A Few Historical Frauds
Einstein, Bell & Edison, Coca-Cola and the Wright Brothers
By Larry Romanoff • Moon of Shanghai • July 11, 2020
There are only two nations in the world whose existence seems to be founded primarily on historical myths. In the US, false historical mythology permeates every nook and cranny of the American psyche, the result of more than 100 years of astonishing and unconscionable programming and propaganda, a massive crime against an entire population. This condition pertains not only to past events we think of as history, but to the extent that most items permitting Americans to “feel good by being an American” are fabricated Disney fairytales. This essay is a brief introduction to only a minor aspect of this subject.
In the introduction to my series of books (soon to be published) I wrote that “Perhaps 90%, or even 95%, of everything we know, or think that we know, or that we believe to be true about history, is wrong. To express this another way, if we were to take the history of the entire world for the past 500 years and compress it into a book of 100 pages, a full 50 of those pages would be blank. That is the extent to which our true history has been suppressed, entirely deleted from the record and from our consciousness. Of the remaining 50 pages, 45 are false in whole or in part, photoshopped, sanitised, twisted, and with critical details omitted to deliberately lead the public to the wrong conclusions.”[1]
Einstein, the Mythical Genius
One of the greatest mythical frauds in history is that of Albert Einstein, the famous physicist who invented the Theory of Relativity, E=mc² and so many other esoteric things. But this is all fabrication. The claims about Einstein inventing any theory of relativity, or light and photons, or time, are false. Almost every claim – almost everything – attributed to Einstein is simply a lie. Einstein was an inept who contributed nothing original to the field of quantum mechanics, nor any other science. Far from being a competent physicist, he once even flatly denied that the atom could be split and, much later, admitted that the idea of a chain reaction in fissile material “had never occurred to me”.[2][3]
Einstein was a third-class clerk at the government patent office in Bern, and never progressed beyond this level even with years of experience. By all contemporary reports, Einstein wasn’t even an accomplished mathematician. It has been well documented that much of the mathematical content of Einstein’s so-called theories were well beyond his ability. Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, stated that Einstein’s first wife Mileva Marić was a “Serbian physicist who had helped him with (his) math . . .”[4] Other prominent scientists have made the claim that his wife did most of his math for him.
Henri Poincaré was the foremost expert on relativity in the late 19th century and the first person to formally present the theories, having published more than 30 books and over 500 papers on the topics. Extensive documentation exists that Einstein and his associates had studied Poincaré’s theories and mathematics for years, yet when Einstein published his almost wholly-plagiarised versions he made no reference whatever to these other works.
In the accepted historical account, Einstein is credited with having written the correct field equations for general relativity, an enormous falsehood. It is an undisputed fact that David Hilbert sent Einstein a draft of his work (which had already been submitted for publication), containing precisely these equations, evidenced by the existence of a letter from Einstein to Hilbert thanking him for doing so. Yet a few weeks later, Einstein delivered a public speech of Hilbert’s work, claiming full credit for the derivation of Hilbert’s equations. Similarly, E=mc², the famous equation relating mass, energy, and the speed of light, had been published several times by Italian physicist Olinto De Pretto, long before Einstein was suddenly given credit for it. In multiple thorough reviews of scientific literature, prominent scientists have unanimously stated that there is “absolutely nothing to connect Einstein to the derivation of this formula.”[5]
Einstein’s papers, theories, mathematics, documentation, were almost 100% plagiarised from others. He combined the prior published works of several people into one paper and claimed ownership of all of it. His so-called theories were nothing more than a composition encompassing the prior work of men like James Maxwell, Hendrik Lorentz, Joseph Larmor, Olinto De Pretto, Robert Brown, Ludwig Boltzmann, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, and many more.
In a paper he wrote in 1907, in part responding to (already-virulent) accusations of plagiarism, Einstein declared that plagiarism was perfectly acceptable as a form of ethical research, stating “… the nature [of physics is] that what follows has already been partly solved by other authors. I am [therefore] entitled to leave out a thoroughly pedantic survey of the literature…”[6][7][8] In other words, scientists all build on each others’ work, so Einstein could freely compile the work of everyone before him and re-present it as his own, with no obligation to even mention them or their work. His view of ethical science was like building a tower where each person adds one stone and, if I add the last stone, I not only take credit for the entire design and construction of the tower, but I own the building.
Perhaps the most damning evidence was when in 1953 Sir Edmund Whittaker published a very detailed account of the origin and development of all these theories and equations of physics, with extensive reference to the primary sources, documenting beyond doubt that Einstein had no priority in any of it, and clearly stating so. Einstein was alive and well when Whittaker published his book, yet he offered no dispute to the conclusions, no refutation of Whittaker’s claim that he (Einstein) had been irrelevant to the entire process. Einstein made no attempts in his own defense but simply hid in the bushes and refused to make any public comment whatever.[9]
Einstein was almost certainly the greatest fraud and plagiarist in modern science, an unashamed intellectual thief but, according to sources like Wikipedia, this is all just a minor “priority dispute” about who said what first in the realm of relativity physics. These sources misleadingly imply that several people made a discovery independently and more or less simultaneously, and we are simply debating who went public first. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Wikipedia is renowned as being virtually useless as an information source due to widespread ideological bias and censorship.
Einstein was Jewish and had the support of the Jewish-controlled media who conspired to create yet another historical myth. His fame and popularity today, his status as a hero of the scientific world, are due only to decades of a well-planned force-feeding of the Einstein myth to the masses by the media. The propaganda machine simply airbrushed out of the history books all the physicists who formulated these theories, and credited everything to Einstein. Without the extravagant generations-long PR and propaganda campaign, Einstein would have remained in the dustbin of obscurity where he belongs.
There are many Einstein apologists who produce reams of heavily-documented irrelevancies masquerading as proof, items such as a schoolmate who claimed “the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.” Many scientists and scientific historians know the truth of all this, and the accurate historical record is readily available, but many appear afraid to speak out for fear of damaging their careers. I have put the question to several prominent physicists in different countries, eliciting similar responses, namely that “it will not further one’s career to open a debate which will inevitably produce a tsunami of invective and slander, to say nothing of accusations of anti-Semitism.”
Time Magazine published more than a dozen issues on Einstein, including a special Collector’s Edition, and even ran an issue naming Einstein the “Person of the Century”. As with all other American heroes, the PR machine has worked for decades to embellish the myth with a collection of possibly hundreds of wise sayings attributed to this man where there is absolutely no historical evidence he ever said any of those things. The NYT published an article on a small cleverly-selected scientific dispute, in which it claimed “Findings Back Einstein in a Plagiarism Dispute”.[10] And thus is history spun by those who control the microphone. This is why so many pages in our history book consist of misrepresentations and omitted facts, painting a picture so considerably at odds with the truth. As with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and so many others, the false historical myths have been so deeply entwined in American and world history that they cannot be unraveled.
Einstein, the “Man of Peace”
Similarly, there has been a great campaign by Einstein’s revisionist apologists to disavow his strong support for the development of the atomic bomb, claiming him to be “a man of peace”. I have copies of correspondence from Einstein where he stated his conviction that the United States should “demonstrate” the atomic bomb to disfavored foreign countries. In one letter to then-US President Roosevelt, he wrote, “… extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. I am convinced as to the wisdom and the urgency of creating the conditions under which that and related work can be carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale than hitherto”.[11]
That statement is part of one of Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, suggesting he (Einstein) be “entrusted with the task” of managing the project. Roosevelt refused Einstein’s fervent requests to manage, or even to participate in, the project, because it was an open secret that nobody trusted him and the FBI had conducted extensive investigations against him. One FBI file labeled “Secret”, stated that Einstein was affiliated with 33 organisations which had been cited by the Attorney-General and/or Congress, as being politically suspect.
It is interesting that the respected National Geographic is one of the world’s worst publications for spinning historical fact and truth. In 2017, this magazine ran an article on Einstein claiming that Hoover and the FBI despised Einstein and built a 1,400-page file on him because “the world-famous physicist was outspoken against nuclear bombs”.[12][13]
The second portion of the same letter is rather more disturbing, and has to my knowledge never been publicly referenced anywhere. It clearly reveals that Einstein had had detailed discussions with some wealthy acquaintances in Europe who were eager to personally finance the US development of atomic bombs from their own pockets. Einstein was informing the President he had access to these individuals with whom he had already confirmed available funding, baiting Roosevelt with an offer that, should he be ‘entrusted’ with management of the bomb project, he could bring the necessary financing with him. He states that, as project manager, one of his tasks would be: “providing funds … through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause.”
It would be appropriate for us to ask who were these “private persons” who had the money to finance the development of the world’s first atomic bombs, and why they would want to personally fund such a project. Einstein does not mention these individuals by name, but they would surely have been Jewish and who in Europe (in the 1930s) had the kind of money to offer open-ended funding for a scientific project the cost of which was unknown and unknowable, but clearly massive.[15] This offer was not spurred by patriotism but by the prospect of financial gain and control of both the technology and the application of this ‘science’. We can therefore further question who would have taken ownership of the technology, and who would have been the intended victims of this large personal investment.
One plausible theory; I would add here that many of Einstein’s propagandists and apologists have made repeated efforts to pass the blame for the development of the atomic bomb onto Enrico Fermi, another monstrous falsehood. The US government offered Fermi a cash payment of US$100,000[16] to lead the research and development of the atom bomb, but Fermi refused. I have seen a copy of a letter from Fermi to the US President claiming that something so evil had “no right to exist”. In fact, it was Oppenheimer and Szilard who led the development of what was almost in totality a Jewish project, so much so that for many years in scientific circles the atomic bomb was widely known as “The Jewish hell-bomb”.[17] I believe it was Eustace Mullins who first coined the phrase, and I believe it was he who first suggested there was “circumstantial but compelling evidence” that the Jewish motivation for offering to finance the A-bomb’s development was to take control of the technology and use it for Germany’s total destruction.”[18] The theory is more than plausible if you are familiar with the heavily-evidenced proposition that the underlying purpose of both world wars was the total destruction of Germany). You can understand why items like this are restricted to the blank pages in our history book.
Alexander Graham Bell – The Man Who Didn’t Invent the Telephone
History books tell us the famous American, Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone. This claim has only two flaws; Bell was Canadian, not American, and he did not invent the telephone.
An Italian named Antonio Meucci patented a working telephone many years before Bell did anything.[19] Bell had obtained copies of Meuci’s drawings and patents and had attempted to obtain US patents on Meuci’s phone. Meucci discovered Bell’s attempted patent of his invention and filed a lawsuit against Bell, in support of which he brought from Italy all his documents, working models, original sketches and his patent, to present to the court as evidence of his prior invention. The delivery company – Western Union – was charged with the responsibility as trustee to hold this evidence for delivery to the court, but all of it “amazingly disappeared without a trace immediately prior to the court hearing, leaving Meucci with no proof of anything and thus losing his lawsuit against Bell.” It is worth noting that at the time Bell was employed at the Western Union lab where Meucci’s evidence was being stored.
The Italians are still angry about this. The Italian Historical Association informed us that their investigation produced evidence of illegal relationships between employees of the patent office and Bell’s company. And later, during a lawsuit between Bell and Western Union, it was revealed Bell had agreed to pay Western Union 20% of all profits from ‘his’ telephone, for 17 years, representing millions of dollars, sufficient temptation for Western Union to justify “losing” Meucci’s invention. US media have fabricated at least dozens of tales excusing Bell, a common one that “due to hardships, Meucci could not renew his patent” and therefore Bell could take it, but in fact the US government filed charges against Bell for fraud because of his telephone patent, but powerful friends had the lawsuit delayed year after year until Meucci died.[20] American history books and sources like Wikipedia omit these critical facts and twist the remaining information, and thus Americans grow up believing yet one more false myth about their country and their innovative ability.
I would make a note here that when doing historical research we sometimes discover that the landscape has been so badly polluted by countless individuals amending details to conform to opinion or ideology (or patriotism) that it becomes nearly impossible to ferret out the actual facts without an extraordinary amount of work. In this case, some have claimed (without evidence) that Meucci lost his patent because he hadn’t the funds to renew it. Others ignore Meucci’s lawsuit against Bell and claim Bell delivered his phone patent and samples to Western Union for evaluation and who later claimed to have lost all of it. And so on. Here are several articles purporting to tell “the real truth”[21][22][23][24]
Thomas Edison – The Man Who Didn’t Invent Anything
Every American child is taught in school that the famous American Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Wikipedia claiming that Edison was “the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the UK, France, and Germany”. Edison is given full credit for inventing the light bulb, electricity transmission, electric power utilities, sound recording and motion pictures. All these claims are completely false.[25] Not only was Edison not one of the most prolific inventors in history, he never invented anything. Edison himself made the statement: “patents 1047 – inventions 0”, in recognition of his situation.
The inventions for which Edison is credited by the Americans were all achieved by others, and his “1,093 US patents” were all either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased from those same inventors. As another author pointed out, “a man who kidnaps or adopts 1,000 children can hardly be deemed the world’s most prolific father, and a man who steals 1,000 inventions and patents can hardly be deemed the world’s most prolific inventor”. Thomas Edison was unquestionably one of the world’s most prolific thieves, and widely known as a con-man and common thug who often resorted to threats and extortion, but he was no inventor. Edison was mostly just a thieving opportunist who extorted or stole everything that is listed to his credit, but in US history books Edison is revered in totally fabricated myths as the father of the light bulb and America’s most prolific inventor.
The light bulb had been invented by several people in Europe, one of whom, Heinrich Goebel, unsuccessfully tried selling it to Edison who claimed to see no value in it though he was more than happy to purchase the patent from Goebel’s estate when the man died, cheating his widow out of a substantial sum of money. In any case, another man, Joseph Wilson Swan developed and patented a working incandescent light bulb using a carbon filament 20 years before Edison made any such claim.[26][27] Edison first tried to steal Swan’s invention and, when that proved legally dangerous, he made Swan a minor partner in the Ediswan United Company, buying both Swan and his patented light bulb and claiming the invention for himself. Swan also invented sound recording and other items which are today credited to Edison.[28]
Every American is taught from birth that Edison labored for years, trying at least 1,000 different substances (some say 2,000) before he discovered that twisted carbon would function acceptably as the filament in a light bulb. The story is entirely false, a myth fabricated after the fact, a little religious morality play to support faith in the American Dream – that persistence and hard work will lead to unlimited fame and riches in the end. Edison did indeed try – and repeatedly failed – to create a light bulb, and he may well have attempted some of those filament trials. But all that is irrelevant because Swan had already proven the effectiveness of a carbon filament when Edison took ownership of his invention and patent.
Edison is given credit for the device which made x-rays possible, but the actual inventor was German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen who publicly displayed x-rays of his wife’s hand years prior to Edison’s fluoroscope. Similarly, Edison is given credit for inventing electrical transmission in various forms, but Nicola Tesla brought this invention to the US and offered it to Edison who took ownership of the process and patents under a promise of $50,000, then refused to pay Tesla and spent years in attempts to destroy his name and reputation.
The US-based Science website dismisses the entire truth about Edison in one cute sentence: “Even though many of his “inventions” were not unique – and he engaged in some well-publicized court battles with other inventors whose ideas he “borrowed” – Edison’s skill at marketing and using his [political] influence often got him the credit.”[29] And that means Edison patented items that already existed, created by others, and that had sometimes already been patented. Plus, he had a habit of stealing and patenting any ideas brought to him by other inventors. Hence, the lawsuits. But his marketing ability and some powerful political and judicial contacts kept him out of jail. Nevertheless, the myth has been so thoroughly weaved into American history, it could never be recalled.
The US government even issued a special silver dollar coin to commemorate Edison’s non-achievements. And we have an Edison museum complete with the requisite US flag, providing Americans with the unique opportunity to experience delusion and patriotism simultaneously. But the man did invent one thing the history books seem to have quietly deleted. Edison was a believer in spirits and regularly attended séances where mediums would receive and transmit messages from the dead. To more easily conduct these affairs, Edison invented a telephone that he claimed could talk to people in the spirit world, though he didn’t specify what numbers to dial. In a conversation with B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, Edison claimed, “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus … for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us”. No idea what the spirits said to him, and no idea why his promoters deleted this important item from the history of the world’s greatest inventor.[30]
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, originally called Kola Coca, was invented more than 140 years ago in a small town in Spain, the creators of the formula for the world’s best-selling soft drink having been cheated of its ownership and billions of dollars. The process was a well-kept secret at the time and quickly became a world-famous product, winning dozens of international gold medals and other awards. Unfortunately, Bautista Aparici, one of the company’s founders, attended a trade fair in Philadelphia and made the mistake of giving a sample and a brief description of the process to an American he happened to meet, and a short time later US pharmacist John Pemberton changed the name to Coca-Cola and patented the product and process, the US government refusing to recognise the original Spanish patent.[31][32][33]
The official story is that this drink was “invented by Dr. John Smith Pemberton on May 8, 1886, at Atlanta, Georgia”, in the USA, and was named Coca-Cola because at that time it contained extracts of Coca leaves and Kola nuts, and that the company’s book-keeper renamed the drink because he thought the two ‘C’s’ would look better in advertising. None of that is true. The drink was indeed made from kola nuts and coca leaves, but the new name was a cheap attempt to differentiate itself after Pemberton stole and patented the original formula. All the stories about Pemberton inventing Coke’s secret formula in his laboratory are fabricated nonsense, with the company’s website cleverly designed to airbrush out the drink’s early history and avoid the truth becoming known. Beverage World magazine produced a special issue to commemorate the one-hundredth (American) anniversary of Coca-Cola, claiming Coke was:
“A totally American product born of a solid idea, nurtured throughout the past century with creative thinking and bold decision-making, and always plenty of good old-fashioned hard work. That is as it should be; it is the American way”.
Not by a long shot. Coca-Cola is just one of hundreds of products the Americans have stolen and patented with the full protection of their courts operating under the peculiarly American definition of ‘rule of law’. It isn’t widely-known, though well-documented, that for decades surrounding the turn of the last century, the US government offered between $20,000 and $50,000 to anyone who could steal a foreign patent or product, that amount representing a lifetime’s earnings for an average person.
To add insult to injury, Coca-Cola moved into Spain in 1953, sued the original Spanish owners, then bullied, extorted and bought the rights for a pittance, permitting the firm to continue producing only a single alcoholic beverage under their name. USA Today reported on this without even a hint of regret or shame about the rule of law or fair play or the evils of IP theft. Their only comment: “The Spanish factory has just four employees left and probably won’t last another generation.” Even more insultingly, ABC News dismisses this story as “The Spanish firm that inspired Coke”, although they do state correctly the claim: “Locals believe that the Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit is where Coca-Cola originated — and that the factory which developed the formula that inspired the world’s best-selling soda has been cheated of its rightful place in history. Not to mention profits.”[34]
The Wright Brothers
For more than 100 years, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has had on display an aircraft that was piloted by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in man’s first powered, manned aircraft flight, Americans therefore having created “The Age of Flight”.
But that was never true, and the Smithsonian was in on the fraud from the very beginning. In an agreement with the Wright family to donate the aircraft to the Institution, its officials signed a pledge to perpetuate the story that the Wrights had made the first flight, when all present were fully aware the claim was false. And for more than 100 years the Smithsonian Institution of Historical Mythology, with the full support of the US government and the media, has done everything in its power to dismiss, contradict, and just ignore, extensive documentation of other prior flights in an effort to prevent the dethroning of America in the public mind.[35][36]
Several people have thoroughly researched the matter and have written authoritative books on other prior flights but these have been “denounced by leading aeronautic agencies” (like the Smithsonian Institution), with the authors dismissed as “unqualified” and their books “unreliable”. In fact, there were many prior flights, some in Europe, Canada, South America, and others in the US itself, and the Smithsonian was fully aware of this. Recently, the editors of the authoritative Jane’s Aircraft firmly declared that Gustave Whitehead had flown years before the Wright Brothers. Alberto Santos-Dumont had done the same in Paris, as had another group in Alberta, Canada.
Moreover, there exists sufficient evidence the Wrights had access to all that prior knowledge in building their own aircraft, then claimed it as their own. In addition to other design features, the Wright brothers claimed ownership of the curved airfoil – without which no aircraft would ever have gotten off the ground anywhere, but, as one historian noted, “the Wrights stole both the concept and the actual design from an Australian who had recorded it years before, and who had himself deduced the concept from the boomerang of the Australian aboriginals.” The Wright Brothers stole the idea to build their aircraft, then patented it and sued others for using it.
Rumors had been circulating for decades that the Smithsonian had signed what was essentially a contract of fraud with the Wright family, agreeing to perpetuate the myth of the first manned flight, in exchange for having the aircraft on permanent display. But the Directors of the Smithsonian repeatedly denied the existence of such an agreement, stating that would be “tampering with history” and that they “would never agree to such a thing.” But then one day a US Senator collected a few lawyers and descended on the Smithsonian in a kind of political raid. And they did indeed locate the document, which reads in part: “Neither the Smithsonian Institution nor its successors nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered by the United States of America, shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement … in respect of any aircraft model … of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming … that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight …”[37]
And now you know how the Wright Brothers became famous as the first men to fly. One historian wrote that the Smithsonian had no authority “to engage in political engineering of this sort”, noting that this “compromises history”. But compromising history is an American specialty. And this children’s tale will never end. Scientific American wrote a long, biased, and foolish article, claiming the other stories as myths and their myth as the truth.[38] Other eminent publications have done the same. This is how history is spun.
To give you an idea of the enormous influence of the US media and book publishers in maintaining these myths, in 2015 David McCullough ignored the judgment by Janes (and the world outside the US), and wrote a new book for Americans that not only perpetuates the myth but enhances it, with the major US media immediately writing glowing book reviews to help push sales and get the propaganda back into the public mind. The Washington Post modestly tells us how “two [American] boys taught the world to fly.” The publishers, Simon and Schuster, tell us the Wright brothers had “exceptional courage and determination”, and “ceaseless curiosity”.[39]
Daniel Okrent, in a review of McCullough’s book in the NYT,[40] adds that their progress was achieved through “excruciating patience and obsessive attention to detail” and with “an elegant demonstration of the creativity of their thinking”. They were “possessed by genius”. Their discovery of the necessity of a curved airfoil was not copied from Australia, but was the result of “endless calculation, application and recalculation”, every concoction being “a dazzling piece of reasoning” pursued with a “grandness of vision”, with the end result being “the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished”. Yes. Except that it wasn’t.
Notes
[1] Jim Quinn: A Nation Built On Lies; https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-10/jim-quinn-nation-built-lies-part-2
[2] Einstein’s Plagiarism of the General Theory of Relativity 1st Edition; by Christopher Jon Bjerknes; https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Plagiarism-General-Theory-Relativity/dp/1544900872
[3] Einstein A Plagiarist Special Relativity; https://educheer.com/term-paper/einstein-a-plagiarist-special-relativity
[4] Time magazine, July 2006; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211594,00.htm
[5] The Guardian, November 11, 1999; “Einstein’s E=mc² was Italian’s idea”; Clark, R. W. [1984], Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon Books, New York. De Pretto, O. [1904], ‘Ipo tesi dell ” et ere nell a vita dell ” universe’, Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Feb.
[6] http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/episteme/epi6/ep6-bjerk-rec.htm
[7] https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_einstein.htm
[8] https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/02/was-einstein-a-wife-beater-womanizer-plagiarizer-and-eugenicist/
[9] A history of the theories of aether and electricity: https://archive.org/details/historyoftheorie00whitrich
[10] Findings Back Einstein In a Plagiarism Dispute; https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/18/science/findings-back-einstein-in-a-plagiarism-dispute.html
[11] Photo included:
[12] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/science-march-einstein-fbi-genius-science/
[13] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/09/eins-s03.html
[14] Photo included:
[15] In the end, the Manhattan Project cost the US military between US$2 and US$3 billion, in dollars of the day.
[16] The average annual income in the US in 1935 was about $1,500, thus this represents about 65 years of average income.
[17] The Secret History Of The Atomic Bomb by Eustace C. Mullins; http://whale.to/b/mullins8.html
[18] http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2013/08/the-jewish-bomb-that-ended-world-war-ii/
[19] Antonio Meucci – Biography, Facts and Pictures; https://www.famousscientists.org/antonio-meucci
[20] The United States Government vs. Alexander Graham Bell; www.chezbasilio.org/us_bell.htm
[21] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews
[22] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/aug/06/bellvwestern
[23] http://wondermark.com/true-stuff-western-union-bell/
[24] https://sciencetechworld.com/10-famous-stolen-inventions/
[25] http://newsreeling.com/about-thomas-edisons-lies-and-19-stolen-inventions
[26] Joseph Swan – Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan
[27] Joseph Swan | Biography, Lightbulb, & Facts; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Wilson-Swan
[28] Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company is Established; https://worldhistoryproject.org/1883/edison-swan-united-electric-light-company-is-established
[29] Thomas A. Edison and the Founding of Science: science.sciencemag.org/content/105/2719/142
[30] Thomas Edison, B.C. Forbes And The Mystery Of The Spirit Phone; https://www.forbes.com/…/2019/10/25/thomas-edison-bc-forbes-mystery-spirit-phone
[31] Spanish town claims origins of Coca-Cola; https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/10/newser-spanish-town-coca-cola/2638515/
[32] https://www.spiegel.de/thema/coca_cola/
[33] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/locals-say-coca-cola-originated-in-aielo-de-malferit-in-spain-a-915371.html
[34] Fizzing Out: The Spanish Firm that Inspired Coke – ABC News; https://abcnews.go.com/International/fizzing-spanish-firm-inspired-coke/story?id=19918738
[35] https://www.foxnews.com/science/smithsonian-releases-wright-brothers-contract-detailing-first-in-flight-claims
[36] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/5/130503-wright-brothers-first-flight-gustave-whitehead-aviation-smithsonian-institution-adventure-world/
[37] http://historybycontract.org/?tag=smithsonian-wright-agreement-1948
[38] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/myths-about-the-wright-br/
[39] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Wright-Brothers/David-McCullough/9781476728759
[40] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/books/review/the-wright-brothers-by-david-mccullough.html
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.
Blindness on Iraq War “Patriotism”
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF |July 10, 2020
An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Democrat Tammy Ducksworth demonstrates that when it comes to “patriotism,” liberals are as morally blind as conservatives.
Duckworth’s op-ed goes after conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who recently questioned Duckworth’s patriotism by suggesting that she didn’t love her country. Naturally, Duckworth, who lost her legs while serving as a soldier in the U.S. military in Iraq, took umbrage over Carlson’s attack and responded quite vociferously in her op-ed.
Much of the controversy involves meaningless exchanges that regularly take place between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. That’s mostly because both leftists and rights believe in the welfare-warfare state way of life.
But there is one aspect of Duckworth’s op-ed that deserves addressing because it so clearly shows that when it comes to war, the left-wing is as morally obtuse as the right wing.
Duckworth writes:
Even knowing how my tour in Iraq would turn out, even knowing that I’d lose both my legs in a battlefield just north of Baghdad in late 2004, I would do it all over again. Because if there’s anything that my ancestors’ service taught me, it’s the importance of protecting our founding values, including every American’s right to speak out.
So while I would put on my old uniform and go to war all over again to protect the right of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump to say offensive things on TV and Twitter….
What Duckworth obviously still hasn’t come to the terms with is that her military service in Iraq had absolute nothing to do with protecting the right of freedom of speech of the American people. That’s because neither the Iraqi regime nor the Iraqi people were threatening the freedom of speech of the American people.
What Duckworth obviously still doesn’t recognize is that it was the U.S. government that was the aggressor in the Iraq War. She was part of a military force — the most powerful in history — that attacked and then occupied an impoverished Third World country that had never attacked and then occupied the United States or even threatened to do so.
Yes, I know, U.S. officials called the operation “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But that was just propaganda. The operation had nothing to do with bringing freedom to Iraq, any more than it did with protecting the right to Americans to exercise freedom of speech. The purpose of the operation was to replace Iraqi dictator (and former U.S. partner and ally) Saddam Hussein with another U.S. stooge.”
Moreover, let’s not forget that every U.S. soldier who served in Iraq, including Duckworth, was serving in an illegal war. It was illegal given that there was no congressional declaration of war against Iraq, as the Constitution requires. It was also illegal under international law because it violated the principle against wars of aggression established by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.
Let’s also not forget about the countless Iraqis who were killed in the process. By being deprived of their lives, they were also deprived of their right of freedom of speech.
Leftists and rightists can engage in their meaningless debates on “patriotism” all they want. Just leave out the part that holds that invading and occupying a country that has never attacked the United States protects the right of Americans to exercise freedom of speech because that just isn’t true.
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.
Not Fact Checkers
By Iain | In This Together | February 28, 2020
Fact Checkers claim they check facts for you, so you don’t have to. The dictionary definition of a fact is:
“Something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information”
The legal definition of a fact is:
“An actual and absolute reality, as distinguished from mere supposition or opinion; a truth, as distinguished from fiction or error.”
Like reality and truth, a fact is absolute. It never changes, it is immutable and eternal. Our understanding of the facts may differ because we only have the available evidence to inform our knowledge of the facts. The availability of evidence is vital if we are to have any hope of knowing the facts. Our access to evidence doesn’t change the facts, it merely limits or expands our knowledge of them.
The definition of knowledge is:
“[Noun]… awareness, understanding, or information that has been obtained by experience or study, and that is either in a person’s mind or possessed by people generally.”
Access to information is the key component for developing knowledge of the facts. Knowledge doesn’t mean we always get the facts right, but we have no chance if information is limited or deliberately restricted.
Some facts are relatively easy to understand. The boiling point of water is a fact we can physically measure with consistent results. Others are more difficult to know and therefore less certain from our perspective. For example, history comprises of nothing other than facts but for us to know what they are we need to sift through the evidence, some reliable some not, to build our knowledge of the historical facts.
The same is true with current affairs and public issues. The facts are fixed but our knowledge of them is determined by our access to information. Information is subject to many competing forces. Censorship, propaganda, commercial interest, fabrication, omission and basic human error all combine to distort, obfuscate or over emphasise information (evidence). This makes knowing the facts about contemporary public issues just as tricky as knowing the historical facts, often more so.
Fortunately, we can all employ critical thinking skills, cross reference the evidence from various sources and decide the facts for ourselves. Thanks to the current iteration of the internet, the logical pursuit of information, forming our own balanced judgments of the facts, has never been more accessible for ordinary folk. The process called thinking is the service the fact checkers are selling.
Fact checkers claim their knowledge of the information (evidence), which identifies fact, is both complete and indisputable. They are certain about what happened, thoroughly understand all the relevant circumstances, have a complete grasp of reality, knowledge of all the relevant information and are accurately able to determine what is fact.
In short, they say they possess the truth. If you disagree with them, you don’t know the truth and are therefore wrong, regardless of the evidence you cite.
If you rely upon the fact checkers for your facts you must accept this. You no longer need to think critically or examine the evidence yourself. The fact checkers will do the hard work for you. They will tell you what the information is, give you your knowledge and cement the facts in your mind. All you need do is “Google it.”
What Do Fact Checkers Do?
The State has decided people are incapable of critical thinking and can’t tell the difference between facts and disinformation. Further, they propose legislation that will fundamentally change the nature of the internet. It is in this political environment that fact checkers have been commissioned to discern the facts and present the truth to the confused public.
In 2014 there were just 44 Fact checkers worldwide. As of June 2019 there were 188. While the whole of Africa, Asia, Australasia and South America have 67 fact checkers between them, the much smaller geographical and less populated regions of Europe and North America have 121. So there must be more incorrect information in the U.S. and Europe than anywhere else in the world.
Fact Checking is a rapidly changing startup industry. In 2014 nearly 90% of Fact Checkers were directly funded by mainstream media corporations. Today that figure has dropped to just 56% with many more claiming they are independent. We are going to look at how independent they are.
Some independent fact checkers, such as the UK’s Full Fact, have been given charity status. The UK Charity commission accepted Full Fact’s charitable purpose:
“To provide free tools, advice, and information so that anyone can check the claims we hear about public issues.”
Fact Checkers make money by fact checking for multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), wealthy charitable foundations and the mainstream media. Global corporations, notably the tech giants, are under considerable political pressure to employ fact checkers and devise ways of stopping the spread of so called disinformation. Disinformation being anything that questions official narratives.
Recently Facebook announced that its subsidiary Instagram was working with fact checkers to deploy a rating system. They will apply a rating “label” to all information as either true, partly false or false. Information rated as partly false or false will then be removed from search results and associated hashtags denied. Once the label is activated Facebook and Instagram bots seek out all “matching” content and label it accordingly. Thus effectively removing the offending information from the public domain.
The public will then be redirected to the correct information:
“… If something is rated false or partly false on Facebook, starting today we’ll automatically label identical content if it is posted on Instagram (and vice versa). The label will link out to the rating from the fact-checker and provide links to articles from credible sources that debunk the claim(s) made in the post.”
“Credible sources”, as far as most International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) fact checkers are concerned, often means the mainstream media (MSM) who they cite while seemingly oblivious to the MSM’s never ending stream of fake news.
Independent Fact Checkers?
For fact checkers to have any credibility they need to be scrupulously unbiased, thoroughly independent and as objective as possible. Any evidence that they are not means they are not fact checkers at all but rather political organizations that offer an opinion. If they are paid by people or groups with clear agendas then they have no credibility and everything they say needs to be treated with caution. We would still need to exercise due diligence and examine the evidence ourselves to establish if the fact checkers opinions are indeed facts.
When the UK Government Foreign and Commonwealth Office established the Open Information Partnership (the Expose Network) they suggested their network of actors use approved fact checking services, such as Full Fact in the UK, who are members of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). Poynter’s major funders include the Charles Koch Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Omidyar Network (Luminate), Google and the Open Society Foundation.
Therefore it is a fact that the IFCN, the “official” trade organisation for “approved” fact checkers, is funded by, among others, the multinational corporation Koch Industries, the C.I.A (NED), globalist venture capitalists (Omidyar), aggressive internet monopolists (Google) and globalist currency speculator & social change agent George Soros (Open Society). Nearly all of the fact checking signatories to the IFCN code have similar agenda driven backers. Members include Politifact, Full Fact, StopFake and AP Fact Check, to name but a few.
Full Fact, for example, list their corporate members to include the City of London Corporation (the UK financial sector and a global center for international finance), the global corporate law firm King & Wood Malleson, St Jame’s Place Wealth Management (a huge global capital investment firm), and the defence contractor Rolls Royce. Their funding partners include Google, The Omidyar Network and the Open Society foundation. They even wrote a policy proposal paper called “Tackling Misinformation In an Open Society.”
Full Fact’s trustees include former BBC Director of News and Current Affairs James Harding. James was responsible for one of the most egregious pieces of fake news war propaganda in modern history when he oversaw production of the BBC’s fake documentary Saving Syria’s Children.
BBC Fake Documentary To Promote War
Chair of the board of trustees is Conservative Party donor Michael Samuel and he is joined by fellow Conservative Lord Inglewood and Labour Peer Baroness Royal. The political establishment is well represented when it comes to making sure we have the right facts.
Another Full Fact trustee is Lord Sharkey Liberal Democrat Peer and former strategic adviser to once UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Clegg joined Facebook in October 2018 to become Facebook Head of Global Affairs. In January 2019 Full Fact became approved third party fact checkers for Facebook and in September 2019 Nick announced that Facebook won’t “fact check” politicians in the same way that it fact checks the general public. Speaking of Facebook’s approach to the political class Clegg said:
“From now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.”
Obviously this carte blanche doesn’t extend to the general public. Presumably because we are all disinformation agents.
Another Full Fact trustee Tim Gordon was also an advisor to Nick Clegg. He co founded Best Practice AI which was the first UK AI firm invited to join the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council (GAIC). The GAIC bring together representatives from tech giants including Microsoft , IBM and Google’s Chinese division with British government ministers, such as former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Wright, who attending their council meeting in 2019.
GAIC is one of six WEF global councils focused upon technology and the fourth industrial revolution. Their stated purpose is:
“… to provide policy guidance and address governance gaps.”
So as Full Fact rolls out automated AI fact checking, fully funded by regular WEF attendees Pierre Omidyar and George Soros, with the full support of GAIC members Google, it is good to know these projects are rooted firmly in Full Fact’s independence. As they only report the facts they state on their website:
“Full Fact fights bad information. We’re a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners who find, expose and counter the harm it does.”
“Bad information” is information that questions government policy agendas and harms globalist interests. These interests are defined for government by global institutions like the World Economic forum, where government ministers attend to get their orders. Independent, in Full Fact speak, must mean “employed by global corporations and oligarchs.”
The extensive political, intelligence, non governmental and globalist network steering Full Fact is by no means unique to them. A cursory glance at the supporters of the other fact checking signatories to the IFCN reveal a similar web of globalist and corporate interests in practically every case. The IFCN, and its members, are paid by people with overt political, financial and social agendas. Independence is non existent and consequently the fact checkers claims of objectivity need to be treated accordingly. They have no credibility at all.
Not Fact Checking
If fact checkers check facts then you would at least expect them to report the evidence accurately. However, all too often, they don’t. For example, AP Fact Check are IFCN members who report that World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) collapsed on September 11th 2001 as a result of fires. This “fact” was first reported by AP Fact Check on 13/06/2017 and remains as their statement of fact today (28/02/2020.)
The engineering department of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) undertook a 4 year long study into the collapse of WTC7. The UAF report is currently open to peer review and cites the evidence it is based upon. It was published in draft form in mid September 2019 and the findings were officially announced at the same time. It categorically states:
“… fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse.”
The UAF study represents the most thorough, up to date, scientific analysis of the collapse of WTC7. Incomplete peer review of the UAF report is no reason for AP Fact Check to ignore it. The NIST report, the sole source for the fire collapse theory, has never been peer reviewed. Anyone using AP Fact Check to check the facts about the collapse of WTC7 would be wrong if they believed AP Fact Check. AP Fact Check haven’t got their facts straight.
This is a common problem with so called fact checkers. Due to the political nature of their role, all too often they stray into opinion rather than fact. There’s nothing wrong with that except the fact checkers falsely claim their opinions are facts not opinions. What’s worse is that the Internet is being policed and information censored on the basis that the fact checkers opinions are facts.
In January this year the HighWire released a video which contrasted clips of Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist for the World Health Organisation (W.H.O). The Video was titled “W.H.O. Chief Scientist Caught Lying To The Public.” There was no commentary in the Highwire video, viewers were simply presented with the two clips of Dr. Swaminathan. It was left to the viewers discretion to decide if they believed Dr. Swaminathan was, in fact, lying.
In the first clip, from an official W.H.O. vaccine promotional video, Dr. Swaminathan states:
“We have vaccine safety systems. Robust vaccine safety systems … [The] WHO works closely with countries to make sure that vaccines can do what they do best: prevent disease without risks.”
The second clip records Dr. Swaminathan’s address to the U.N. Global Vaccine Safety Summit in 2019. She informs the summit:
“… We really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries…..we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine… One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the cause of deaths are, but in most cases, there is some obfuscation at that level.”
These two mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true. If one is, the other is a lie. Vaccines cannot both “prevent disease without risks” while “deaths… have occurred due to a particular vaccine.” The intention to deceive is an evident fact. Yet Facebook’s automated fact checking labeling system flagged the video as ‘PARTLY FALSE‘ and directed users to two articles from two credible sources which both presented specious, illogical arguments to discredit the factually accurate HighWire video.
In September 2019 climatologists and environmental experts protested to Facebook after its fact checkers labelled the article “The Great Failure of the Climate Models” as ‘FALSE.’ The article was blocked and users could not share it. The information in the article was censored. The article was based upon the work of scientists and statisticians and was factually accurate. Facebook not only labelled the article FALSE they directed readers to a dubious, poorly evidenced source, calling that “credible.”
Facebook removed the FALSE label shortly after receiving the protest letter, without explanation or apology. They clearly accepted their fact checking wasn’t checking any facts at all, simply censoring factually accurate information. However, in the fast paced modern information environment, the damage was done, and the political objective achieved.
This is not fact checking. This is political opinion masquerading as fact checking, deceiving the public into believing something is factually accurate (or inaccurate) when, in fact, it isn’t.
Poynter and the IFCN also confuse their opinion with fact. In May 2019 Poynter were forced to issue an apology, of sorts, to a number of media organisations after they issued an index of ‘unreliable’ media sources. When some of the listed organisations inquired about the basis for Poynter’s unfounded accusations, requesting Poynter and the IFCN provide some evidence to back up their claims, Poynter quickly removed the suggested “blacklist.”
Poynter’s IFCN make a great deal out of their fact checking principles so it’s a shame they didn’t apply any when they issued their blacklist. Poynter’s managing editor, Barbara Allen, said the purpose of the blacklist was as follows:
“… to provide a useful tool for readers to gauge the legitimacy of the information they were consuming… We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology. We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report.”
This was tantamount to the IFCN admitting they chose who to put on their blacklist based upon their feelings. When we look at who funds the IFCN it’s pretty clear who those feelings lean towards.
When requested to evidence their decision the IFCN, guardians of the fact checking industry, couldn’t provide any. They had no relevant information, had no evidence to back up their opinion and were simply stating something as a fact when it was nothing of the sort.
Just because an organisation claims they are a fact checker it doesn’t mean they check facts. They are essentially establishment stooges whose role it is to police information and make sure the wider public doesn’t have access to any evidence that challenges official narratives and policy decisions. These fallible groups of people, no better informed than anyone else, are being used by the internet giants, at the behest of government, to censor what we can say online.
Let’s ignore the establishment’s fact checkers and hang on to our critical thinking skills for a while. It looks like we are going to need them more than ever.
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$1.5bn up in smoke: US THAAD missile stockpile dries up defending Israel against Iran
By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | July 2, 2025
According to American media, defense news outlets, and independent analysts, the 12-day Israeli military aggression against Iran significantly depleted the US stockpile of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptor missiles.
Citing official sources, American magazine Newsweek reported on Friday that the US transferred a substantial portion of its advanced missile defense capabilities to support the Israeli regime, an effort with questionable results and a critical impact on US strategic reserves.
THAAD, developed by Lockheed Martin arms manufacturing company, is a key component of Israel’s multi-layered air defense architecture. It is designed to intercept medium-range ballistic missiles, including those launched from Iran and Yemen.
The US-made system is capable of targeting short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, whether inside or outside Earth’s atmosphere.
THAAD uses a “hit-to-kill” method, relying on kinetic energy rather than explosive warheads to destroy incoming threats, intercepting at altitudes of up to 150 km and ranges between 150-200 km.
Operated exclusively by American personnel, the US military maintains eight THAAD batteries with an estimated 350–400 interceptors in total. The eighth battery was activated during the June 20 Israeli aggression against Iran and is capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles. … continue
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