s make sure they spend their last days in decent conditions.
“Donate now. Latet was founded in 1996 and is the largest Israeli NGO combating poverty. Acting as an umbrella organization, Latet provides for the basic needs of populations living in poverty and food insecurity, giving ongoing food assistance to over 200,000 people in Israel. The organization operates the leading national food bank and runs impactful aid programs. For the last 10 years it has been the only organization in Israel providing a comprehensive aid package to Holocaust survivors in need, including a monthly food box, emergency fund for medical and paramedical needs, home restorations as well as ongoing social support in the form of personal volunteers and social events throughout the year. For more information about Latet: www.latet.org.il/en/”
One should not necessarily doubt the fundamental decency of LATET and what they are seeking to do, but their solicitation raises some serious questions about the Israeli government and Jewish charities that have been the recipients of more than $100 billion obtained as “reparations” from various foreigners, mostly Germans, specifically to address the needs of the so-called “Holocaust survivors.” How can the survivors be living in terrible conditions and even starving in a socialist country with a formidable safety net, one might ask Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when they have been granted pensions and other compensation since 1952?
The answer would appear to be pretty simple, that the money has gone directly to the Israeli government and to major Jewish private organizations which have engaged in the extortion racket and have proceeded to divert the flow from the “cash cow” for their own purposes. Soon there will be few survivors of the war left and the scam will presumably end, or maybe not, as there have been claims that the terror of the German camps can be passed on genetically and is inheritable?
Unfortunately, compensating for claims of Jewish suffering is a big business. The regular annual scandalous multi-billion dollar cash flow out of the United States Treasury to fill the Israeli coffers will continue seemingly forever. American taxpayers might be delighted to learn that during the past week Congress, beset by plague, civil unrest and a crumbling infrastructure, found time to move to approve an additional $500 million to Israel for its “defense.”
WHO’s Conflict of Interest?
US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, in Bern, Switzerland, on June 3, 2019. (State Dept. Photo by Ron Przysucha/ Public Domain)
By David Macilwain | American Herald Tribune | June 30, 2020
Last week the French National Assembly convened an inquiry into the “genealogy and chronology” of the Coronavirus crisis to examine the evident failures in its handling and will interview government ministers, experts and health advisors over the next six months. While we in the English-speaking world may have heard endless arguments over the failures of the UK or US governments to properly prepare for and cope with the health-care emergency, the crisis and problems in the French health system and bureaucracy have been similar and equally serious. Given the global cooperation and collaboration of health authorities and industry, the inquiry has global significance.
Judging by the attention paid by French media to the inquiry, which comes just as France is loosening the lock-downs and restarting normal government activities, it is set to be controversial and upsetting, exposing both incompetence and corruption.
Leading the criticism of the Macron government’s handling of the crisis are the most serious accusations that its prohibition of an effective drug treatment has cost many lives, a criticism put directly to the inquiry by Professor Didier Raoult, the most vocal proponent of the drug – Hydroxychloroquine. At his institute in Marseilles, early treatment with the drug of people infected with Sars-CoV-2 has been conclusively demonstrated to reduce hospitalization rates and shorten recovery times when given along with the antibiotic Azithromycin, and consequently to cut death rates by at least half.
Raoult has pointed to the low death rate in the Marseilles region of 140 per million inhabitants compared with that in Paris of 759 per million as at least partly due to the very different treatment of the epidemic in Marseilles under his instruction. The policies pursued by local health services there included early widespread testing for the virus and isolation and quarantining of cases, aimed both at protecting those in aged care and in keeping people from needing hospitalization with the help of drug treatments.
It incidentally seems quite bizarre that some countries – notably the US, UK and Australia, are only now embarking on large testing programs – and claiming a “second wave” in cases – which Raoult calls a “fantasme journalistique”. The consequent reimposition of severe lock-downs in some suburbs of Melbourne, and in Leicester in the UK is a very worrying development.
The efficacy of HCQ and Azithromycin is well illustrated – one should say proven – by this most recent review of its use on 3120 out of a total of 3700 patients treated at the Marseilles hospitals during March, April and the first half of May. Unlike the fraudulent study published and then retracted by the Lancet in May, the analysis in this review is exemplary, along with the battery of tests performed on patients to determine the exact nature of their infection and estimate the effectiveness of the drug treatment. The overall final mortality rate of 1.1% obscures the huge discrepancy in numbers between treated and untreated patients. Hospitalization, ICU, and death rates averaged five times greater in those receiving the “other” treatment – being normal care without HCQ-AZM treatment – equivalent to a placebo.
The IHU Marseilles study and its discussion points deserve close scrutiny, because they cannot be dismissed as unsubstantiated or biased, or somehow political, just because Professor Raoult is a “controversial figure”. There is a controversy, and it was well expressed by Raoult in his three hour presentation to the inquiry. His criticisms of health advisors to government include conflicts of interest and policy driven by politics rather than science. Raoult has been vindicated in his success, and can now say to those health authorities “if you had accepted my advice and approved this drug treatment, thousands of lives would have been saved.”
This is quite unlike similar statements in the UK and elsewhere, where claims an earlier imposition of lock-down would have cut the death toll in half are entirely hypothetical. As Prof. Raoult has also observed, the progress of this epidemic of a new and unknown virus was quite speculative, and its handling by authorities has failed to reflect that. In fact, one feels more and more that the “response” of governments all around the world has followed a strangely similar and inappropriately rigid scheme, of which certain aspects were de rigueur, particularly “social distancing”.
There seems little evidence that would justify this most damaging and extreme of measures to control an epidemic whose seriousness could be ameliorated by other measures – such as those advocated by Raoult’s Institute – which would have avoided the devastating “collateral damage” inflicted on the economy and society in the name of “staying safe”.
Prof. Raoult’s vocal and consistent criticism of the political manipulation of the Coronavirus crisis is hardly trivial however, to be finally excused as a “failure”- to impose lockdowns sooner, to have sufficient supplies of masks or ventilators, or to use more testing and effective contact tracing. What lies beneath appears to be, for want of a better word, a conspiracy.
As previously and famously noted by Pepe Escobar, French officials seemed to have foresight on the potential use of Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 infection, with its cheapness and availability being a likely hindrance to pharmaceutical companies looking to make big profits from new drug treatments or vaccines. Of even greater significance perhaps, was the possibility – or danger – that the vast bulk of the population might become infected with the virus and recover quickly with the help of this cheap drug treatment, while bypassing the need, and possibly interminable wait for a vaccine.
Now it can be seen that in Western countries the demand for a vaccine is acute, and the market cut-throat, despite assurances from many quarters that “vaccines must be available to all” and that “manufacturers won’t seek to profit” from their winning product. (the profit will naturally be included in what their governments choose to pay them) The clear conflicts of interest between health officials, public and private interests make such brave pronouncements particularly hollow. Just one case is sufficient to illustrate this, as despite its unconvincing performance in combatting the novel Coronavirus, the drug developed and promoted by Dr Anthony Fauci and company Gilead, Remdesevir, was rapidly approved for use following a research trial sponsored by the White House.
More concerning however is what appears to be a conflict of interest in the WHO itself, possibly related to the WHO’s largest source of funding in the Gates organization. While the WHO has not actively opposed the use of Hydroxychloroquine against the virus infection for most of the pandemic, neither has it voiced any support for its use, such as might be suggested by its obvious benefits, and particularly in countries with poor health facilities and resources.
Had the WHO taken at least a mildly supportive role, acknowledging that the drug was already in widespread use and there was little to lose from trying it against COVID-19, then it is hard to imagine that those behind the recent fabricated Lancet paper would have pursued such a project. Without claiming that the WHO had some hand in the alleged study that set out to debunk HCQ treatment, it should be noted that the WHO was very quick to jump on the non-peer-reviewed “results” and to declare a world-wide cancellation of its research projects on the drug. And while it had to rescind this direction shortly afterward when the fraud was exposed, the dog now has a bad name – as apparently intended.
This stands in sharp contrast to the WHO’s sudden enthusiasm for the steroidal drug Dexamethasone, recently discovered by a UK research team to have had a mildly positive benefit on seriously ill COVID19 patients:
“The World Health Organization (WHO) plans to update its guidelines on treating people stricken with coronavirus to reflect results of a clinical trial that showed a cheap, common steroid could help save critically ill patients.
The benefit was only seen in patients seriously ill with COVID-19 and was not observed in patients with milder disease, the WHO said in a statement late Tuesday.
British researchers estimated 5,000 lives could have been saved had the drug been used to treat patients in the United Kingdom at the start of the pandemic.
“This is great news and I congratulate the government of the UK, the University of Oxford, and the many hospitals and patients in the UK who have contributed to this lifesaving scientific breakthrough,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in the press release.”
There is something more than ironic in the WHO’s interest in a different cheap and available drug that has also been widely used for decades, but which is no use in protecting those people in the target market for the vaccine. To me, and surely to Professor Raoult and his colleagues, this looks more like protecting ones business interests and investor profits, at the expense of public health and lives.
Postscript:
It has just been announced that GILEAD will start charging for its drug Remdesevir from next week at $US 2340 for a five-day course, or $US 4860 for private patients. Generic equivalents manufactured in poorer countries will sell for $US 934 per treatment course. Announcing the prices, chief executive Dan O’Day noted that the drug was priced “to ensure wide access rather than based solely on the value to patients”.
It seems hardly worth pointing out that six days treatment with Hydroxychloroquine costs around $US 7, so for the same cost as treating one patient with Remdesevir, roughly four hundred could be given Hydroxychloroquine. If this is compounded by the effective cure rate, Remdesevir treatment costs closer to one thousand times that of HCQ. The addition of Azithromycin and Zinc doubles the cost of HCQ treatment, but also increases its efficacy considerably.
Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid
By James Bovard | Ron Paul Institute | Monday June 29, 2020
Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by US government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid to Ukraine than to its effectiveness. And most of the media coverage pretended that US handouts abroad are as generous and uplifting as congressmen claim.
US foreign aid has long fueled the poxes it promised to eradicate — especially kleptocracy, or government by thieves. A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.” Windfalls of foreign aid can make politicians more rapacious, which economists have dubbed the “voracity effect.”
Early in his presidency, George W. Bush promised to reform foreign aid, declaring, “I think it makes no sense to give aid money to countries that are corrupt.” Regardless, the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world’s most corrupt regimes.
Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations in 2010 that the US government was “leading a global effort to combat corruption.” The Los Angeles Times noted that Obama’s “aides said the United States in the past has often seemed to just throw money at problems,” while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that “a lot of these aid programs don’t work” and lamented their “heartbreaking” failures. But Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to double foreign-aid spending, which obliterated efforts to reform failed programs. In 2011, congressional Republicans sought to restrict foreign aid going to fraud-ridden foreign regimes. Secretary of State Clinton wailed that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests “has the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients.”
Regardless, the Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of US tax dollars into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was “one of the most corrupt countries on earth.” The governor of Kandahar denounced his own government officials and police officers as “looters and kidnappers.” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), declared that “US policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, the United States has provided more than $6 billion in aid to Ukraine. At the House impeachment hearings late last year, a key anti-Trump witness was acting US ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. The Washington Post hailed Taylor as someone who “spent much of the 1990s telling Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of US development assistance for post-Soviet countries.” A New York Times editorial lauded Taylor and State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent as witnesses who “came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country.”
Their testimony spurred Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, to bewail that “this is the most fraught time and the most difficult time for our members” since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s accusations of communism in the 1950s. A Washington Post headline echoed him: “The diplomatic corps has been wounded. The State Department needs to heal.” But not nearly as much as the foreigners supposedly rescued by US bureaucrats.
The Wall Street Journal reported on October 31 that the International Monetary Fund, which has provided more than $20 billion in loans to Ukraine, “remains skeptical after a history of broken promises [from the Ukrainian government]. Kiev hasn’t successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure.” The IMF concluded that Ukraine continued to be vexed by “shortcomings in the legal framework, pervasive corruption, and large parts of the economy dominated by inefficient state-owned enterprises or by oligarchs.” That last item is damning for US benevolent pretensions. If a former Soviet republic cannot even terminate its government-owned boondoggles, then why was the US government bankrolling them? While many members of Congress could not find Ukraine on a map, far fewer could have offered any coherent explanation of what US aid bought in Ukraine.
Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that corruption surged in Ukraine in the late 1990s (after the United States decided to rescue that country) and remains at abysmal levels. Ukraine now ranks in the bottom tier on the list of most corrupt nations, with a worse rating than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major US aid recipients notorious for corruption.
Actually, the best gauge of Ukrainian corruption is the near-total collapse of its citizens’ trust in government or in their own future. Since 1991, the nation has lost almost 20 percent of its population as citizens flee abroad like passengers leaping off a sinking ship. But as long as Kiev was not completely depopulated, US bureaucrats could continue claiming to be on the verge of achieving great things.
The House impeachment hearings and much of the media gushed over those career US government officials despite their strikeouts. It was akin to a congressional committee’s resurrecting Col. George Custer in 1877 and fawning as he offered personal insights in dealing with uprisings by Sioux Indians (while carefully avoiding awkward questions about the previous year at the Little Bighorn).
Foreign aid is virtue-signaling with other people’s money. As long the aid spawns press releases and photo opportunities for presidents and members of Congress and campaign donations from corporate and other beneficiaries, little else matters. Congress almost never conducts thorough investigations into the failure of aid programs despite their legendary pratfalls. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2010, AID “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’ — a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.” Martine van Bijlert of the nonprofit Afghanistan Analysts Network commented, “As long as you spend money and you can provide a paper trail, that’s a job well done. It’s a perverse system, and there seems to be no intention to change it.” The “burn rate” fixation produced endless absurdities, including collapsing school buildings, impassable roads, failed electrification projects, and phantom health clinics. SIGAR’s John Sopko “found a USAID lessons-learned report from 1980s on Afghan reconstruction but nobody at AID had read it.”
Perverse incentives
“Fail and repeat” was also AID’s motto in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, AID and the Pentagon paired up to spend $60 billion to rebuild Iraq. As long as projects looked vaguely impressive at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, AID declared victory. Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), listed some of the agency’s farcical Iraq success claims at a 2011 hearing: “262,482 individuals reportedly benefited from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only 100 victims of a specific attack; 22 individuals attended a five-day mental-health course, yet 1.5 million were reported as beneficiaries; … and 280,000 were reported as benefitting from $14,246 spent to rehabilitate a morgue.” Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, denied in 2009 that US aid for relief and reconstruction had benefitted his country: “Maybe they spent it, but Iraq doesn’t feel it.” An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity noted that, according to top Iraqi officials, the biggest impact of US aid was “more corruption and widespread money-laundering.”
After driving around the world, investment guru Jim Rogers declared, “Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers.” Mercedes-Benz automobiles became so popular among African government officials that a new Swahili word was coined: wabenzi — “men of the Mercedes-Benz.” After the Obama administration promised massive aid to Ukraine in 2014, Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, jumped on the gravy train — as did legions of well-connected Washingtonians and other hustlers around the nation. Similar largesse ensures that there will never be a shortage of overpaid people and hired think tanks ready to write op-eds or letters to the editor of the Washington Post whooping up the moral greatness of foreign aid or some such hokum.
Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence. Rather than encouraging good governance practices, foreign aid is more likely to produce kleptocracies. As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, “The history of US assistance is littered with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects.” Both US politicians and US bureaucrats are prone to want to continue the aid gravy train regardless of how foreign regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens.
US government leaders are far more concerned with buying influence than with safeguarding purity. Foreign aid is often little more than a bribe for a foreign regime to behave in ways that please the US government. One large bribe naturally spawns hundreds or thousands of smaller bribes, and thereby corrupts an entire country. The impeachment of Trump was driven by the specific favor that Democrats claimed he had requested from the Ukrainian president, not from seeking favors per se.
When it comes to the failure of US aid to Ukraine, almost all of Trump’s congressional critics are like the “dog that didn’t bark” in the Sherlock Holmes story. The real outrage is that Trump and prior presidents, with Congress cheering all the way, delivered so many US tax dollars to Kiev that any reasonable person knew would be wasted.
Foreign aid will continue to be toxic as long as politicians continue to be politicians. There is no bureaucratic cure for the perverse incentives created by flooding foreign nations with US tax dollars. If Washington truly wants to curtail foreign corruption, ending US government handouts aid is the best first step. Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism.
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From the Archives
A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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