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The Khashoggi Disappearance and the Stalled Vision 2030 Plan

Our Vexed and Bitter Masters Seek Regime Change Again

By Scott Creighton | nomadiceveryman | October 18, 2018

Back in April of this year, a journalist in Gaza wearing a vest marked “PRESS” was deliberately shot and killed by IDF snipers. That brings the total number killed to 18 since the start of the Second Intifada. No one of consequence called for regime change in Israel.

As of July this year, there had already been six journalists killed in Mexico by drug cartels linked to Mexico’s corrupt government and our own intelligence services. The last one beaten to death in a horrific murder. Last year the number of journalists murdered set a new record for the country at 42. As far as I know, the MSM and Lindsey Graham have yet to call for sanctions and regime change.

In Columbia there have been two murdered for covering things the rulers didn’t want covered. But we like Columbia’s neoliberal government so for now, not a peep about changing it.

What makes the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi so different? This is a question a few writers and researchers have been asking themselves and a couple of us have come to some honest, sensible, business-oriented answers… since of course the U.S. and her allies are all about Business.

Now let’s be clear. I write about Khashoggi’s disappearance because the only hard evidence that we have before us is this…

CCTV image of the missing Saudi Journalist Jamal Khashoggi entering the Saudi consulate

That is a blurry image of a middle aged man walking toward the door of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It is not proof of a murder. It is proof someone walked toward a door and then entered the building.

Everything else is speculation or statements from “anonymous sources close to the investigation” meaning it’s all baseless rumor, innuendo or deliberate disinformation.

It is entirely possible that the man in the image is not Jamal Khashoggi. And it is entirely possible that it is.

Therefore it is also entirely possible that Khashoggi is not dead by the hands of the Saudis and simultaneously… it is.

But it is not definitive by any stretch of the imagination in either way… unless all of a sudden you take our intelligence assets at face value as if they never lied to us before. Which is quite a leap of faith in my opinion.

All of the journalist murders I listed above have definite proof of their demise. Bodies. DNA. Causes of death. Death certificates. Coroner’s reports. Things of that nature. Here there is only that grainy image taken from a grainy video of about 4 seconds in length. And that, boys and girls, is it.

So why all the pressure being put on Saudi Arabia to essentially foment a regime change in the Kingdom of Saud over a grainy picture of a man who set up a Saudi Regime change NGO in Delaware back in January of this year? A regime change NGO promoted by the National Endowment for Democracy.

Why are MSM outlets and even so-called “alternative anti-war” (Common Dreams, Moon of Alabam and others) ones suddenly parroting the likes of Bernie Sanders and Lindsey Graham in calling for Mohammad bin Salmon’s removal from office?

Was the murder so brutal that it offended even the hardest regime change advocates in D.C. and their allies in the Washington Post? Do they not know the UAE hired a for-profit death-squad based in the U.S. to kill political rivals in Yemen in vicious brutal ways from 2015-2017?

In one case the American former Special Ops mercs put a big bomb on the door of a building they thought their one target was holding a meeting with a whole bunch of others. They hoped to kill EVERYONE in the building but were too late. So later they developed a methodology of using bikes to put bombs on cars in busy traffic intersections killing their targets that way. Them and anyone else who happened to be close.

Have you ever seen someone die slowly after a bomb goes off and blows off their legs or arms or rips open their guts? It’s horrible. And they weren’t even the target.

And yet this hit squad operated with impunity for a favored nation of ours and most involved with the operation find it hard too believe our military and political leadership didn’t know about it. Notice, it started under Obama and continued under Trump. What a shock huh?

You think the alleged abduction, torture, murder and dismemberment was so shocking to those folks they just HAD to do SOMETHING?

Or do you think it was because Khashoggi was pretending to be a journalist at the Washington Post as he fought for regime change in Saudi Arabia?

As some journalists , some news agencies and bloggers have pointed out, Khashoggi’s disappearance perfectly coincides with a number of international events that make this case rather suspect. Unfortunately that number is relatively low.

Khashoggi had extensive ties to Lockheed Martin, the old guard of Saudi royalty, the CIA and other intelligence assets… and of course… his very own regime change focused NGO.

We also know that the deal President Trump made with MbS and Saudi Arabia last year for 110 billion dollars worth of weapons sales was falling through and a deadline for them to purchase the horribly untrustworthy THAAD missile defense system came and went on Sept. 30th of this year with no purchase by MbS.

And we know that the Saudi ambassador to Russia was worried about the U.S. imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia as recently as Sept. 21 due to them buying the Russian S-400 system instead.

Add to all that the Davos in the Desert meeting taking place this week which the risk of sanctions would seriously screw up… and you have a perfect storm of motive for someone OTHER than Saudi Arabia to either kidnap, kill or “send into early retirement” one Jamal Khashoggi. Right?

Now, 110 billion dollars in deals promised to the MIC is a lot of money, that is for sure. But the question kept rattling around in my feeble little brain… is that really enough to motivate every sector of American empire support, including the fake “alt-right and alt-left” outlets to go all out calling for YET ANOTHER regime change operation in the Middle East?

Seems like a damn good question doesn’t it?

And my answer was “no”

Then I started digging again and what I found makes that 110 billion dollars look like something I give to the local homeless guy every morning when he shows up lightly rapping, rapping upon my chamber door.

Try 4 trillion on for size. Four Trillion spread across every facet of our glorious business community and stretching into every pocket of every director sitting on both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the for-profit Central Bank system.

Now THAT is something that EVERYONE can get behind, huh?

Yes, MbS is on the outs as they say but it’s not entirely due to his reluctance to buy U.S. made crappy weapons of war (though that is part of it)

What is really at play here is his apparent reneging  on an even bigger deal and an ideological shift that made him the darling of all neoliberals in D.C., New York, London and Tel Aviv.

You see, MbS was installed by our intelligence assets for one purpose: he was finally going to be the Saudi royal family member to fully neoliberalize Arabia on behalf of our hot money speculators and Big Business interests.

The plan was called Vision 2030 (put together by globalist neoliberal technocrats from McKinsey in 2014) and when he first signed on for it (open financial markets to hot money speculators and Wall Street, privatization of everything from nationalized oil company to healthcare) MbS immediately became the DARLING of the Middle East. Man, the right and left of the Business Party loved him to death. Lindsey Graham drooled over him right along side Chris Mathews. Obama praised him as did Trump and everyone in between.

They coupled that with some bullshit about letting women drive cars so the left would get on board and suddenly the brutal dictatorship in Saudi Arabia was something left of Sesame Street. Bert and Ernie would still get beheaded for being gay, the Grouch would have his trash-can privatized and Big Bird would still loose his head for asking too many questions… but the facade was going to hold and a Saudi Arabia would be the new Shining City on the Hill.

All was great in the land Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence. 

But then a funny thing happened on the way to neoliberalization: the vulture capitalists kept being told … to wait till the feeding frenzy could begin.

The oil company IPO was the biggest single disappointment for the masters of the universe but there were many others detailed in the Vision 2030 plan. The IPO, the largest single offering of it’s kind in history, was supposed to have already taken place, making folks like Exxon, Goldman Sachs and BP shareholder in Saudi Arabia’s massive oil business. But it never happened and from the looks of it, the owners of all things planet Earth are getting tired of waiting around for the feast.

Mohammad bin Salmon was raised up and made the heir apparent to the throne in Saudi Arabia ahead of older, more established royal family members for one reason and one reason alone: he was willing to allow the West to roll into the country and chop it up and sell it off for profits.

Keep in mind… by 2014 the glorious captains of industry and banksters had already digested their latest consumables found in places like Libya, Ukraine and Iraq. Syria was resisting and the Russians and Iranians were making it hard for them to anticipate when they would get their next mergers and acquisitions meal fed to them so they needed something to tide them over so to speak. They needed new markets to exploit and pillage and Obama apparently refused to invade Venezuela so something had to give.

Then along came a power struggle in a country they have coveted for decades. A nation with tons of state-owned property and businesses and services they could consume.

Saudi Arabia.

All they needed was a front-man on the inside they could promote and then control.

Prince Mohammad bin Salmon fit the bill perfectly.

He was young, would be their man for decades to come and his youth made him seem like something they could promote as the new face of the old kingdom.

But something has changed in him and thus, in our masters’ opinion and trust of him.

Hell hath no fury like a globalist spurned and what we see now is clearly a ramification of that love lost and turned to hatred.

Is it a coincidence that all of these things are coming to a head at the exact same time a man committed to removing MbS from power goes “missing” at the consulate in Istanbul?

Possible I assume.

But I quit believing in geo-political coincidences right around the same time I quit believing in our two party “democracy” so for me, this seems like the beginnings of another neoliberal regime change operation.

Only this one will be fueled by the fire of an unrequited love and the desperation of vulture capitalists starving for another carcass upon which too feed.

October 18, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Economics, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

American mercenary boasts of role in ‘targeted assassination program’ in Yemen

RT | October 17, 2018

A Hungarian-Israeli security contractor based in the US, Abraham Golan, has claimed he ran a targeted assassination program in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition currently waging a proxy war against Iran-backed Houthis.

The US is supplying weapons, intelligence, and other support to the coalition, but Golan’s account, as told to BuzzFeed, reads like something out of a spy thriller.

Golan claims the United Arab Emirates (UAE), part of the coalition, hired his mercenary company, Spear Operations Group, to kill specific enemies, including Anssaf Ali Mayo, leader of the Yemeni political party Al-Islah, which the UAE considers a terrorist group. The Mayo assassination was ultimately unsuccessful – Mayo disappeared from Yemeni politics for a while, and the Spear crew even thought he was dead, but he is currently serving in the Yemeni government, alive and well.

The botched assassination of December 29, 2015 is seen by observers from both sides as the opening salvo in a “targeted campaign,” which former UN investigator Gregory Johnsen says eventually took out 25 to 30 members of Al-Islah and other clerics.

Golan claims responsibility for several of the high-profile assassinations in Yemen, though he refuses to share which ones. Not because of remorse – he’s a mercenary, after all – but because his business inhabits a legal gray area, and perhaps because he doesn’t want his professional secrets getting out. Golan is trying to sell his business model to the US military.

Experts have cast doubt on the idea that the US, which essentially armed and trained the UAE’s military from the ground up, didn’t know the UAE had hired Americans to conduct assassinations in a war in which the US is deeply involved. The CIA claimed ignorance of the matter, but one agency official – after categorically denying the government would allow such a thing – confirmed the story, himself shocked that American mercenaries had been allowed to operate “almost like a murder squad.”

The US does enjoy a privileged place within UAE military circles, having sold the Arab nation $27 billion in arms and defense services since 2009. While the US theoretically bars mercenaries from participating in combat, it hires them to do everything else in the military, and one man’s security detail is another man’s firefight.

Private contractors are supposed to be regulated by the State Department, which claims it has never permitted mercenaries to work for another government, and US law forbids any who would “conspire to kill, kidnap, [or] maim” a foreign citizen. But the publication cites multiple sources who claim Spear mercenaries were given military rank by the UAE, providing them legal cover for their actions (US citizens are allowed to serve in foreign militaries, with some exceptions).

BuzzFeed was admittedly unable to verify much of Golan’s biography, which allegedly includes a stint in the French Foreign Legion and friendships with notorious figures like former Mossad head Danny Yatom and Serbian militant Arkan. A CIA acquaintance calls him “prone to exaggeration.” The details of his story – “target cards” handed out with names, photographs, even phone numbers; a Jolly-Roger-esque company flag – are Hollywoodesque.

Golan supposedly offered the UAE his company’s services as targeted assassins, explicitly tasked to “disrupt and destruct” Al-Islah. On top of $1.5 million a month, they would receive kill bonuses and train UAE soldiers. He claims to have declined missions targeting individuals outside the party, but those claims are unverified, and his partner admits that some targets may have simply been enemies of the UAE’s ruling family.

However much truth there may be to Golan’s tale, it illuminates the consequences of War on Terror mission creep – an overabundance of highly-trained special forces, lax oversight regarding war crimes and international law, an increasingly privatized fighting force, and the notion that enemy combatants are anyone a government deems them to be mean Spear’s business model could strike US commanders’ fancy after all.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

New BBC documentary ‘Dangerous Dynasty’ ignores the West’s role in destabilizing Syria

By Neil Clark | RT | October 16, 2018

The new BBC2 documentary, ‘A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad’, should be contrasted with the 2010 BBC4 series ‘Syrian School’, which eschewed neocon propaganda and allowed us to make our own minds up about Baathist Syria.

Whatever happened to objective film making? Why does everyone today feel that the film or program maker must take sides and not just show us things as they are?

These thoughts were uppermost in my mind when watching the first episode of the 72 Films production, ‘A Dangerous Dynasty’ last week.

You could say the title was a bit of a giveaway. If you were expecting to see a balanced, intellectual analysis of Baathist rule in Syria, providing historical perspective, and putting the ‘House of Assad’ in some kind of regional context, you’d have been very disappointed.

We weren’t even two minutes in before a voice-over declared: “Many have wondered how this former eye doctor [Bashar Assad] and his British-born wife ended up running a regime of committing war crimes, of gassing their own people… Understand their saga [the Assads] and you will understand how their country now lies in ruins.”

Really? The ‘House of Assad’ had ruled Syria for over 40 years without the country being in ruins.

The descent into the abyss began in 2011. We can argue till the cows come home about ‘who fired first’, as anti-government protests swept the country, but even if we do blame the Syrian authorities for initiating the violence seven years ago, there’s no getting away from the fact that the conflict which developed was deliberately stoked by powers hostile to the Syrian Arab Republic.

These powers were desirous of either regime-change or keeping Syria permanently weak and divided for geo-strategic reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with concern for human rights.

To blame all the bloodshed on the ‘House of Assad’, as ‘A Dangerous Dynasty’ does, is ahistorical nonsense and ignores the pernicious role that the US, France, the UK, and their regional allies have played in destabilizing Syria and keeping the fires of war burning.

“We have to ask ourselves how does this mild-mannered eye doctor end up killing hundreds of thousands of people,” one commentator says in ‘A Dangerous Dynasty’, as if Bashar, who had originally planned to devote his life to the noble cause of medicine,  just got up one morning and said “Right, now I’m going to kill hundreds of thousands of people.”

The reality is that the Syrian president was faced with a foreign-backed attempt to destroy his country. He reacted with great force, but just look at how neighboring Israel responds when rockets are fired in from Gaza, or how the US responded after 9-11. Imagine how the White House would react if foreign-backed jihadists took control of parts of the US and beheaded captured US soldiers. Do we think the US president would have said to the ‘rebels’, “Hi guys! Let’s sit round the camp fire together and sing Kumbaya”?

The program had unpleasant undertones of Arabophobia, promoting the narrative that Arabs, and in particular Arab ‘dictators’ who don’t show sufficient subservience to Western elites, cannot be trusted.

It reminded me of an interview with Syria’s deputy ambassador to the UN and a US neocon on BBC’s Newsnight, in the lead-up to the Iraq War, which I wrote about for the Guardian.

While the neocon was treated with great deference, the Syrian representative was treated with withering contempt and “Why should we believe YOU?” condescension. ‘A Dangerous Dynasty’ had much the same tone. Sinister music was played whenever a family photograph of the Assads was shown to make it clear we understood that these were ‘the baddies’.

We were told that Bashar’s mother was “tough and manipulative.” His father Hafez “has extraordinary eyes that seem to look into your soul.” Assad Sr. was “an old fashioned dictator.” Female soldiers had to bite off the heads of snakes and male ones kill puppies to show their obedience. In one segment, we were told that Hafez al-Assad was like a crafty hamburger seller from the bazaar who removes the meat after you’ve paid your money. “He didn’t trust anybody… he lives in a world of conspiracy and paranoia. His whole worldview was conspiratorial,” an American envoy complained.

But didn’t Hafez had good reason not to trust anyone – least of all American governments? Just look at what the US did to Iraq and Libya. Gorbachev trusted the Americans and believed promises that there would be no NATO Drang nach Osten following the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact. Today, NATO troops are on Russia’s borders.

Arabophobia can also be seen in the surprise expressed that Bashar Assad, is “civilized” and “well-mannered” in his personal interactions. As if Arabs, can’t do ‘civilized’ and ‘well-mannered’.

Ironically, probably the most nuanced view in the whole program came from Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, who was a British diplomat in Syria in the 1980s.

“It was a socialist military dictatorship, but actually there was a live-and-let-live approach. It was a tightly controlled society but one where Western diplomats could move around fairly freely. If you didn’t bother the Syrian regime they weren’t going to bother you,” Sawer said.

No one disputes that Hafez al-Assad was a ruthless leader, but while the words ‘regime’ and ‘dictator’ were repeated ad nauseam, there was nothing in the program about the advances that Syria made under Assad and his son in the years 1970-2011. The way Christians and other religious minorities were protected by the secular government was ignored. Ditto Syria’s very generous support for the dispossessed and stateless Palestinians, which made them a target.

The book ‘Parting Shots’, published by the BBC, includes a letter written by Sir James Craig, British Ambassador to Syria in 1979, to UK Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington. Craig admits he doesn’t like the Baathists. But he also says “all I have said against them could be said against a hundred other government is this naughty world.” He then goes on: “And there is this, above all, that can be said for them: ever since they came to power, and long before, they have devoted a preponderant part of their energy to the cause of the Palestinians, to which they are called not only by self-interest but by the ties of kinship, neighbourliness and compassion.” Sir James said he found “a distinct spark of nobility” in their “obstinacy” on this issue.

If we go back eight years, a much fairer picture of Syria was shown on the BBC in ‘Syrian School’.

This was arguably one of the best documentary series ever shown on British television. It didn’t preach and it didn’t tell us what to think. It simply showed us what everyday life was like in Syria – the good and the bad.

Max Baring, who worked as director-cameraman on the program said: “Syria is a country where, from poetry to politics, you can have an intellectual debate. You can re-imagine the world there in a way that we seem to have lost in the West, where even the credit crunch hasn’t dented the orthodoxy of Liberal Capitalism, where ‘The X-Factor’ seems now to have become the cultural pinnacle.”

You don’t have to be a diehard supporter of ‘House of Assad’ to acknowledge that life was (and is)  better under the ‘dynasty’ than under the medieval head-choppers of ISIS and other associated fundamentalist ‘rebels’, who the enemies of Baathist Syria seemed quite happy to support – either directly or indirectly. As my fellow Op-ed columnist John Wight correctly pointed out last week, “Not one Western journalist denouncing the Syrian government would have dared to set foot within so much of an inch of militant-held territory, knowing that if they did they would be peremptorily abducted, tortured and slaughtered.”

Shamefully, it’s “the Syrian regime” that ‘Dangerous Dynasty’ blames for the rise of hardcore jihadist terrorism. The neo-con endless war lobby, who set the Middle East on fire, gets a free pass.

The second episode of the hatchet job will be shown this Tuesday. I think I’ll take a bath (no pun intended), instead. Looking further ahead, I’ve an idea (which I’ll give them for just £10K), for the program makers for their next series. How about doing one about another father and son, who both launch wars in successive decades against the same country? The father, who was a millionaire, was director of his country’s intelligence services. The son sold his illegal war on a pack of false claims about a country possessing weapons it didn’t have, with the invasion leading to a million deaths and a refugee crisis of Biblical proportions.

‘Junior’ also invaded another country where conflict is still raging today, and under the pretext of fighting a ‘War on Terror’ introduced a surveillance state and established a detention camp where people were held indefinitely without trial. The title of the series: ‘Dangerous Dynasty: The House of Bush’.

Over to you, 72 Films.

October 16, 2018 Posted by | Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Dark Story Behind Global Warming aka Climate Change

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 16.10.2018

The recent UN global warming conference under auspices of the deceptively-named International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded its meeting in South Korea discussing how to drastically limit global temperature rise. Mainstream media is predictably retailing various panic scenarios “predicting” catastrophic climate change because of man-made emissions of Greenhouse Gases, especially CO2, if drastic changes in our lifestyle are not urgently undertaken. There is only one thing wrong with all that. It’s based on fake science and corrupted climate modelers who have reaped by now [many] billions in government research grants to buttress the arguments for radical change in our standard of living. We might casually ask “What’s the point?” The answer is not positive.

The South Korea meeting of the UN IPCC discussed measures needed, according to their computer models, to limit global temperature rise to below  1.5 Centigrade above levels of the pre-industrial era. One of the panel members and authors of the latest IPCC Special Report on Global Warming, Drew Shindell, at Duke University told the press that to meet the arbitrary 1.5 degree target will require world CO2 emissions to drop by a staggering 40% in the next 12 years. The IPCC calls for a draconian “zero net emissions” of CO2 by 2050. That would mean complete ban on gas or diesel engines for cars and trucks, no coal power plants, transformation of the world agriculture to burning food as biofuels. Shindell modestly put it, “These are huge, huge shifts.”

The new IPCC report, SR15, declares that global warming of 1.5°C will “probably“ bring species extinction, weather extremes and risks to food supply, health and economic growth. To avoid this the IPCC estimates required energy investment alone will be $2.4 trillion per year. Could this explain the interest of major global banks, especially in the City of London in pushing the Global Warming card?

This scenario assumes an even more incredible dimension as it is generated by fake science and doctored data by a tight-knit group of climate scientists internationally that have so polarized scientific discourse that they label fellow scientists who try to argue as not mere global warming skeptics, but rather as “Climate Change deniers.” What does that bit of neuro-linguistic programming suggest? Holocaust deniers? Talk about how to kill legitimate scientific debate, the essence of true science. Recently the head of the UN IPCC proclaimed, “The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.”

What the UN panel chose to ignore was the fact the debate was anything but “over.” The Global Warming Petition Project, signed by over 31,000 American scientists states, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

‘Chicken Little’

Most interesting, about the dire warnings of global catastrophe if dramatic changes to our living standards are not undertaken urgently, is that the dire warnings are always attempts to frighten based on future prediction. When the “tipping point” of so-called irreversibility is passed with no evident catastrophe, they invent a new future point.

In 1982 Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” He predicted lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”In 1989 Noel Brown, of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. James Hansen, a key figure in the doomsday scenarios declared at that time that 350 ppm of CO2 was the upper limit, “to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPCC, declared that 2012 was the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.” Today the measured level is 414.

As UK scientist Philip Stott notes, “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. …Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s… By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years…Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988)…”

Flawed Data

A central flaw to the computer models cited by the IPCC is the fact that they are purely theoretical models and not real. The hypothesis depends entirely on computer models generating scenarios of the future, with no empirical records that can verify either these models or their flawed prediction. As one scientific study concluded, “The computer climate models upon which ‘human-caused global warming’ is  based have  substantial  uncertainties  and  are  markedly unreliable. This is not surprising, since the climate is a coupled, non-linear dynamical system. It is very complex.” Coupled refers to the phenomenon that the oceans cause changes in the atmosphere and the atmosphere in turn affects the oceans. Both are complexly related to solar cycles. No single model predicting global warming or 2030 “tipping points” is able or even tries to integrate the most profound influence on Earth climate and weather, the activity of the sun and solar eruption cycles which determine ocean currents, jet stream activity, El ninos and our daily weather.

An Australian IT expert and independent researcher, John McLean, recently did a detailed analysis of the IPCC climate report. He notes that HadCRUT4 is the primary dataset used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make its dramatic claims about “man-made global warming”, to justify its demands for trillions of dollars to be spent on “combating climate change.” But McLean points to egregious errors in the HadCRUT4 used by IPCC. He notes, “It’s very careless and amateur. About the standard of a first-year university student.” Among the errors, he cites places where temperature “averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia.” In another place he found that for the Caribbean island, St Kitts temperature was recorded at 0 degrees C for a whole month, on two occasions. TheHadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This was the group at East Anglia that was exposed several years ago for the notorious Climategate scandals of faking data and deleting embarrassing emails to hide it. Mainstream media promptly buried the story, turning attention instead on “who illegally hacked East Anglia emails.”

Astonishing enough when we do a little basic research, we find that the IPCC never carried out a true scientific inquiry into the possible cases of change in Earth climate. Man made sources of change were arbitrarily asserted, and the game was on.

Malthusian Maurice Strong

Few are aware however of the political and even geopolitical origins of Global Warming theories. How did this come about? So-called Climate Change, aka Global Warming, is a neo-malthusian deindustrialization agenda originally developed by circles around the Rockefeller family in the early 1970’s to prevent the rise of independent industrial rivals, much as Trump’s trade wars today. In my book, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, I detail how the highly influential Rockefeller group also backed creation of the Club of Rome, Aspen Institute, Worldwatch Institute and MIT Limits to Growth report. A key early organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller’s longtime friend, a Canadian oilman named Maurice Strong. Strong was one of the early propagators of the scientifically unfounded theory that man-made emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens civilization, so-called Global Warming.

As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to “save the environment.” Some years later the same Strong restated his radical ecologist stance: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Co-founder of the Rockefeller-tied Club of Rome, Dr Alexander King admitted the fraud in his book, The First Global Revolution. He stated, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Please reread that, and let it sink in. Humanity, and not the 147 global banks and multi-nationals who de facto determine today’s environment, bear the responsibility.

Following the Earth Summit, Strong was named Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan. He was the key architect of the 1997-2005 Kyoto Protocol that declared man made Global Warming, according to “consensus,” was real and that it was “extremely likely” that man-made CO2 emissions have predominantly caused it. In 1988 Strong was key in creation of the UN IPCC and later the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit which he chaired, and which approved his globalist UN Agenda 21.

The UN IPCC and its Global Warming agenda is a political and not a scientific project. Their latest report is, like the previous ones, based on fake science and outright fraud. MIT Professor Richard S Lindzen in a recent speech criticized politicians and activists who claim “the science is settled,” and demand “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” He noted that it was totally implausible for such a complex “multifactor system” as the climate to be summarized by just one variable, global mean temperature change, and primarily controlled by just a 1-2 per cent variance in the energy budget due to CO2. Lindzen described how “an implausible conjecture backed by false evidence, repeated incessantly, has become ‘knowledge,’ used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization.” Our world indeed needs a “staggering transformation,” but one that promotes health and stability of the human species instead.

October 16, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

African Penguin Decline – BBC Fake News

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | October 16, 2018

As we found out last week, the directive has come down from on high at the BBC to ramp up climate alarm at every opportunity they get.

The memo has evidently been received in the BBC newsroom, who broadcast this flagrantly dishonest piece yesterday about African penguins on Outside Source (at about 51 minutes in):

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bnl4gy/outside-source-15102018

Unfortunately the programme expires on iPlayer tonight, but this is the full transcript:

 Presenter:

The next report is about the African penguin population and how it’s rapidly declining. Conservationists are saying their habitat is being hit by rising tides caused by climate change.

And it’s interesting that since that report by the UN last week on climate change, so many different organisations have been coming forward to emphasise the importance it has on their work.

Reporter Eliza Philippides reporting from S Africa:

Boulders Beach, home to one of the 28 African penguin habitats. These birds can only be found in S Africa and Namibia. But their survival is under threat, and one of the reasons is there is not enough fish in the sea.

Faroeshka Rodgers, Section Ranger of Simon’s Town:

The African penguin have to swim far distances to find food, but in the past that was not the case. We suspect this could be from commercial trawling or over exploitation of the food sources of the African penguin.

Eliza Philippides

In just three years the number of breeding pairs has dropped by a fifth. Here at Boulders Beach the rangers are encouraging the penguins to use artificial nest boxes, hoping to increase their chances of breeding successfully.

This colony is the only place in the world where people can swim freely with these endangered birds. As a result they get millions of visitors every year.

Stabilising the population and increasing penguin numbers is a priority here. The aim? That children can see the African penguin in the wild.

And, apart from a brief interview with a tourist, who could not believe how close she got to the critters, that was it!

There was not a single mention of climate change or sea levels or tides from either the rangers themselves, who are the experts, or from the BBC’s reporter, Philippides.

So why did the presenter even mention it at the start, never mind fail to even acknowledge the very real and obvious problem  of over fishing?

Surprisingly nobody mentioned either the very real threat to the penguins well being caused by “millions of tourists getting close up”. But apparently “letting children see them” is more important.

As for sea levels at Simon’s Town, they have been rising gradually at 2.14mm/year, and have actually fallen during the last decade:

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=430-061

Simon’s Bay has wide, sandy beaches, with plenty of rocky outcrops. The idea that an increase in sea level of less than an inch a decade could make the slightest difference to the penguins’ nesting sites or general welfare belongs on Jackanory, not a supposedly serious news programme.

Simon’s Bay

The African penguin population has been declining sharply since the early 1900s,

and the reasons are well understood and have nothing to do with climate change, as the Organization for the Conservation of Penguins explains:

Breeding no longer occurs at 10 localities where it formerly occurred or has been suspected to occur. The present population is probably less than 10% of that in 1900, when there was estimated to be about 1.5 million birds on Dassen Island alone. By 1956 the population had fallen to roughly half that in 1900, and had halved again by the late 1970s, when there was an estimated 220,000 adult birds. By the late 1980s the number had dropped to about 194,000 and in the early 1990s there was an estimated 179,000 adult birds.

Given an annual rate of decline of about 2% per year, there is considerable concern about the long-term viability of African Penguins in the wild. By the late 1990s the population had recovered slightly, and in 1999 there was an estimated 224,000 individuals. The African Penguin is now classified as Endangered by the IUCN, and is listed in Appendix II of CITES and the Bonn Convention for the conservation of migratory species.

The reasons for the significant decline in the African Penguin populations are well known. Initially, the decline was due mostly to the exploitation of penguin eggs for food, and habitat alteration and disturbance associated with guano collection at breeding colonies. These factors have now largely ceased, and the major current threats include competition with commercial fisheries for pelagic fish prey, and oil pollution. Other threats include competition with Cape Fur Seals for space at breeding colonies and for food resources, as well as predation by seals on penguins. Feral cats are present and pose a problem at a few of the colonies. African Penguins also face predation of eggs and chicks by avian predators such as Kelp Gulls and Sacred Ibises, while natural terrestrial predators, such as mongoose, genets and leopard are present at the mainland colonies.

It is obvious that BBC presenters have been told to get a plug in for climate change, whenever news items like these come along, regardless of how tenuous or outright incorrect the link may be.

October 16, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN SYRIA? BBC PANORAMA RELIES ON QUESTIONABLE RESEARCH

Global Network for Syria | October 16, 2018

A joint investigation by BBC Panorama and BBC Arabic claimed to show how chemical weapons have been used by the Syrian Government as part of a deliberate military strategy. Yet there are serious concerns over the investigation’s reliance on ‘broadly impartial’ sources — who are not named — and consequently the reliability of the report’s findings.

The Panorama programme is called ‘Syria’s Chemical War’ and was first broadcast on Monday 15 October on BBC One at 20:30.

Yesterday’s BBC Panorama programme was notable for its omissions. It was not clear, for example, whether evidence backing the claims of 106 uses of chemical weapons came from Syrian rebel sources. Given that sources are not named, the BBC may be relying on evidence from groups that are widely regarded as favourable to the opposition, such as the White Helmets, the Syrian American Medical Society, or the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations.

The investigation ignored the interim findings of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the Douma incident, which contradict the BBC’s conclusions. The OPCW found no evidence of the use of prohibited weapons in Douma and did not rule out that chlorine cylinders found at the site may have been planted.

The programme showed former OPCW staff saying that not all of Asad’s stocks destroyed under OPCW supervision were necessarily accounted for. It neglected to point out, however, that the OPCW reported in 2014 that it had been unable to visit two sites where chemical weapons were stored and that both these sites were in rebel-held territory deemed unsafe for inspectors to visit.

The programme also claimed to detect a pattern of Asad using chemical weapons in the final stages of sieges. But the report did not address questions raised by numerous military experts who ask why Syrian Government Forces, which were already winning the war, would deploy chemical weapons of limited usefulness, risking severe reprisals by the US-led Coalition.

There are further concerns regarding the lack of reference to Islamist fighters, who have used chlorine canisters as part of their “resistance”, and who have butchered not just Christians and Alawites but also hundreds of the civilians living under their control, as documented by the UN.

The war in Syria is complex, with many different layers to the conflict. It is crucial that any future investigation includes historical and geopolitical context, objective analysis, transparency about sources, and, at the very least, an acknowledgement that there are different points of view.

Peter Ford, former British Ambassador to Syria
Dr Tim Anderson, University of Sydney
Lord Carey of Clifton
Baroness Cox
Lord Gordon of Strathblane
Dr Michael Langrish, former Bishop of Exeter
Lord Stoddart of Swindon

Contact: carolinecox1@outlook.com

October 16, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Khashoggi Was No Critic of Saudi Regime

By As`ad AbuKhalil | Consortium News | October 15, 2018

The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week has generated huge international publicity, but unsurprisingly, little in Saudi-controlled, Arab media. The Washington Post, for whom Khashoggi wrote, and other Western media, have kept the story alive, increasing the pressure on Riyadh to explain its role in the affair.

It’s been odd to read about Khashoggi in Western media. David Hirst in The Guardian claimed Khashoggi merely cared about absolutes such as “truth, democracy, and freedom”. Human Rights Watch’s director described him as representing “outspoken and critical journalism.”

But did he pursue those absolutes while working for Saudi princes?

Khashoggi was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus. There is no journalism allowed in the kingdom: there have been courageous Saudi women and men who attempted to crack the wall of rigid political conformity and were persecuted and punished for their views. Khashoggi was not among them.

Some writers suffered while Khashoggi was their boss at Al-Watan newspaper. Khashoggi—contrary to what is being written—was never punished by the regime, except lightly two years ago, when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) banned him from tweeting and writing for Al-Hayat, the London-based, pan-Arab newspaper owned by Saudi Prince Khalid bin Sultan.

By historical contrast, Nasir As-Sa`id was a courageous secular Arab Nationalist writer who fled the kingdom in 1956 and settled in Cairo, and then Beirut. He authored a massive (though tabloid-like) volume about the history of the House of Saud. He was unrelenting in his attacks against the Saudi royal family.

For this, the Saudi regime paid a corrupt PLO leader in Beirut (Abu Az-Za`im, tied to Jordanian intelligence) to get rid of As-Sa`id. He kidnapped As-Sa`id from a crowded Beirut street in 1979 and delivered him to the Saudi embassy there. He was presumably tortured and killed (some say his body was tossed from a plane over the “empty quarter” desert in Saudi Arabia). Such is the track record of the regime.

Finding the Right Prince

Khashoggi was an ambitious young reporter who knew that to rise in Saudi journalism you don’t need professionalism, courage, or ethics. In Saudi Arabia, you need to attach yourself to the right prince. Early on, Khashoggi became close to two of them: Prince Turki Al-Faysal (who headed Saudi intelligence) and his brother, Prince Khalid Al-Faysal, who owned Al-Watan (The Motherland) where Khashoggi had his first (Arabic) editing job.

Khashoggi distinguished himself with an eagerness to please and an uncanny ability to adjust his views to those of the prevailing government. In the era of anti-Communism and the promotion of fanatical jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Khashoggi was a true believer. He fought with Osama bin Laden and promoted the cause of the Mujahideen.

The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius and others want to embellish this by implying that he was an “embedded” reporter—as if bin Laden’s army would invite independent journalists to report on their war efforts. The entire project of covering the Afghan Mujahideen and promoting them in the Saudi press was the work of the chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki, Khashoggi’s principal patron-prince.

Western media coverage of Khashoggi’s career (by people who don’t know Arabic) presents a picture far from reality. They portray a courageous investigative journalist upsetting the Saudi regime. Nothing is further from the truth: there is no journalism in Saudi Arabia; there is only crude and naked propaganda.

Editors are trusted individuals who have demonstrated long-time loyalty. Khashoggi admitted to an Arab reporter last year in an interview from Istanbul that in Saudi Arabia he had been both editor and censor. Editors of Saudi regime papers (mouthpieces of princes and kings) enforce government rules and eliminate objectionable material.

Khashoggi never spoke out for Saudis in distress. He ran into trouble in two stints as Al-Watan editor because of articles he published by other writers, not by himself, that were mildly critical of the conservative religious establishment—which he at times supported. He was relocated to another government media job— to shield him from the religious authorities.

Khashoggi was the go-to man for Western journalists covering the kingdom, appointed to do so by the regime. He may have been pleasant in conversation with reporters but he never questioned the royal legitimacy. And that goes for his brief one-year stint in Washington writing for the Post.

A Reactionary

Khashoggi was a reactionary: he supported all monarchies and sultanates in the region and contended they were “reformable.” To him, only the secular republics, in tense relations with the Saudis, such as Iraq, Syria and Libya, defied reform and needed to be overthrown. He favored Islamization of Arab politics along Muslim Brotherhood lines.

Khashoggi’s vision was an “Arab uprising” led by the Saudi regime. In his Arabic writings he backed MbS’s “reforms” and even his “war on corruption,” derided in the region and beyond. He thought that MbS’s arrests of the princes in the Ritz were legitimate (though he mildly criticized them in a Post column) even as his last sponsoring prince, Al-Walid bin Talal, was locked up in the luxury hotel. Khashoggi even wanted to be an advisor to MbS, who did not trust him and turned him down.

Writing in the Post (with an Arabic version) Khashoggi came across as a liberal Democrat favoring democracy and reform. But he didn’t challenge Saudi regime legitimacy or Western Mideast policy. Mainstream journalists were enamored with him. They saw him as an agreeable Arab who didn’t criticize their coverage of the region, but praised it, considering the mainstream U.S. press the epitome of professional journalism. Khashoggi was essentially a token Arab writing for a paper with a regrettable record of misrepresenting Arabs.

In Arabic, his Islamist sympathies with Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) were unmistakable. Forgotten or little known in the West is that during the Cold War the Saudis sponsored, funded, and nurtured the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against the progressive, secular camp led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Ikhwan controlled the Saudi educational system raising Saudi students to admire the Brotherhood. But Sep. 11 changed the Saudi calculus: the rulers wanted a scapegoat for their role in sponsoring Islamist fanaticism and the Ikhwan was the perfect target. That made Khashoggi suspect too.

Hints Against Him

Recent articles in the Saudi press hinted that the regime might move against him. He had lost his patrons but the notion that Khashoggi was about to launch an Arab opposition party was not credible. The real crime was that Khashoggi was backed alone by Ikhwan supporters, namely the Qatari regime and the Turkish government.

A writer in Okaz, a daily in Jeddah, accused him of meeting with the Emir of Qatar at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and of having ties to “regional and international intelligence services.” If true it may have sealed his fate. Qatar is now the number one enemy of the Saudi regime—arguably worse than Iran.

Khashoggi was treated as a defector and one isn’t allowed to defect from the Saudi Establishment. The last senior defections were back in 1962, when Prince Talal and Prince Badr joined Nasser’s Arab nationalist movement in Egypt.

Khashoggi had to be punished in a way that would send shivers down the spine of other would-be defectors.

As’ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New “War on Terrorism” (2002), and The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004). He also runs the popular blog The Angry Arab News Service.

October 15, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

“Just Another Mother Murdered”

Palestinian children weep in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip (July 15, 2014)

A dozen years ago Alison Weir described how U.S. media ignored a Palestinian death… This pattern has persisted year after year after year… 

By Alison Weir – If Americans Knew October 6, 2006

Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation’s largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.

There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News. Nothing.

The LA Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Associated Press each had one sentence, at most, telling about her. All three left out the details, the LA Times had her age significantly off, and the Washington Post reported that she had been killed by an Israeli tank shell.

It hadn’t been a tank shell that had killer her, according to witnesses. It had been bullets, multiple ones, fired up close.

Neighbors report that Israeli soldiers had been beating her husband because he wasn’t answering their questions. Foolishly or valiantly, how is one to say, the 35-year-old woman had interfered. She tried to explain that her husband was deaf, screamed at the soldiers that her husband couldn’t hear them and attempted to stop them from hitting him. So they shot her. Several times.

Her name was Itemad Ismail Abu Mo’ammar.

She didn’t die, though. That took longer. It required her life to flow out of her in the form of blood for several hours, as Israeli soldiers refused to allow an ambulance to transport her to help. Her husband and children could do nothing to save her.

Finally, after approximately five hours, an ambulance was allowed to take her to a hospital, where physicians were able to render one service: pronounce her dead, a few days before the commencement of Ramadan, a season of family gatherings much like the Christmas season for Americans. She left 11 children. None of this was in the Washington Post story, which had reported her death in one half of one sentence.

Her husband’s brother, who lived in the same house, was also killed. He was a 28-year-old farmer.

Why did this all happen? The family lived behind a resistance fighter wanted by Israel. They were simply “collateral damage” in a failed Israeli assassination/kidnapping operation.

All together, five Palestinians were killed that day. The other three were young shepherds killed in another area, two 15 years old and one 14, who seem to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gaza.

None of this was reported in most of America’s news media, and so the American public never learned about a mother bleeding to death in front of her children, or young shepherds being blown to pieces. Apparently, it just wasn’t newsworthy.

A Case Study of “Good” News Coverage

The Washington Post at least mentioned these deaths, so perhaps those who care about journalistic standards should laud the Post for its coverage.

And yet, the Post in its short report got so much so wrong.

In addition to misreporting Itemad’s cause of death and omitting critical facts, the Post’s story portrayed the entire context incorrectly, telling readers that these five deaths had broken a period of “relative calm.”

The fact is that while it was true that in the previous six months not a single Israeli child had been killed by Palestinians, during this period Israelis had killed 75 Palestinian young people, including an 8-month-old and several three-year-olds.

I phoned the Post and spoke to a foreign editor about the need to run a correction, providing information on Itemad’s murder. The editor said that she would pass this on to their correspondent (who is based in Israel), but explained that it was “impossible for him to go to Gaza.” When I disagreed, she amended the “impossible” to “very difficult.” She neglected to mention that the Post has access to stringers in Gaza available to check out any incident the editors deem important.

Next, I wrote a letter to the paper containing the above information. Happily, the Post letters department apparently checked it out and decided it was a good letter. They sent an email informing me that they were considering my letter for publication and needed to confirm that I was the one who had written it, and that I had not sent the information elsewhere.

I replied in the affirmative, we exchanged a few more messages, and everything appeared on target. Normally, when publications contact you in this way, your letter is published shortly thereafter. I waited in anticipation. And waited.

It is now almost two weeks after their report, and I have just been informed that the paper has decided not to print my letter. The Post has apparently determined that there is no need to run a correction.

I think I understand.

Although the Washington Post’s statement of principles proclaims, “This newspaper is pledged to minimize the number of errors we make and to correct those that occur… Accuracy is our goal; candor is our defense,” the American Society of Newspaper Editors clarifies these ethical requirements: corrections need only be printed when the error of commission or omission is “significant.”

And, after all, these were only Palestinians, and it was just another mother dead.


Alison Weir is the founder and executive director of If Americans Knew. She is the author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel


Another Palestinian mother has just been killed. For a list of Palestinian and Israeli women killed see this Timeline.

October 15, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Naomi Klein’s Patriarchal Christian Nation

By Eve Mykytyn | October 13, 2018

Naomi Klein’s piece “Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Rule of Pampered Princelings,” is a thoughtful consideration of how the children of the moneyed classes propagate the ‘self made’ myth in which individual effort is lionized. In this fiction, government ‘interference’ is the enemy, and, as Klein points out, those with a lifetime of safety deride the frail safety net society allows to others. She notes that although these ‘princelings’ may include the less privileged in their rhetoric, they propagate social policies of low taxes and fewer regulations that primarily benefit the very rich.

Klein asks, “But what must it take to pour large parts of a fortune that came to you by accident of birth into a relentless campaign of further affirmative action for the rich?” Klein’s answer is that the rich attribute their riches to what Trump has called, ‘good genes,’ the corollary of which is that those without must have ‘bad genes’ and deserve their fate as ‘losers.’

To Klein, this is the basis of Trump’s bargain: native born whites, although they lack Trump’s wealth, are invited to celebrate “their own, albeit more modest, birthright entitlements as white, middle-class Americans,” and their entitlements as white citizens of a “Christian patriarchal nation.” This is where my disagreements with Klein begin.

Some of Trump’s supporters may well like to identify with (or would like to possess) Trump’s wealth. But whether or not the US is a ‘Christian patriarchal nation,’ I don’t see the evidence that Trump’s support comes from people who would like to see it as such.

First, it is unfair to put all of Trump’s supporters in one barrel. Trump won a majority of votes from all white Americans of every education level. Interestingly, while analysis of votes is broken down by race, education and income, there was no category that includes both race and income. Or to the point, we have little direct data on how whites who enjoy little of the vestiges of ‘white privilege’ voted. An analysis in Medium divides the US by region and finds Trump’s strongest support in the US’s poorest and perhaps whitest regions, Appalachia and southern Louisiana, which he won by 22% and 25% respectively. So the data we do have does not support Klein’s assertion that Trump’s voters support him to protect their white privilege; in fact, it seems that his strongest support comes from whites who have few, if any, privileges.

A glance at any Trump rally shows large numbers of women, does Ms Klein believe all these women want a patriarchy? And, according to Money magazine, women inherit 70% of the assets passed down in the United States and own more then 50% of investable assets. Not much of a patriarchy.

Further, the claim of Trump’s voters as holding on to a Christian nation seems purely speculative. While Jews voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, Orthodox Jews supported Trump by a margin of 29%. The Orthodox would seem to have little interest in preserving the United States as a Christian Nation.

If, as Klein claims, the United States has always been the province and protector of ‘propertied white men,’ wealth is no longer solely in the hands of men or of Christians.

The exclusive classes contain a large number of self-identified Jews. A Jewish newsletter counted 139 of the Forbes top 400 (richest) as Jewish. Despite the so called dog whistling (apparently heard primarily by Jews who found anti Semitic content in Trump lambasting the non Jewish Koch brothers) Trump as president has not been anti Semitic. Far from it. Trump has duly rewarded his Jewish benefactors, the Mercers and Sheldon Adelson, and has sicced his Zionist son in law on the Middle East. His appointments have contained so many of the mostly Jewish Goldman Sachs once and future anointed that Goldman’s chair, Lloyd Blankfein stated that having so many Goldman people in the Trump administration made him “a little apprehensive about it because for fear of how it might look.”

Klein’s complaint that Trump has posited himself falsely as a self made man is legitimate. His response that the New York Times report on the source of his wealth as being largely his family’s money was that the report was ‘boring.’ This is hardly a repudiation. But the wealth of Trump and other scions of the very wealthy will not enure to the non college educated whites who largely supported Trump.

If Klein’s goal is a change in the administration, her goal might be better served by finding a way to appeal to Trump’s voters rather than smearing them with condescending and unproven shibboleths.

October 13, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Bellingcat outed by the Independent

By Philip Roddis | Steel City Scribe | October 11, 2018

The West’s war on Syria, and rapidly heating cold war on Russia, have involved extensive use of smear. Of unsubstantiated or even disproved allegations repeated in our not-so free media until even those who rightly or wrongly – usually wrongly – deem themselves critical thinkers assume, no-smoke-without-fire  fashion, there must be truth to them. This conclusion is seldom drawn by the conscious mind. That’s not how propaganda works: witness on the one hand that near universal belief that ‘adverts don’t sway me in the slightest’; on the other those misguided capitalists who, oblivious to our immunity to it, continue to throw vast sums at that propaganda form we call commercial advertising.

Putin – my, how we feted his predecessor, the drunken Yeltsin, as he oversaw Russia’s descent to basket case status while Wall Street drooled over the spoils! – and Assad feature hardly less frequently on our screens and front pages than do ads for new cars and sofas.

The stakes are higher, though, which explains two aspects of their demonisation not shared by commercials.

One is the cynicism with which charities have allowed themselves to be used. In most cases this has involved the naivety or worse of big names, either unaware of the threat to ‘the brand’, else willing to risk it for short term gain. See in this respect Professor Tim Hayward on an Amnesty International throwing – I’m being kind here – caution to the wind on Syria. But in at least one case ‘the brand’ was corrupt at birth. I mean the White Helmets: brainchild of Brit mercenary James Le Mesurier, recipient of well over $120 million in funding from the USA and other states overtly seeking Assad’s removal, and – to a degree of certainty very much higher than that of Damascus having used sarin gas on its own people – in cahoots with Islamist terrorism.

The other, related, is the equal cynicism – or, at a stretch, starry eyed credulity – with which our media inflate the value of ‘information’ from risible sources. One such is the grandiosely titled Syrian Observatory on Human Rights, routinely quoted by BBC, Guardian and even – to their undying shame – ‘far left’ media in reporting alleged abuses by the Syrian authorities, without informing us that, to quote from the post just linked:

SOHR is the one man band of Rami Abdul Rahman, a disgruntled Syrian who lives in Coventry and hasn’t set foot in Syria since 2003. His methods are opaque to say the least but seem to rely on what I’ll call ‘cascade inquiry’, whereby he phones a handful of pals inside Syria. They in turn phone their pals, who phone theirs. But who are these pals? Rumours abound that Rahman is affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, rivals to more recent Saudi backed Wahabbi groups led by Al Qaeda and ISIS, but nevertheless willing to work with Daesh to end Syria’s secularism and impose theocratic Sunni rule on Shia, Christian, Druze and Alawi alike. (Nor is there any evidence of widespread Muslim Brotherhood support from Syrian Sunnis, most of whom see Islam and Islamism as poles apart and value their secularist, authoritarian but religiously tolerant state.)

Then there’s Bellingcat, the organisation founded by one Eliot Higgins: Media Studies drop-out and author of – I feel a professional slight here, having taught digital arts at Sheffield University – digitally altered images that serve NATO objectives in an ongoing Russia demonisation which endangers us all.

(Worse by far of course is the fact his amateurish images – these for instance, offered as proof that Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was downed in July 2014 by Russian missiles – would have earned him a fail in my Photoshop class.)

Fortunately I need spend few words on Bellingcat/Higgins. That take-down has already been done, most recently in Catte’s excellent OffGuardian piece of two days ago. What I have not seen till now though is any questioning of Bellingcat’s credentials in mainstream media. So let me hand you over, without further ado and with hearty if surprised approval, to Mary Dejevsky: not known as a Kremlin stooge or Putin troll. Yet here she is, in today’s Independent, asking in all sincerity and with admirable bluntness just WTF is Bellingcat?

Who knows, such questions might in their own quiet way help avert WW3. We can but hope.

October 11, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Britain is More of a Fake State than Anything Else

By Grete Mautner – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2018

Blatant lies have been a feature of the British political system for a long while. Whitehall’s tried and tested ways of manipulating the general public are used to distract attention from crucial topics. But what’s even more curious is that inside the Whitehall bunkers where they come up with their own definitions for such manipulations, there is even a term for this kind of propaganda. They call it a ‘term of art’.

That would hardly be a surprise if one is to recall that modern British oligarchies have grown out of yesterday’s slave owners and high seas pirates, for whom deception was nothing but a tool of their trade. We must not forget that millions of people died in the wars unleashed by the United Kingdom. One can recall that only a handful of native Tasmanians escaped being slaughtered by the English in the 19th century. In less that two decades of British military presence in Bengal, the population of the region had decreased by almost 20 million people – which constitutes more than a half of the indigenous population of the region. The absolute majority of wars Anglo-Saxons unleashed over the course of the last two centuries began with a provocation and then were sold to the UK population together with an extensive amount of military hysteria in the media.

And it doesn’t seem that things have changed much in the ways that London operates on the international stage, as it carries on voicing its dubious accusations against Moscow for its alleged involvement in the Salisbury incident. Previously, it would try to prevent British sports fans from traveling to Russia to attend FIFA World Cup 2018 by claiming that it was a terrible and dangerous place to visit. For sure, those accusations were proven wrong by those fans who dared to make a trip but no apologies was offered to Russia by London.

But why bother with presenting facts before voicing any actual accusations, if the Telegraph could as well announce that the chief executive of BP was poisoned in a plot believed to have been orchestrated by the Russian security services.

To provide this publication with some air of credibility, the media would present “revelations” made by the former employee of BP Illya Zaslavsky, who announced that Russian elites wanted to remove Bob Dudley from the position of group chief executive of BP by “slow poisoning” him with foods. The only problem with Zaslavsky’s claims is that Dudley himself is perfectly healthy and he keeps working in close cooperation with Russia. As a matter of fact, after visiting Moscow last February, Dudley described his contacts with Russia’s Rosneft as exceptional, in spite of the aggravation of geopolitical tensions in the world.

In its bid to provide British citizens with even more fake information, the Guardian would in turn run an article full of allegations that Moscow was somehow discussing with representatives of Julian Assange its assistance in his escape plan. However, these claims haven’t been confirmed by anyone just as well.

However, British media sources are not the only ones who are engaged in disinformation campaigns, as British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt has recently told the Sky News that he he had a “tough” discussion with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the margins of a United Nations summit in New York. According to Hunt, he hinted to Lavrov that there’s a high chance of a direct military confrontation between Russia and the UK, while adding that Moscow would pay a high diplomatic price for its alleged wrongdoings. The only problem with those claims is that there was no direct meeting between Lavrov and Hunt during the recent UN Summit in New York, which was officially confirmed by the Russian foreign ministry.

But should we be surprised by the obsession of British elites with all things fake, if The Queen Elizabeth II has a fake hand waving machine for when her arm gets tired at royal engagements. So it must be of little surprise to anyone that to support its lies the British government employs thousands of people directly in propaganda and related activities to distort and deceive.

But, frankly, if you’re going to start wars using fake pretexts you could as well fight it with fake weapons. Thus, the British-made ADE 651 tool, that London urges others to use to scan personal belongings of jihadists must be allegedly helping explosives specialists to detect all sorts of explosives and precious metals from a fairly long distance using a telescopic antenna. However, it’s unlikely that the actual device has any electronic boards inside it – at the very best, its an imitation of a scanner. But this did not prevent Britain from pushing this product on the international market at a price tag of 60 thousand dollars a pop. The government of Iraq, in particular, has acquired more than 1,500 units of ADE 651 for the needs of its federal police and the military, since those bodies are engaged in heavy counter-terrorist activities at all times. ADE 651 is the brainchild of the British company ATSC, and its inventor James McCormick is currently serving ten years in prison. To make the matters worse, militants of various terrorist organizations are aware of the properties of this British know-how and keep mocking Iraqi law enforcement agencies for the acquisition of this device.

As it’s been recently reported by a professor of sociology at the University of Bath and ESRC, David Miller, the UK office for national statistics, for 2017, show that the number of people who work in “communication” in central government departments, executive agencies and non departmental public bodies, totals 3,450. It is clear that these figures are an underestimate for a variety of reasons. For example the 490 employed in the ministry of defence seems not to cover the media people in the armed services themselves. In 2007, for example, the total ministry of defence complement was reported as as over 1,000, but this “excludes many military personnel involved in communications work”.

Also not in the figures – as the ONS has confirmed – are the unknown numbers that work for the intelligence agencies. Both MI5 and MI6 most likely have sizable staff groups working on propaganda, whether ‘communication’ is in their formal job title or not. The contemporary period is indeed one in which many more people than in the previous two decades are more confident about existing outside the ‘filter bubble’ conjured up by the government, the spooks and the mainstream media.

Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany.

October 11, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment