Magic Novichok
By Craig Murray | October 23, 2020
The security services put an extraordinary amount of media priming effort into explaining why the alleged novichok attack on the Skripals had a delayed effect of several hours, and then failed to kill them. Excuses included that it was a cold day which slowed their metabolisms, that the chemical took a long time to penetrate their skins, that the gel containing the novichok inhibited its operation, that it was a deliberately non-fatal dose, that rain had diluted the novichok on the doorknob, that the Skripals were protected by gloves and possibly only came into contact in taking the gloves off, or that nerve agents are not very deadly and easily treated.
You can take your pick as to which of those convincingly explains why the Skripals apparently swanned round Salisbury for four hours after coming into contact with the novichok coated doorknob, well enough to both drink in a pub and eat a good Italian lunch, before both being instantaneously struck down and disabled at precisely the same time so neither could call for help, despite being different sexes, ages and weights. Just as the chief nurse of the British army happened to walk past.
So now let us fast forward to Alexei Navalny. Traces of “novichok” were allegedly found on a water bottle in his hotel room in Tomsk. That appears to eliminate the cold and the gloves. It also makes it possible he ingested some of the “novichok”. I can find no suggestion anywhere it was contained in a gel. So why was this deadly substance not deadly?
There seems no plain allegation of where Navalny came into contact with the “novichok”. Assuming he spent the night in his hotel room, then the very latest he can have come into contact with the deadly nerve agent would be shortly before he left the room, assuming he then subsequently touched the bottle before leaving. This is true whether the bottle was the source or he just touched it with novichok on his hands. After poisoning with this very deadly nerve agent – which Germany claims is “harder” than other examples, he then checked out of the hotel, went to the airport, checked in for his flight, had a cup of tea and boarded the flight, all before being taken ill. This after contact with a chemical weapon allegedly deadlier than this:
Which of course is aside from all the questions as to why the Russians would use again the poison that was ineffective against the Skripals, and why exactly the FSB would not have swept and cleaned up the hotel room after he had left. All that is even before we get to some of the questions I had already asked:
Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.
Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In a Russian state hospital.
Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered. And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok
There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.
The eagerness of the Western political establishment to accept and amplify nonsensical Russophobia is very worrying. Fear is a powerful political tool, politicians need an enemy, and still more does the military-industrial complex that so successfully siphons off state money. Many fat livings depend on the notion that Russia poses a serious threat to us. The nonsense people are prepared to believe to maintain that fiction give a most unpleasant glimpse into the human psyche.
Iran Seeks to Confuse the United States?
Another story that is more fiction than fact
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Credit: The Hill/ YouTube
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | October 23, 2020
Those who have been waiting for the elusive October Surprise that will upset the apple cart on election day are admittedly running out of time. The media’s unwillingness to even consider that the antics of Hunter Biden just might constitute an embarrassment of major proportions or even something worse has done much to kill that story. And the old tried and true expedient of starting a little war somewhere is also proving to be a false hope as no one appears ready to provoke the righteously wrathful Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by ponying up a casus belli. Maybe there is still time for a false flag operation, but even that would require more prior planning than the White House appears capable of.
There is, however, one area that might just be exploitable to create a crisis, though it much depends on whether a tired public is willing to go one more round over the issue of “foreign election interference.” And yes, the Russians are presumed to be involved, on this occasion, as they always are, joined by the ever-vengeful Iranians.
On Wednesday Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe held a news conference at which he laid out details of the most recent dastardly plot against American democracy. He described how Iran and Russia both obtained American voter registration data, apparently through publicly accessible databases and through purchases of email lists. Though no actual votes have been altered, they are using that information “to influence the presidential election as it enters its final two weeks.” Ratcliffe elaborated how “This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine… confidence in American democracy.”
Ratcliffe focused mostly on Iran, saying that it had been identified as the source of what he described as a claimed 1,500 “spoofed emails” routed through Estonia that “seek to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump.” Iran was also blamed for other material, to include a video encouraging the casting of illegal ballots both domestically and overseas. Additional intelligence suggests that Iran is planning to take more steps to influence the election in the coming days, though what those measures could possibly be was not revealed.
Other government sources elaborated, indicating that Iranian intelligence has been credited with the sending of the email messages going out to Democratic voters in four states, including hotly disputed Pennsylvania and Florida. The emails falsely claimed to be from the alleged far-right group Proud Boys which has been much in the news. Their message was that “we will come after you” if the recipients fail to vote for Donald Trump.
It doesn’t take much to realize that threatening messages relating to voting for Trump allegedly coming from a source described as “racist” would undoubtedly motivate most registered Democratic voters to do the opposite, but that seems to have escaped the analysts of the Directorate of National Intelligence. And one must also ask why Tehran would want the re-election of a president who has been unremittingly hostile, including imposing crippling sanctions, withdrawing from a beneficial nuclear agreement, and assassinating a leading Revolutionary Guards general. Even U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer appears to have figured that one out, saying “It was clear to me that the intent of Iran in this case and Russia in many more cases is to basically undermine confidence in our elections. This action I do not believe was aimed… at discrediting President Trump.”
The anti-Trump New York Times has, of course, another, more sinister interpretation, suggesting that “… it may also play into President Trump’s hands. For weeks, he has argued, without evidence, that the vote on Nov. 3 will be ‘rigged,’ that mail-in ballots will lead to widespread fraud and that the only way he can be defeated is if his opponents cheat. Now, on the eve of the final debate, he has evidence of foreign influence campaigns designed to hurt his re-election chances, even if they did not affect the voting infrastructure.”
The Times also notes a broader conspiracy by the dreadful Persians, explaining how “Iran has tinkered at the edges of American election interference since 2012, but always as a minor actor. Last year, it stepped up its game, private cybersecurity firms have warned. They have caught Iranian operatives occasionally impersonating politicians and journalists around the world, often to spread narratives that are aimed at denigrating Israel or Saudi Arabia, its two major adversaries in the Middle East.” Again, however, the article provides no explanation of what Iran could possibly hope to gain from the minimal “tinkering” it might be able to engage in an American election in which billions of dollars will be spent by Democrats and Republicans who are viciously attacking each other without any outside help.
Ratcliffe had less to say about Russia but U.S. media coverage of the story included a referral to a recent account of how the U.S. military’s Cyber Command helped take down a network developed by Russian hackers called TrickBot that had been used in ransomware attacks directed against companies as well as cities and towns across the United States. It also reported how “In recent days, another Russian hacking group called Energetic Bear, often linked to the F.S.B. — one of the successors to the Soviet Union’s K.G.B. — appears to have focused its attention on gaining access to state and local government networks. That has caught the attention of federal investigators because, until now, the group had largely targeted energy firms, including public utilities.”
There was, however, no evidence that either hacking group was being directed against voter systems, so Russia’s inclusion in the front-page Times story headlined “Iran and Russia Seek to Influence Election in Final Days, U.S. Officials Warn” has to be considered questionable editorial judgment. Perhaps scaremongering would be a better description. In any event, the story itself is much ado about nothing. Iran’s sending out 1,500 emails if that actually occurred, would have zero impact. Likewise, the claimed existence of alleged Russian hacking groups that have done nothing directed against voters or balloting systems with only a few days left until the election would appear to be an electoral tactic rather than exposure of any genuine threat. One might even describe it as a bit of deliberate disinformation.
Weapons of Mass Distraction
By Eric Striker • National Justice • October 22, 2020
The most remarkable thing about the Iraq war debacle isn’t the trillions of dollars wasted or hundreds of thousands of innocent people and US servicemen killed, but the fact that all of the journalists who promoted the lie to the American people were never held to account.
During the 2000s, a bipartisan cabal of overwhelmingly Jewish media personalities coordinated with American intelligence services to concoct the lie that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction to use against the United States.
The role of neoconservatives in this endeavor, primarily as Bush administration officials coordinating the war, is well known. What has been forgotten is the integral role “liberal” publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and others played in selling the WMD hoax.
The Times’ Judith Miller is credited with being one of the first to plant unsubstantiated WMD tales in popular consciousness, but other Jews — many of them also seen as unambiguously “liberal” — also played an active role in lying to drum up support for Bush’s war for Israel: Ezra Klein (currently of Vox ), Jeffrey Goldberg (now editor of The Atlantic), and Jonathan Chait (star columnist at the New Yorker). That’s just a shortlist.
Amazingly, every one of these individuals has only grown in prestige and influence in the press in the aftermath. Even Iraq war sin chicken Judith Miller remained unapologetic in her 2015 rehabilitation tours. She has since 2016 been hired by conservative outlets like Fox News and City Journal, now dedicating her columns to promoting foreign election meddling claims.
The gravest problem now with our Jewish controlled media is that all of the Iraq war disinformation agents, not just Miller, are now amongst the loudest amplifiers of the US intelligence community’s latest baseless hysterics alleging that every act of low-level trolling, dissenting political opinion, or news report (including initially the Hunter Biden story) that they find inconvenient is an inorganic product of Russian, Chinese or Iranian “election meddling” or “disinformation.”
To what ends? To lower public confidence in liberal institutions? To cause division and polarization? To make people afraid to vote and even more afraid of the outcome? The intelligence community’s Chicken Littles are doing this on a much wider scale than any supposed foreign agent.
Earlier today, the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe held an “important” national security conference besides American NKVD leader Christopher Wray claiming that crudely written emails sent by someone impersonating the pro-Trump group, Proud Boys, telling registered Democrats in Florida not to vote was in fact an act of “election interference” by Iran. Intelligence operatives at the announcement also mentioned that Russia was conspiring with them by harvesting US political registrations for ill-intended reasons. No evidence was provided for either allegation.
The claim is ridiculous because, first of all, Florida political registrations are publicly available and easily found online. Anyone can obtain them without engaging in cyber crime or hacking.
Secondly, unflinching hostility towards Iran and over the top loyalty to Israel first is an issue Joe Biden and Donald Trump both enthusiastically agree on.
Trump and Biden are equally bad for Iran in distinct ways. Biden supports escalating Washington’s military presence in Syria and placing pressure on Iraq to cut ties with Iran.
Trump on the other hand has for the last few years attempted to starve the Iranian people into submission with “maximum pressure” sanctions, but this has been paired with military retreats in geostrategic zones of the Middle East that Israel believes are important to maintain a foothold in.
The Iranians and Russians don’t have a dog in America’s 2020 election fight between Oreo and Hydrox. Seeing how only 67% of Democrats are excited to vote for Joe Biden, it looks like Biden’s uninspired and mailed-in candidacy is the foremost act of interference in his campaign.
Meanwhile, Iran has responded with fury typical of a falsely accused man. The nation’s diplomats have lodged an official complaint at the United Nations demanding the FBI and DNI stop making frivolous accusations of trying to intimidate voters in America. President Hassan Rouhani’s counter is that both candidates — who are just spokesmen for Washington’s permanent bureaucracy — are enemies of the Iranian nation.
Today’s press conference by Wray and Ratcliffe was more akin to the despots in 1984 switching back and forth between blaming Eurasia (Russia) and Eastasia (China and Iran) during Hate Week. It’s a moronic distraction from their moronic failures, corruption and the artificially induced climate of fear they have created in our homeland.
It’s an attempt to shoehorn into tonight’s debate the non-issues of “election interference” and “disinformation” that most of the American public, which is suffering from problems like hunger and unemployment, has tuned out.
From weapons of mass destruction to weapons of mass distraction, both personify the Jewish post-truth order.
Tehran Summons Swiss Envoy over US’ Anti-Iran Claims
Al-Manar | October 22, 2020
Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned Swiss Ambassador to Tehran, representing US Interest Section in Iran, over remarks of US officials against Iran.
Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said that Islamic Republic of Iran advises the United States to “refrain from useless projections,” as quoted by Mehr news agency.
“Swiss envoy to Iran was summoned by Assistant and Director General of Iranian Foreign Ministry for American Affairs on Thursday following some baseless allegations raised by US officials about interference of other countries in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election in the United States,” the spokesman said.
While rejecting the repeated claims and “false, clumsy and fraudulent reports of the US officials,” Khatibzadeh emphasized once that it does not matter for Tehran which of the two current candidates will run for the White House.
“The US regime and its intelligence and security services, which have a long history of interfering and creating chaos in the elections of other countries, make baseless claims on the eve of the US elections to advance their undemocratic project and predefined scenario with some projections,” he said.
“It is not far-fetched that the designers of such childish scenarios seek to divert public attention and suspicious provocations in the run-up to the elections.”
Khatibzadeh, meanwhile, advised the United States to refrain from “useless projections, baseless accusations and suspicious scenarios, and try to act like a normal country in the field of international relations and in relation to other countries.”
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe claimed late Wednesday that voter registration information had been obtained by Iran and Russia in an attempt to undermine confidence in the 2020 election.
Ratcliffe claimed Iran sought to sow unrest in the US in an attempt to damage the candidacy of President Donald Trump.
Western Propaganda Over Skripal and Navalny Show Remarkable Similarities
By James ONeill – New Eastern Outlook – 20.10.2020
There was once a notion that enjoyed wide acceptance throughout the world, especially in those countries that shared a common heritage with the United Kingdom, that was known as “British justice”. It was probably always a flawed notion, but such was the power of British colonialism that it enjoyed a reputation nonetheless. Recent history however has put a substantial dent in the mythology. Two recent examples illustrate the point.
The first was the case involving the father and daughter duo of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Sergei as is well known was a traitor to his native Russia. He was caught, tried and imprisoned. After several years in jail serving his sentence, he was the subject of a prisoner swap with Russian spies held in British prisons. He was released and immediately travelled to England where he settled in the town of Salisbury.
The house he occupied was owned by the British government. It was constantly monitored with a security camera. Sergei was visited by his daughter Yulia, a resident of Moscow, where she also had a fiancé, as well as friends and relatives.
On a visit to her father they left his house and visited her mother’s grave. They then went into Salisbury city centre and had a meal. This was followed by a drink at a nearby pub. They then went to a local park where they fed the ducks (along with some children). They both then suddenly took ill whilst sitting on a park bench. They were attended to by a woman and her daughter. The woman just happened to be the chief nurse of the British Army, with the rank of Colonel. No plausible explanation has ever been given for their just happening to be in the park at that time.
Sergei and Yulia were rushed to hospital in an unconscious state where they remained for some time. They recovered, but apart from a brief carefully staged television statement, neither has been seen or heard of again.
The Russian Embassy in London has made repeated requests to speak with Yulia, but this has been refused. What the western media never point out is that this refusal of consular access is a gross breach of international law. Where the Skripals are now, or even if they are still alive, is simply unknown.
The British government and British media were quick to blame Russia for what allegedly happened to the Skripals. The complete absence of any evidence to support this claim was apparently not a barrier. Neither has the growth in continuing violations of international law been deemed a suitable topic of discussion in the British mainstream media.
The public were subjected to the charade of chemical cleansing of the Skripal house, despite the attending police officers wearing no protective equipment and the domestic cat being totally unaffected. It was a complete charade, ably assisted by a non-sceptical media who were content to publish or broadcast the Government’s fabrications and turn a blind eye to the glaring absence of anything approaching actual evidence of any Russian complicity in wrongdoing.
The counter-productive effects of Russia actually damaging or killing Skripal were ignored. This charade, with its manifest lies, duplicity and multiple improbabilities has been brought vividly to mind by the latest alleged Russian malpractice of what happened to the dissident politician Alexi Navalny.
The parallels are eerie, right down to the alleged role of “Novichok” in causing Mr Navalny’s illness. We were initially told that Navalny was poisoned with a cup of tea he drank before boarding his plane. Even the perpetrators of this fiction eventually realised its inherent improbability and abandoned it.
Instead, we are not told, the “Novichok” was in water bottles that Navalny left behind in his hotel room. Very conveniently, ours after being vacated, the hotel room had not been serviced, allowing Navalny’s supporters to recover the allegedly infected bottles of water. These bottles were then sent to Germany but have never been produced for independent analysis.
Navalny was treated in a Russian hospital before being transferred to Germany. The Russian doctors performed all the usual analyses of Navalny’s blood, but did not detect the presence of Novichok. This is allegedly suddenly discovered by the German doctors who, despite repeated requests, have failed to share the evidence with their Russian counterparts.
Instead, the Germans claimed to have sent the evidence to the OPCW who, when asked for the evidence by the Russians, were referred back to Germany. We are expected to take this farcical performance with an unquestioning and straight face.
Navalny duly recovers and declares that he wants to return to Russia. Perhaps he hopes that all this publicity will help him improve upon the less than 2% of the vote he received when he last stood for elective office. Once again, the much feared and lethal capacity of Novichok had failed!
What has emerged however, are hints as to the real motivation behind whatever caused Navalny’s illness. The Americans, who have long bitterly opposed Nord Stream 2 reiterated their demand that the contract for the supply of Russian gas to Germany be cancelled. (at huge compensation costs) They just happened to have an alternative available, albeit at 40% higher cost to the German public, and with the additional benefit of increasing German reliance upon the United States. German opinion polls strongly suggest that the German – United States alliance is rapidly losing its favour with the German public.
At the time of writing, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is holding firm on the original contract with the Russians, but the pressure to cancel Nord Stream 2 may prove irresistible.
While seemingly unrelated at first glance, the Skripal and Navalny incidents show some remarkable parallels. Both are manifestly fake incidents. Both have been used by the respective governments, the United Kingdom and Germany, to challenge the reputation and reliability of the Russian government. Both have been sought to be capitalised upon by forces opposed to any sign of rapprochement and goodwill shown to Russia, whether it is an international football tournament (the last World Cup finals) or the provision of vital and cheaper sources of energy to Europe.
From the American point of view there are several pluses. It inhibits the increasing restlessness of the German public to still being occupied and dictated to by the Americans 75 years after World War II ended. It provides an excuse to maintain a US military presence in countries close to Russia to counter the Russian “threat”, a fictional concept that the Americans never tire of trotting out.
It also provides a perfect opportunity for the United States gas industry to make huge profits at a time when the world’s energy structures are undergoing major realignments, not least because of the increasingly economic and political importance of the growth of China’s influence in the world.
From the United States point of view, Navalny is a win-win situation. The industry profits; their presence in Europe is reinforced; and damage is done to Russia’s reputation as well as its economy.
Just like the unfortunate Mr Skripal, Mr Navalny has been used and abused as a puppet in a much wider geopolitical game. That it is the ordinary people of Russia and Germany who suffer is the least concern of the American puppet masters for whom the retention of their fading credibility is more important than the safety of the world and its citizens.
James O’Neill is an Australian-based former Barrister at Law.
Feds Confirm Biden Emails Are “Authentic”; ’50 Former Intel Officials’ Wrong On Russian Disinfo
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/20/2020
In yet another death blow to Adam Schiff and the ’50 former senior intelligence officers’ “Russia, Russia, Russia” claims, the FBI and DOJ have told a Fox News producer that they do not believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents are part of a Russian disinformation campaign, confirming that the ‘current’ intelligence community agrees with DNI Ratcliffe’s comments yesterday.
Additionally, a Federal Law Enforcement Official also confirmed to Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that the emails are “authentic”.
All of which leaves on big gaping unanswered question (that we all know the answer to)…
We look forward to the reporting from other mainstream media news agencies now that federal law enforcement has confirmed this is not a ‘hoax’ and we assume that the NYPost will once again be allowed to tweet since this is now as ‘factual’ as anything thrown at Trump for the last five years.
* * *
Hours before Politico reported the existence of a letter signed by ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ who say the Hunter Biden laptop scandal “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” – providing “no new evidence,” while they remain “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” Tucker Carlson obliterated their (literal) conspiracy theory.
According to the Fox News host, he’s seen ‘nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter’s laptop,‘ adding “No one but Hunter could’ve known about or replicated this information.”
“This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating.”
Watch:
Meanwhile, the Delaware computer repair shop owner who believes Hunter dropped off three MacBook Pros for data recovery has a signed work order bearing Hunter’s signature. When compared to the signature on a document in his paternity suit, while one looks more formal than the other, they are a match.
Going back to the ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ and their latest Russia fixation, one has to wonder – do they think Putin was able to compromise Biden’s former business associate, Bevan Cooney, who gave investigative journalist Peter Schweizer his gmail password – revealing that Hunter and his partners were engaged in an influence-peddling operation for rich Chinese who wanted access to the Obama administration?
Did Putin further hack Joe Biden in 2011 to make him take a meeting with a Chinese delegation with ties to the CCP – arranged by Hunter’s group, two years after they secured a massive investment of Chinese money?
The implications boggle the mind.
Here’s the clarifying sentences from the ’50 former senior intelligence officials’ that exposes the utter farce of it all:
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
It would appear these former intel officials are not aware of the current intel official views, confirmed by DNI Ratcliffe yesterday that:
“Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
And then there’s the fact that no one from the Biden campaign has yet to deny any of the ‘facts’ in the emails.
Perhaps the real question is; what does Chuck Schumer know about this?
Russian Embassy Says Hacking Accusations Coming From US Have ‘Nothing to Do With Reality’
Sputnik – 20.10.2020
WASHINGTON – The Russian Embassy in Washington has refuted US claims of alleged Russian involvement in a major cyber attack targeting officials and various large-scale events, with an embassy representative telling Sputnik that Russia has no intention to engage in destabilizing operations.
On Monday, the US charged six alleged Russian military intelligence officers with a major cyber attack, claiming that they targeted large-scale events, such as elections in France, Ukraine’s power grid and American medical facilities.
“It is quite obvious that such information has nothing to do with reality and is aimed only at stirring up Russophobic sentiments in the American society, at launching a ‘witch hunt’ and spy mania. All this has been a distinctive feature of Washington’s political life for several years now. The US authorities are consistently destroying the once pragmatic Russian-American relations and artificially imposing a toxic perception of Russia and everything connected with it on their population,” a Russian embassy representative told Sputnik.
The representative of the embassy in Washington added that “Russia does not and has not had any intention of engaging in any kind of destabilizing operations around the world. This is not in line with our foreign policy, national interests, as well as our understanding of how relations between states are built. Russia respects the sovereignty of other countries and does not interfere in their affairs.”
The Russian embassy in Canada has also dismissed all allegations concerning Russia’s alleged cyber activity, calling them “absurd and baseless.”
Global Affairs Canada and the Communications Security Establishment issued a statement on Monday saying that “Canada is concerned over reports of a series of global malicious cyber activities, as detailed in today’s statements by the United States and the United Kingdom.” According to the release, the activities “are examples of the willingness of Russian military intelligence, GRU, to target critical infrastructure and international organizations.”
The Russian embassy in Canada said on Twitter on Monday that Ottawa was damaging its relations with Moscow by issuing such groundless statements.
“Another absurd and baseless Canada allegations on Russian ‘malicious cyber activity’ copycat US-UK intelligence disinformation as part of psychological war against Russia. Ottawa is further damaging Canadian-Russian relations following its Russophobic narrative,” the embassy said.
According to the indictment, unveiled on Monday, six alleged Russian military intelligence officers have used “the world’s most destructive malware to date,” including NotPetya, which wreaked havoc globally and caused nearly $1 billion in losses to victims identified during the probe.
US authorities alleged that in December of 2015 and 2016, the conspirators launched destructive malware attacks against the electric power grid in Ukraine. In the US, hospitals in Pennsylvania were allegedly attacked with malware. US authorities claimed that the suspects also tried to undermine the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, and attempted to meddle in elections in France, as well as tried to compromise the Georgian parliament network and a major media company in the post-Soviet Republic. The group also allegedly conducted “spearphishing campaigns” against investigations by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Kingdom’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory into the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, according to the indictment.
A source at the Russian Foreign Ministry told Sputnik on Monday that the accusations are groundless, aim to create anti-Russian sentiments, and are addressed to the internal audience within the context of the upcoming presidential election in the United States.
DNI says ‘No Evidence’ of Russian interference in Hunter Biden scandal, accuses Schiff of ‘politicizing intelligence’
RT | October 19, 2020
US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has refuted claims that alleged emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China when his father was VP are part of a Russian election interference effort.
“Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe said during a Monday interview on Fox Business. “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that,” he added.
The director’s comments were a direct rebuttal of Congressman Adam Schiff, who claimed on Saturday, without any evidence, that the story about the Democratic presidential candidate’s son was coming “from the Kremlin.”
Ratcliffe addressed Schiff’s words directly, saying, “It’s funny that some of the people who complain the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing the intelligence.”
The official went on to say that while he couldn’t reveal any details of the ongoing investigation, he was free to clarify that it “doesn’t center around Russian disinformation.”
The speculation on foreign involvement began last Wednesday just as the New York Post published a series of alleged leaked emails, implying that Biden Jr. might have involved his then-vice president father in personal business dealings abroad.
Twitter, Biden and the New York Post – Social Media Censorship Kicks up a Gear
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 15, 2020
Yesterday, the New York Post published several articles claiming to show evidence of corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The charges are varied but not really surprising. One article claims Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian energy magnate who asked the family to use their influence to shut down an investigation into his company.
Another story suggests Hunter Biden used his family name to secure a high-paid job and stock interests in a Chinese company.
The NYP evidence these claims with emails and documents allegedly retrieved from a laptop left at a computer repair store in Delaware. The owner of the store alerted the FBI to the computer’s existence when no one came forward to pay for the repairs and he could not contact the owner.
According to the NYP, both the hard drive and laptop were then seized by the FBI. They have a copy of the grand jury subpoena, which is certainly solid evidence, if genuine.
The owner of the store claims he, prior to it being seized, made a copy of the hard drive and sent it to Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer.
While this is potentially intriguing, if true, it’s not really “news”. Biden’s corruption in Ukraine has been evident since his son was appointed to the board of the largest energy company in Ukraine within weeks of the US-backed coup in 2014 (a decision so obviously dodgy even the Guardian made a joke out of it). Joe Biden himself has even admitted to applying financial pressure to get a Ukrainian State Prosecutor removed from office.
None of this is really “big news”. Corruption is rampant in the halls of power, that is as certain as death and taxes, and will continue to be so, whether or not these specific allegations are accurate.
The big news, the part of this story that should concern everyone, is that Twitter has completely blocked this material on their platform.
And we’re not talking a “soft block”, we at OffG are more than familiar with twitter’s use of “warnings”, no they literally made it impossible to share the links, even in DMs. If you try, you get his warning:
We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”
We’ve talked about twitter’s “partners” before, and they are suspect. As for being “potentially harmful”, well isn’t that subjective? Fire is vital at times, but certainly “potentially harmful” at others. Water, in sufficient quantity, is “potentially harmful”.
If you’re a liar, the truth is “potentially harmful”.
Facebook has followed suit, if in less sweeping fashion. The social media giant’s spokesperson Andy Stone announced that they would be:
“… reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.
This decision is pending approval by their “independent fact-checkers”, which we have also covered in detail before.
*
So what are the social media companies’ excuses reasons for blocking this content?
Well, it depends who you ask.
Twitter claims that since the emails are potentially “hacked”, posting them violates their policy regarding illegally gathered material. (Interestingly this policy was never applied to Trump’s leaked tax returns.)
Facebook, on the other hand, claim to have blocked these stories because they might be “misinformation”. A truly ludicrous precedent to set. You can’t block something that might not be true, because that applies to literally almost everything.
You do have to admire the strategy though. The pincer movement is brilliant.
You see, one site is blocking them because they might not be real, the other because if they are real then they’re stolen. It’s a win-win situation.
Essentially, real or not, the tech giants have all the bases covered and there’s no way they are going to let people read those emails, or even stories about the emails. Twitter even blocked the account of the Whitehouse Spokesperson Kayleigh MacEnany for sharing the links.
Of course, moving forward this will not just apply to these emails, but anything they want.
More and more precedents are rolling out that social media companies can stop anyone from saying anything by applying their absurdly vague and subjective rules.
They have essentially given themselves license to block anything they want on a totally ad hoc basis, and because it’s being done in the name of “orange man bad” or combatting “hate speech”, an army of useful idiots are happy to go along with it. Even calling it a win for progressive values.
The mainstream cheered on twitter earlier this year when they started (incorrectly) “fact-checking” Donald Trump’s tweets concerning postal voting. We wrote then that it was a scary and potentially damaging idea. This is why.
We now have mega-corporations, who possess neither democratic mandate nor public accountability, controlling what elected officials can and cannot say in public. The political discourse of our society has become subject to the approval of “independent fact-checkers” created by billionaires and staffed by the Deep State.
Which is exactly what we’ve been warning about, for years.
*
It all makes you wonder – what exactly is the point of this story?
Are we just witnessing surface tremors of the deeper internal conflict in the Deep State, just as we saw in 2016?
Or is it meant to distract everyone with salacious details of a corruption scandal we all already knew about, while ever-more of our online freedoms are taken away?
This story probably isn’t going away any time soon. For one thing, we can expect that someone is going to accuse Russia of somehow being involved in the very near future.
… oh, they already did. I guess we’re in for Russiagate II then. Fun times.
FBI used MEDIA REPORTS seeded by British spy to ‘corroborate’ Steele Dossier, declassified spreadsheet shows
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | October 13, 2020
The FBI sought to ‘verify’ information in the notorious dossier at the heart of Russiagate by using media articles seeded by the actual dossier author, British spy Christopher Steele, newly released evidence has shown.
The so-called Steele Dossier is the centerpiece of ‘Russiagate,’ the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump “colluded” with Moscow in the 2016 US presidential election. The dossier’s most bombastic claim was that Russia had “kompromat” on him in the form of sex tapes from a Moscow hotel involving urinating prostitutes.
Steele compiled the dossier for Fusion GPS, a DC-based firm paid by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through the DNC. The FBI then used it to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016, and extended it three times well into 2017.
A 94-page spreadsheet made public on Monday, however, shows the FBI relied heavily on media reports to corroborate Steele’s claims – in many cases, the very same reports Steele had planted himself.
According to analyst Stephen McIntyre, footnotes listed in the spreadsheet show that 39 percent of the footnotes lead to Washington, DC media outlets, another 29 percent are redacted, and Steele himself was cited on 18 occasions, somehow self-verifying his own work.
In one instance, McIntyre notes, the FBI triple counted an article from the Daily Beast as three separate sources. Other media outlets named in the document are CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News and Mother Jones.
The FBI had actually decided to fire Steele as a paid informant in September 2016 – before obtaining the Page warrant – because he leaked to the media, specifically Yahoo and Mother Jones, but that never raised any red flags either with the warrant or the corroboration, apparently.
Moreover, the Bureau knew in December 2016 that the “primary sub-source” (PSS) for the dossier was a Russian national they had investigated as a foreign agent in 2009, but the investigation was abandoned without explanation and this fact was never flagged. Even after interviewing the PSS in January 2017, and establishing that most of the dossier was fabricated outright, the FBI continued to use it at the FISA court to extend the Page warrant.
Another source the FBI used to corroborate Steele was Cody Shearer, a long-time Clinton operative who produced a memo alleging that Russian intelligence had a sex tape of Trump. That amounts to more circular reporting, however, as Steele was reportedly given the Shearer dossier by State Department official Jonathan Winer, and then handed it over to his FBI contacts in October 2016.
The spreadsheet is the first confirmation that the FBI actually used the ‘Shearer Dossier,’ whose existence was first reported by the Guardian in January 2018, as part of a push by Democrats to show that the Steele dossier wasn’t the sole grounds for the FISA warrants.
Just last week, however, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified notes from then-CIA chief John Brennan, who said he warned the Obama administration about a plan by Hillary Clinton to smear Trump with allegations of ‘Russian collusion’ as a means of “distracting the public from her use of a private email server” before the 2016 election.
The two-year probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with zero evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, much less Trump himself – and while it argued that Moscow “meddled” in US elections, it offered no evidence beyond its own assertions contained in indictments that were subsequently dropped when challenged in court.
While all these revelations have amounted to an indictment of the entire ‘Russiagate’ affair, the media that gave each other awards for their coverage of ‘collusion’ has never apologized for any of it. To this day, millions of Americans continue to believe their president is a “Russian agent.”
Colonel Alexander Vindman’s Revenge
Another “expert” with an agenda surfaces
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • October 13, 2020
During last year’s impeachment process directed against President Donald Trump, Congress obtained testimony from a parade of witnesses to or participants in what was inevitably being referred to as UkraineGate. It centered around an investigation into whether Trump inappropriately sought a political quid pro quo from Ukrainian leaders in exchange for a military assistance package.
The prepared opening statement by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, described as the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council (NSC), provided some insights into how decision making at the NSC actually works. Vindman was born to a Jewish family in Ukraine but emigrated to the United States at age three. He was commissioned as an army infantry officer in 1998 and served in some capacity in Iraq from 2004-5, where he was wounded by a roadside bomb and received a purple heart. Vindman, who speaks both Ukrainian and Russian fluently, has filled a number of diplomatic and military positions in government dealing with Eastern Europe, to include a key role in Pentagon planning on how to deal with Russia.
Vindman, Ukrainian both by birth and culturally, clearly was a major player in articulating and managing U.S. policy towards that country, but at that time it was sometimes noted that he did not really understand what his role on the NSC should have been. As more than likely the U.S. government’s sole genuine Ukrainian expert, he should have become a good source for consideration of viable options that the United States might exercise vis-à-vis its relationship with Ukraine, and, by extension, regarding Moscow’s involvement with Kiev. But that is not how his statement before congress, which advocated for a specific policy, read. Rather than providing expert advice, Vindman was concerned chiefly because arming Ukraine was not proceeding quickly enough to suit him, an extremely risky policy which had already created serious problems with a much more important Russia.
Part of Vindman’s written statement (my emphasis) is revealing: ”When I joined the NSC in July 2018, I began implementing the administration’s policy on Ukraine. In the Spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency. This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy. While my interagency colleagues and I were becoming increasingly optimistic on Ukraine’s prospects, this alternative narrative undermined U.S. government efforts to expand cooperation with Ukraine.”
Vindman was also interested in promoting a policy that would limit any damage to the Democratic Party. Note the following additional excerpt from Vindman’s prepared statement to Congress: “…. I was worried about the implications for the US government’s support of Ukraine…. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.”
So Alexander Vindman clearly was pushing a risky alternative policy that had not been endorsed by either the president of the United States or the secretary of state, who were and still are the responsible authorities for making decisions relating to foreign and national security issues. It is therefore tempting to conclude that Vindman was an integral part of the Washington inside-the-beltway Deep State, which believed the solution to the Ukraine problem was to send arms to Kiev to enable an attack on Russia that would in turn weaken President Vladimir Putin. Along the way, Vindman attempted to make the absurd claim that the political situation in Kiev was somehow important to U.S. national security, asserting that “Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.” He did not care to ask the inevitable next question, “Aggression against whom?” The combined visions of Russia as an aggressive, expansionistic power coupled with the brave Ukrainians serving as a bastion of freedom is so absurd that it is hardly worth countering.
It is perhaps not surprising to learn that Colonel Vindman is at it again, joining the chorus of former government officials who are seeking to bring about the defeat of Donald Trump in November. And this time around he has the useful bully pulpit provided by the New York Times and The Atlantic, which have featured a Times op-ed co-authored by him followed by a recorded and transcribed interview as well as another article based on yet another interview with The Atlantic. The Times op-ed revealed that Vindman has not learned anything about how the government works since he made the statement to Congress last year. In a piece entitled “Trump Has Sold Off America’s Credibility for His Personal Gain: From China to Ukraine, this president has acted at odds with American foreign policy. Imagine what he could do with four more years” it cites Vindman’s perspective that “… the president and his associates asked officials in Kyiv to deliver on Mr. Trump’s political interests in exchange for American military aid needed to defend Ukraine… This was not a unique instance of Mr. Trump’s personal priorities corrupting American foreign policy. As the 2020 election grew closer, the president increasingly ignored the policies developed by his own government and instead pursued transactions guided by self-interest and instinct.”
Colonel Vindman is wrong in not realizing that when it comes to foreign policy “his own government” is the president whose decisions are binding, whether one likes it or not. And he also fails to understand that bilateral international agreements and understandings are a process of horse trading, with favors being done by both sides. Trump was certainly within his rights to want to know about possible illegal activity carried out by the son of a former Vice President.
The Atlantic piece, written by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli prison guard and now leading anti-Trump malcontent, quotes Vindman and editorializes as follows: “’President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,’” he says. Useful idiot is a term commonly used to describe dupes of authoritarian regimes; fellow traveler, in Vindman’s description, is a person who shares Putin’s loathing for democratic norms. But do you think Russia is blackmailing Trump? “’They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it,’” he says. “’They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.’” Vindman continues, “’In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.’”
It is very easy to despise what passes for foreign policy in the Trump White House, but the alternative of rule by agenda-driven bureaucrats like Colonel Alexander Vindman is even more unpalatable from a constitutional point of view. His original testimony before Congress, wrapped in an air of sanctimoniousness and a uniform, should be regarded as little more than the conventional thinking that has produced foreign policy failure after failure in the past twenty years. Russia the perpetual enemy requiring “friends” like Ukraine with little regard for the actual threat level or the potential consequences. The fact that Vindman is how exploiting a bully pulpit on the largely discredited New York Times while also getting into bed with the scoundrel Jeffrey Goldberg should tell one all that is necessary to know. Trump is right about ending America’s love affair with foreign wars, even though it is a subject that neither he nor Joe Biden will be discussing. Vindman is little more than an apologist for why those useless wars are promoted and are continuing.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Why the Dems Can’t Have Nice Things (Like the White House)
By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well | October 10, 2020
Here’s why the Democrats can’t have nice things. Like the White House.
Though by now the media has awarded Biden all 270 electoral votes and taped a transcript of his debate performance on the national refrigerator door, it is unclear Joe Biden really wants to be president. He barely campaigns and usually ends his working day at noon. Since mid-August Biden logged 22 days where he either didn’t make a public campaign appearance (during the same period Trump visited 19 states.) Biden has slept at home every night of the campaign. He has no signature policy initiative. He often appears overwhelmed. He simply presents his waxy self as the embodiment of the empty and depressing strategy of I’m the Lesser of Two Evils and marks off the days until it will all be over.
The Democratic party itself seems to feel much the same way. After four years of complaining Trump is an old white draft dodging man linked to corruption, the best the Dem process could cough up was an even older white draft dodging man linked to corruption. On a rare Biden visit outside his own yard to Charlotte, North Carolina, local organizers only turned out 16 people to meet the candidate. The chairwoman of the African American caucus only learned of the event from TV. Meanwhile, the party insists on its own demographic illusion. Latinos, key in crucial states like Arizona and Florida, have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees, resistant to a campaign defining them as “people of color.” Some 98 percent of Latinos don’t want to be called “Latinx” even as the Democrats continue to do so pandering to the two percent. Ideology over reality, though it may not matter: 38 percent of Hispanic voters Dem imagine they control in battleground states are ambivalent about voting at all. A Telemundo poll shows 68.7 percent believe Trump won the first presidential debate.
The Dems ignore other demographic bad news. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent from 2016. More to the point, registration among whites without college degrees is up 46 percent while registration by people of color is up only four percent. Turnout looks to be in trouble as well; in Wisconsin while 79 percent of black voters participated in the 2012 general election, in 2016 it was down to 47 percent. The risk of low turnout is even greater when one factors in age. About 78 percent of blacks age 60+ are likely to vote, compared to only 29 percent for blacks age 18-29.
Meanwhile, in this final stretch when they should be clawing for every vote, Dems are sending out scattered messages on in-person voting (“You might die of COVID but it’s so important you guys!!!! LOL”) and planning on relying on a 19th century mail in system run by local yokels that works poorly under the best of circumstances. Plan B is to claim the system they told everyone to use didn’t work and the president needs to be selected by Netflix users.
If Democrats really wanted to win some swing states they should have found a way to fix the water in Flint. They might have persuaded Mike Bloomberg instead of buying felons’ votes in Florida to have created the equivalent in new jobs in Ohio. Dems never talked to the voters they needed the most. In fact, quite the opposite. They stomped their feet and held their breath in a four year tantrum and called them racists and haters when unmasked Midwesterners never got appropriately offended by Trump. These people worked hard for what they have only to hear that dismissed as privilege. Dems attack people as much for who they are as what they believe and still expect a vote for Biden. The NYT calls them “the worst of us.” Call them the missing whites on election day.
Democrats also believe their own self-illusion. Instead of understanding social media as a winnowed, mob-enforced minority of confirmational people, Dem strategists believe it all makes a difference. They came to think listening to podcasts, wearing cute #Resistance gear, retweeting and liking, holding Pink Hat marches and flash mobs, making $25 donations to GoFundMes, signing online petitions before going on Etsy to buy snarky t-shirts about vaginas, forwarding propaganda videos from the Lincoln Project, all while talking about NPR in line at Trader Joe’s, matter. All the devices don’t add up to a single vote. It isn’t a barometer, it’s a mirror.
Voting Dem may just be too much of an ask for thinking people. Review the near-endless emotional hemophilia, hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, and fake news kudzu a Dem voter is asked to ignore. For example, a Trump rally, or a wedding, is a deadly super-spreader event but a BLM rally is not. Schools and businesses are open or closed at the discretion of governors and mayors but Trump is to blame. Demonstrations which devolve into riots are acceptable but a couple of rednecks open carrying at a statehouse is a precursor to civil war. BLM when the killer is a cop, a lot less so when the killer is a black gang member. The new Supreme Court will limit our rights, except if they extend our 2A rights and then more rights are bad. Kids in cages means Nazism but Biden bringing back the Obama national security advisors who created millions of refugees flowing out of Syria and Libya is no matter. Choosing a Supreme “too close” to an election is the end of democracy but Dems promising revenge by adding states, deep-sixing the Electoral College, and packing the court to jam through their own one party eternal majority is not. A Muslim woman in Congress is revered for her adherence to sexist Islamic doctrine but a Catholic woman who honors her spouse is Handmaid’s Tale in Biblical proportions. #BelieveWomen applies to accusers of Republicans but not Democrats. We must have more women in government, except if they’re Republicans. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, claims he will block any FDA-approved COVID vaccine from his state until his own scientists check it out, fearing a dangerous chemical will be released so that Trump can win the election. We must reawaken our democracy but if you vote for a third party you are working for Putin.
More?
When the stock market was soaring it didn’t matter because most people did not own stock yet when it fell during COVID it was the end of the economy but when it recovered it no longer mattered. None of the desperate warnings of war — Iran, China, North Korea, Venezuela, civil war in America — came to be. No one did anything bad after the embassy moved to Jerusalem or the Iranian agreement ended. All the things which were to disappear — the ACA, Roe, LGBT rights, same sex marriage — did not. Martial law was not declared, though the MSM signaled numerous times they would be OK with a military coup to depose Trump. Puerto Rico did not descend into genocide. Trump did not launch nuclear weapons in a fit of psychosis. The Democrats over and over made insta-heroes of miserable people who then had to be disowned like Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, Robert Mueller, James Comey, and every former general who was going to flip and tell all but didn’t. I honestly have no idea anymore if Dr. Fauci is seen as a good guy or a bad guy by Dems. The Democratic party claimed insubordination by government officials is to be honored if it is called #Resistance. We needed to see Trump’s taxes bad enough that it was OK someone stole them and even then the NYT won’t let anyone see the actual documents. Pee tape anyone? And in the final months before the election, the principle Democratic strategy is to claim if Trump wins it was all unfair. Update: the Reichstag is still standing.
How can a thinking person look at all that and conclude “these are the people I want running the country.”
Too many readers will see this article as pro-Trump. Where does it praise Trump? And that’s the last point here. Democrats and the MSM (let’s call it MSDNC) have divorced themselves from earth gravity. The rules of their home planet are any criticism of the party means you love Trump, are a hater, racist, Nazi, Russian or a bot. Inquiry is not allowed, so you must accept the Dossier, Russiagate, Ukraine, whatever crazy story is “reported” by “sources” and vote Biden or else.
Maybe if a little introspection had been allowed amid demands for conformity of thought the Democrat party would not be imploring voters to believe the end justifies the means. Maybe they would not have cried wolf again and again until only the true crazies are still listening. Maybe they would have foregone the public humiliation of the Mueller report and the failed impeachment. Maybe they’d be running a candidate that represented, well, something to vote for. Maybe they would not be so worried their voters will stay home on November 3.
If Trump wins again, it will be safe to say Dems lost this election in 2016 when they failed to see the change the nation wanted, pushed Bernie aside, and demanded we coronate Hillary. That gave Trump his first term. But rather than learn anything in the cold morning and seek redemption, the Dems basically did the same thing in 2020, albeit with the more likeable Joe Biden. But Biden carries most of the same old school baggage, inherits the same wounds of the Obama years, and has that lasting taint of corruption after 47 years in government.
Yes, Joe’ll win the popular vote, the Electoral College are racist cheaters, Mrs. Jones’ ballot was lost in Raleigh, PutinPutinPutin, all a rich gumbo but whenever the end of the day comes, Trump will likely have his second term. More because the Democrats lost than because he won.
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From the Archives
Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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