Friday, March 30, 2018

"Whom the gods wish to destroy": The Telford child sex scandal and the end of England

ORIGINAL LINK

addtext_com_MTkzOTM0MjI0Njg.jpg

I've got to assume that very few Americans ever heard of Telford, a district in the English West Midlands. Steve Sailer admits to never having heard of it; and if Steve hasn't heard of it, nobody has. This is excusable. There was no such place as Telford until 1968. That was when bureaucratic managerialism in Britain was in the ascendant. Ancient towns and villages were being grouped together in strange new entities under stone-faced administrators filled with a conviction of their own managerial competence. Britain's old counties were reorganized to suit the inclinations and convenience of these mandarins, and people were shoveled around like so many truckloads of concrete. Shortly afterwards Britain entered the European Union, and those British mandarins, to their delight, became globalist apparatchiks, with way bigger expense accounts. They must have had many a laugh with each other, over the champagne and truffles, at how easy it had been. It was the end of old England. Mass Third World immigration was a key component of the new order. British people who dared to raise their voices against what was happening - people like Enoch Powell - were insulted, abused, and hounded out of public life.

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US Admits "Doing The Planning" For Saudi Strikes In Yemen

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

In a new meeting with reporters, Defense Secretary James Mattis has offered new details about US involvement in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, providing specifics about what the US is doing that contradict long-standing claims of a very limited, non-combat involvement.

Mattis now admits the US is “doing the planning” in Yemen strikes, and has shown the Saudis how the concept of a no-strike zone is supposed to work, and engaged in a maturing process of “battlefield management” intended to see Saudi strikes killing fewer civilians.

Mattis also tried to spin the already established US involvement in mid-air refueling as beneficial for civilians being bombed. He warned Saudi bombers would make “rash or hasty decisions” if they had to worry about running out of fuel before bombing a place, and might take less time to avoid hitting civilian targets.

Obviously all of these US efforts to avoid hitting civilian targets in Yemen aren’t working, as Saudi airstrikes are still killing a shocking number of innocent bystanders. The comments are more noteworthy than just another half-hearted attempted to spin US involvement in the war as innocuous, however.

That’s because the Senate just debated measure on the Yemen War, with Mattis and other top Pentagon officials defending their involvement as limited. Throughout this, officials have long presented the civilian toll as something distinct from their own involvement in the conflict, and suggested that the US has nothing to do with targeting.



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To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

http://www.wral.com/Raleigh-police-search-google-location-history/17377435/

Wikileaks states that Ecuadorian embassy blocked Assange’s Internet access over Catalan tweets (Video)

ORIGINAL LINK

The Ecuadorian embassy cut off internet access for Julian Assange and is no longer allowing him to have visitors.

Sources close to Wikileaks revealed to RT that the Ecuadorian embassy blocked Julian Assange’s Internet access in order to prevent him from tweeting about Catalan issues.

RT reports in the video below…

The Gateway Pundit confirmed RT’s reports

A source close to Assange and the Embassy confirmed to The Gateway Pundit that this is due to Assange’s refusal to stop tweeting about Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont’s arrest in Germany on a Spanish warrant.

“Clearly, Ecuador’s government has been subjected to bullying over its decision to grant Julian asylum, support and, ultimately, diplomatic status. Naturally, Quito cannot admit that it is buckling under that pressure and it argues, in public, that Julian’s tweets over Catalonia are responsible for the decision to isolate him. Of course this is utterly unbelievable. Julian is now a citizen of Ecuador and as such enjoys the full protection of his freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution of Ecuador,” Brian Eno and Yanis Varoufakis wrote of Assange’s situation.

“Additionally, the only reason Julian is holed up in Ecuador’s London Embassy – and why Ecuador gave him asylum in the first place – is precisely because he empowered whistleblowers’ freedom of expression and defended our right to know the truth about practices of the US and other Western powers that the latter found ‘inconvenient’ once exposed to the light of day.”

Kim Dotcom and journalist Suzie Dawson of the Internet Party will be launching a livestream vigil demanding his right to communication.

Suzie Dawson and I are about to launch an online vigil for Julian Assange supporters from around the world. Let’s join together and demand the immediate restoration of Julian's human right to communication.

We will be using the hashtag #ReconnectJulian

Stay tuned for details!

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 28, 2018

The post Wikileaks states that Ecuadorian embassy blocked Assange’s Internet access over Catalan tweets (Video) appeared first on The Duran.



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Monday, March 26, 2018

The Overton Bubble

The Overton Bubble:



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US Intelligence Officer: “Every Single Terrorist Attack In US Was A False Flag Attack” – Collective Evolution

US Intelligence Officer: “Every Single Terrorist Attack In US Was A False Flag Attack” – Collective Evolution:



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Humanity’s meat and dairy intake must be cut in half by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change

ORIGINAL LINK

cows

(Credit: damnura via iStock)

AlterNetIn a recent press release on its website, Greenpeace called for a reduction in meat, dairy, and egg consumption. A new report by the organization states that “global meat and dairy production and consumption must be cut in half by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change.” The report also confirms what many health professionals have said for years: Eating meat and dairy raises various health risks, including risk of cancer, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Indeed, calling for such a reduction is vital to the fight against global warming, as animal agriculture is the number-one driver of climate change.

Why are meat, dairy and eggs so harmful to the environment? Every year we raise and kill at least 56 billion land animals for food worldwide. We feed enormous amounts of corn, soy, and wheat to each of them. Much of this animal feed is grown on deforested land whose precious rainforests and wildlife have been wiped out. These animals excrete untold amounts of feces, which pollute local waterways and accelerate climate change by emitting methane into the atmosphere. They must be transported to slaughter and their meat packaged and shipped. The process not only kills billions of animals and inflicts unspeakable cruelty but literally kills our planet.

 The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the livestock sector is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide pollution and the single largest source of methane and nitrous oxide. And according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, carbon dioxide emissions from raising farmed animals make up about 15 percent of global human-induced emissions.
Raising animals for food is also culpable for more than 90 percent of Amazon rainforest destruction and uses more than one-third of the earth’s landmass. More than 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest — and 135 animal, plant, and insect species — are lost to animal agriculture each day.

Animal agriculture also takes a devastating toll on wildlife through habitat loss and hunting. Because it uses such a massive amount of land, wild animals are pushed out of their natural environments or violently killed because they are viewed as a predatory threat to the meat and dairy industries.

The good news? By going vegan you not only help protect animals but cut your carbon footprint in half.

Climate change is real and animal agriculture is undoubtedly a leading contributor. If you’re serious about the environment, it’s time to take action. Don’t just say you care about the planet, prove it by leaving all animal products off your plate.



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A GREAT EXAMPLE OF REAL ‘FAKE NEWS.’

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/03/25/a-great-example-of-real-fake-news/

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Cambridge Analytica Is Not The Problem. Google And Facebook ARE The Problem

http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/22/google-and-facebook-are-problem-not-cambridge-analytica

PressTV-Obama called Putin, too: Trump

ORIGINAL LINK
US President Donald Trump reiterates his stance towards the recent reelection of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, arguing that former President Barack Obama had similarly congratulated the Russian leader in the past. Trump said in a tweet on Wednesday that he is standing by his decision to call Putin after his latest victory in the […]

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How Facebook Went From ‘Ideal Way’ to Reach Voters to Being ‘Weaponized’

http://freebeacon.com/blog/facebook-went-ideal-way-reach-voters-weaponized/

House intel clears Trump in Russia probe, votes to release final report

ORIGINAL LINK
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on March 22, 2018 (Photo: Twitter/Melania Trump)

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on March 22, 2018 (Photo: Twitter/Melania Trump)

There’s no evidence of Trump campaign “collusion, coordination or conspiracy” with the Russians, says the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which voted to end its investigation Thursday.

There’s also “no evidence that Trump associates were involved in the theft or publication of Clinton campaign-related emails,” the committee said in a summary of its findings that clears Trump’s team of wrongdoing during the election.

The committee voted to release its full report to the public after the intelligence community has a chance to review it.

“Last January, we set out to investigate Russian active measures during the 2016 election. Today, we are one step closer to delivering answers to the questions the American people have been asking for over a year,” Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, who has led the probe since last April, told Fox News Thursday.

Just a week ago, the committee revealed that they found “no evidence of collusion” and said there’s no basis for claims from figures in the intelligence community who said Russian President Vladimir Putin has a “supposed preference” for Donald Trump during the election.

Democrats claim the Republicans have “prematurely” ended the committee’s Russia investigation.

The report’s findings and recommendations do reveal “a pattern of Russian active measures” through cyberattacks and social-media campaigns to “sow discord” in the U.S.

The committee released a summary of its classified report, which included the following key findings concerning alleged Trump campaign links with Russia:

  • Finding #25: When asked directly, none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
  • Finding #26: The Committee found no evidence that President Trump’s pre-campaign business dealings formed the basis for collusion during the campaign.
  • Finding #27: The Republican national security establishment’s opposition to candidate Trump created opportunities for two less-experienced individuals with pro-Russia views to serve as campaign advisors: George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
  • Finding #28: The change in the Republican Party platform regarding Ukraine resulted in a stronger position against Russia, not a weaker one, and there is no evidence that Paul Manafort was involved.
  • Finding #29: there is no evidence that Trump associates were involved in the theft or publication of Clinton campaign-related emails, although Trump associates had numerous ill-advised contacts with WikiLeaks.
  • Finding #30: Carter Page did not travel to Moscow in July 2016 on behalf of the Trump campaign, but the Committee is concerned about his seemingly incomplete accounts of his activity in Moscow.
  • Finding #31: George Papadopolous’ attempts to leverage his Russian contacts to facilitate meetings between the Trump campaign and Russians was unsuccessful.
  • Finding #32: Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort attended a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower where they expected to receive – but did not ultimately obtain – derogatory information on candidate Clinton from Russian sources.
  • Finding #33: Donald Trump Jr. briefly met with a Russian government official at the 2016 National Rife Association annual meeting, but the Committee found no evidence that the two discussed the U.S. presidential election.
  • Finding #34: The Committee found no evidence that meetings between Trump associates – including Jeff Sessions – and official representatives of the Russian government – including Ambassador Kislyak – reflected collusion, coordination, or conspiracy with the Russian government.
  • Finding #35: possible Russian efforts to set up a “back channel” with Trump associates after the election suggest the absence of collusion during the campaign. since the communication associated with collusion would have rendered such a “back channel” unnecessary.
  • Finding #36: prior to conducting opposition research targeting candidate Trump’s business dealings, Fusion GPS conducted research benefitting (sic) Russian interests.
  • Finding #37: The law firm Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to research Trump’s Russia ties.
  • Finding #38: Christopher Steele claims to have obtained his dossier information second- and third-hand from purported high-placed Russian sources, such as government officials with links to the Kremlin and intelligence services.
  • Finding #39: Christopher Steele’s information from Russian sources was provided directly to Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie and indirectly to the Clinton campaign.

Developing …



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Tolerance Cuts Both Ways: Freedom for the Speech We Hate

ORIGINAL LINK

Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.

— Nat Hentoff, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, 1983.

Tolerance cuts both ways.

This isn’t an easy pill to swallow, I know, but that’s the way free speech works, especially when it comes to tolerating speech that we hate.

The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

This haphazard approach to the First Amendment has so muddied the waters that even First Amendment scholars are finding it hard to navigate at times.

It’s really not that hard.

The First Amendment affirms the right of the people to speak freely, worship freely, peaceably assemble, petition the government for a redress of grievances, and have a free press.

Nowhere in the First Amendment does it permit the government to limit speech in order to avoid causing offense, hurting someone’s feelings, safeguarding government secrets, protecting government officials, insulating judges from undue influence, discouraging bullying, penalizing hateful ideas and actions, eliminating terrorism, combating prejudice and intolerance, and the like.

Unfortunately, in the war being waged between free speech purists who believe that free speech is an inalienable right and those who believe that free speech is a mere privilege to be granted only under certain conditions, the censors are winning.

We have entered into an egotistical, insulated, narcissistic era in which free speech has become regulated speech: to be celebrated when it reflects the values of the majority and tolerated otherwise, unless it moves so far beyond our political, religious and socio-economic comfort zones as to be rendered dangerous and unacceptable.

Indeed, President Trump—who has been accused of using his very public platform to belittle and mock his critics and enemies while attempting to muzzle those who might speak out against him—may be the perfect poster child for this age of intolerance.

Even so, Trump is not to blame for America’s growing intolerance for free speech.

The country started down that sorry road long ago.

Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) have conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good.

On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Emboldened by phrases such as “hate crimes,” “bullying,” “extremism” and “microaggressions,” the nation has been whittling away at free speech, confining it to carefully constructed “free speech zones,” criminalizing it when it skates too close to challenging the status quo, shaming it when it butts up against politically correct ideals, and muzzling it when it appears dangerous.

Free speech is no longer free.

The U.S. Supreme Court has long been the referee in the tug-of-war over the nation’s tolerance for free speech and other expressive activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet the Supreme Court’s role as arbiter of justice in these disputes is undergoing a sea change. Except in cases where it has no vested interest, the Court has begun to advocate for the government’s outsized interests, ruling in favor of the government in matters of war, national security, commerce and speech.

When asked to choose between the rule of law and government supremacy, the Supreme Court tends to side with the government.

If we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to voice our opinions in public—no matter how misogynistic, hateful, prejudiced, intolerant, misguided or politically incorrect they might be—then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.

Just as surveillance has been shown to “stifle and smother dissent, keeping a populace cowed by fear,” government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance, makes independent thought all but impossible, and ultimately foments a seething discontent that has no outlet but violence.

The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world.

When there is no steam valve—when there is no one to hear what the people have to say—frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation. By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.

Silencing unpopular viewpoints with which the majority might disagree—whether it’s by shouting them down, censoring them, muzzling them, or criminalizing them—only empowers the controllers of the Deep State.

Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination.

Offensive, politically incorrect and “unsafe” speech: Disguised as tolerance, civility and love, political correctness has resulted in the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite. Consequently, college campuses have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “red light” speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or offended.

Bullying, intimidating speech: Warning that “school bullies become tomorrow’s hate crimes defendants,” the Justice Department has led the way in urging schools to curtail bullying, going so far as to classify “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.”

Hateful speech: Hate speech—speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation—is the primary candidate for online censorship. Corporate internet giants Google, Twitter and Facebook are in the process of  determining what kinds of speech will be permitted online and what will be deleted.

Dangerous, anti-government speech: As part of its ongoing war on “extremism,” the government partnered with the tech industry to establish a task force to counter online “propaganda” by terrorists hoping to recruit support or plan attacks (the program started under President Obama). In this way, anyone who criticizes the government online can be considered an extremist and will have their content reported to government agencies for further investigation or deleted.

The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.

Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

The end result is control.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.

It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.

This is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

Indeed, the U.S. government has become particularly intolerant of speech that challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, extremist speech, etc.

To emphasize: the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

In fact, some of this past century’s greatest dystopian authors warned of this very danger.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

And in almost every episode of Twilight Zone, Rod Serling urged viewers to unlock their minds and free themselves of prejudice, hate, violence and fear. “We’re developing a new citizenry,” Serling declared. “One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem as I see it is that we’ve lost faith in the average citizen to do the right thing. We’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.

The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

In this way, we have become our worst enemy.

As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once warned, a silent, inert citizenry is the greatest menace to freedom.

Brandeis provided a well-reasoned argument against government censorship in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927). It’s not a lengthy read, but here it is boiled down to ten basic truths:

(1) The purpose of government is to make men free to develop their faculties, i.e., THINK;
(2) The freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are essential to the discovery and spread of political truth;
(3) Without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile;
(4) The greatest menace to freedom is a silent people;
(5) Public discussion is a political duty, and should be a fundamental principle of the American government;
(6) Order cannot be secured through censorship;
(7) Fear breeds repression; repression breeds hate; and hate menaces stable government;
(8) The power of reason as applied through public discussion is always superior to silence coerced by law;
9) Free speech and assembly were guaranteed in order to guard against the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities; and,
(10) To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground (a clear and present danger) to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent, and that the evil to be prevented is a serious one.

Perhaps the most important point that Brandeis made is that freedom requires courage.

“Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards,” Brandeis wrote. “They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.” Rather, they were “courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government.”

In other words, the founders did not fear the power of speech.

Rather, they embraced it, knowing all too well that a nation without a hearty tolerance for free speech, no matter how provocative, insensitive or dangerous, will be easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.

What the police state wants is a nation of sheep that will docilely march in lockstep with its dictates. What early Americans envisioned was a nation of individualists who knew exactly when to tell the government to take a hike.

“If the freedom of speech be taken away,” warned George Washington, “then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.

Either we live in a constitutional republic or a police state.

Never forget that we have rights.

As Justice William O. Douglas advised in his dissent in Colten v. Kentucky, “we need not stay docile and quiet” in the face of authority.

The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).

Then again, if we just cower before government agents and meekly obey, we may find ourselves following in the footsteps of those nations that eventually fell to tyranny.

The alternative involves standing up and speaking truth to power.

Jesus Christ walked that road. So did Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless other freedom fighters whose actions changed the course of history.

Indeed, had Christ merely complied with the Roman police state, there would have been no crucifixion and no Christian religion.

Had Gandhi meekly fallen in line with the British Empire’s dictates, the Indian people would never have won their independence.

Had Martin Luther King Jr. obeyed the laws of his day, there would have been no civil rights movement.

And if the founding fathers had marched in lockstep with royal decrees, there would have been no American Revolution.

So where do we go from here?

If Americans don’t learn how to get along—at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other’s right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different—then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

The government will lock down the nation at the slightest provocation.

It is ready, willing and able to impose martial law within 24 hours.

Indeed, the government has been anticipating and preparing for civil unrest for years now, as evidenced by the build-up of guns and tanks and militarized police and military training drills and threat assessments and extremism reports and surveillance systems and private prisons and Pentagon training videos predicting the need to impose martial law by 2030.

Trust me: when the police state cracks down, it will not discriminate.

We’ll all be muzzled together.

We’ll all be jailed together.

We’ll all be viewed as a collective enemy to be catalogued, conquered and caged.

Indeed, a recent survey concluded that a large bipartisan majority of the American public already recognizes the dangers posed by a government that is not only tracking its citizens but is also being controlled by a “Deep State” of unelected government officials.

Thus, the last thing we need to do is play into the government’s hands by turning on one another, turning in one another, and giving the government’s standing army an excuse to take over.

So let’s start with a little more patience, a lot more tolerance and a civics lesson on the First Amendment.

What this means is opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some.

It’s time to start thinking for ourselves again.

It’s time to start talking to each other, listening more and shouting less.

Most of all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s time to make the government hear us—see us—and heed us.

This is the ultimate power of free speech.



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Monday, March 19, 2018

Irish "Potato Famine" Was Deliberate Genocide

ORIGINAL LINK
ireland massgraves.gif
(left, location of mass graves in Ireland)

THE IRISH HOLOCAUST- (Irish: an Gorta Mór) or the Great Hunger was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852


According to historian Chris Fogarty,
the "Irish Potato Famine" which killed over five million people 
was not a famine but a deliberate British policy of starvation similar to the
Holomodor in the Ukraine in 1932-33.











"The truth is startling, 67 out of 130 regiments of Britain's Empire army were in Ireland in this period (100,000 at any one time). The troops were not on a humanitarian mission. Their job was to remove food by force."


This is a summary of a Red Ice Radio broadcast supplemented by information from Chris Fogarty's website http://www.irishholocaust.org/. Chris is author of the book: Ireland 1845-1850: The Perfect Holocaust, distributed directly from the author in Chicago, USA.

From June 16, 2015

by Richard Merriman 
(henrymakow.com)


History is a big lie told by the victors. The illuminati have almost perfected rewriting history to suit their own agenda.

irishpot.jpg
I grew up thinking that the Irish famine was a natural catastrophe caused by crop failure; the Irish were guilty of only cultivating only one crop-- potatoes. 

While Chris Fogarty was researching the biography of his paternal grandfather at the National Archives, he uncovered a policy of genocide . The truth is startling: 67 out of 130 regiments of Britain's Empire army were in Ireland during this period (100,000 at any one time). The troops were not on a humanitarian mission. Their job was to remove food by force. 

The nation starved as its food was confiscated, 40-70 shiploads a day were removed at gunpoint assisted by British constables, militia and troops. They seized tens of millions head of livestock, tens of millions of tons flour, grains and poultry. These vast quantities were more than enough to feed 18 million people.

The first lie was that the famine was due to the failure of the potato crop. When the quantity of exported Irish foodstuffs could no longer be concealed, the second lie was that the rich Irish were starving the poor Irish. G.B. Shaw wrote in Man and Superman 1897: "The Famine? No, the Starvation. When a country is full of food and exporting it, there can be no Famine."' 

In The Great Hunger (1962,) British Historian Woodham Smith identified 13 of the food removal regiments. She became a pariah in British and Irish academia for the next 30 years. Academic historians maintain the lie that only one crop was cultivated, covering up the food removals and exportation to England. British and Irish academia won't approach the truth, and anyone bringing the genocide out in the open is smeared as a "republican" (implying a terrorist.)

Former Irish President Mary Robinson referred to the genocide as "Ireland's largest natural disaster." In 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "Britain stood by while the Irish starved to death", but did not acknowledge role of the British Army in forced food confiscations. 

The consequence of publishing the truth can be severe.  Chris Fogarty has been raided several times and charged by the FBI. He was told unofficially that British intelligence were involved. The charges were later proven to be fabricated and dropped. 


redce.jpeg
THE HUMAN TOLL AND MOTIVE

The 5.2 million death figure cited by Chris is higher than the official figures which only posit a 2M drop from 1841-51 due to natural famine and emigration. He believes the 1841 census underestimates the real population of over 12M.  He calculates a total population reduction of about 6 million with about 1 million  emigrating. 

The genocide was a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Irish people and their cultural and national identity.  Queen Victoria's economist, Nassau Senior, voiced his fear that existing policies "will not kill more than one million Irish in 1848 and that will scarcely be enough to do much good." The Times leader in 1848 wrote "A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan." 

During the "famine" years, Irish foodstuff received high prices on the agricultural and commodity markets of the world. The British Empire covered half the globe; why else would it keep half its armies in Ireland at great expense? 

The Irish were an obstacle to Britain's world power. They were Celtic, Catholic with their own rich culture and traditions, namely strong: National identity, Family, Culture and Christian faith. The Irish have a strong Celtic consciousness giving the people the ability to think critically, morally and be self-sufficient and it's in our DNA cultural Marxism cannot extinguish it. 

 Ireland like many European nations is undergoing the genocide by cultural Marxism, mass immigration of third worlders, minority rights of LGBT, feminists to undermine marriage, gender leading to moral collapse.  

shatter.jpeg
The Irish government minister Alan Shatter left, a Zionist Jew, accuses the people of not being sufficiently attentive to the Jewish Holocaust. The propaganda project is failing to mass indoctrinate the Irish. 

Charity starts at home and our first duty is to be attentive to our own people's national tragedies before concentrating on another peoples. Shoahism has no place in Irish cultural life, as the nation and its people had no involvement in this event, so have no guilt or responsibility whatsoever.
-------
Related-

Ireland 1845-1850:The Perfect Holocaust and Who Kept it Perfect 
Mr Chris Fogarty 900 North Lakeshore Drive Condo 1507 Chicago Illinois 60611
$20 , Add $3 in state postage within 
Illinois  email: fogartyc@att.net 
Readers in Europe can order copies to be posted (cheaper postage than from USA) from Ireland from johnrobinsonimports@eircom.net


First Comment from Andrew:

The oligarchs who ruled Britain during the Irish Genocide 1845-1852 perfected starvation genocide in India. They ruled through The British East India Company (BEIC) for 200 years . The 5 million starved in Ireland pales in comparison to the 50,000,000 starved in India during BEIC rule. Wiki provides Timeline of major famines in India during British rule. The British historical alibi sounds almost as bad as the truth. "It was caused due to the widespread forced cultivation of opium (forced upon local farmers by the BEIC as part of its strategy to export it to China) in place of local food crops, resulting in a shortage of grain for local people in Bengal." 

The BEIC " forced Indian farmers to plant indigo instead of rice, as well as forbidding the "hoarding" of rice. This prevented traders and dealers from laying in reserves that in other times would have tided the population over lean periods." 

It would have been impossible to order British soldiers or BEIC forces to execute millions of Bengalis or Irishmen, so they forcefully removed food and let starvation and disease do the dirty work for them. Famine sounds so much better than genocide back in Britain and America. 

The same starvation policy eradicated 45 million in China after WW II. 
"The famine that killed up to 45 million people remains a taboo subject in China 50 years on. Author Yang Jisheng is determined to change that with his book, Tombstone." 

The starvation in the South after the US Civil War is another example. How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans.

The last sentence of the article Irish Genocide points out how the Holocaust is always used to distract from the crimes of the British and Americans. James Bacque's book, Other Losses explains how US and Allied Forces starved 700,000 German soldiers in open detention camps after they surrendered. Then we starved another 5,000,000 German civilians in post WW II Germany. If we put Other Losses beside Julius Epstein's Operation Keelhaul,The Story of Forced Repatriation (1973) a very disturbing pattern slaps us in the face. Epstein's book explains how America returned hundreds of thousands of anti-communists fleeing the Iron Curtain. American forces returned these people after the beginning of the Cold War. MANY RETURNED ANTI-COMMUNISTS WERE HUNG in the presences of American soldiers. 

You won't find any of that in history books in the UK or USA either.
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UK Mainstream Media Falsely Alleges Russian Election Fraud - European Politician

ORIGINAL LINK
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The United Kingdom and its mainstream media disapprove of the election process in Russia, claiming that the March 18 presidential election was rigged, despite there being evidence to the contrary, Janice Atkinson, the vice-president of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group in the European Parliament, said.

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Sunday, March 18, 2018

Russia’s Reaction to the Insults of the West is Political Suicide

ORIGINAL LINK

The onslaught of western Russia bashing in the past days, particularly since the alleged poison attack by a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok (the inventor of which, by the way, lives in the US), on a Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, has been just horrifying. Especially by the UK. Starting with PM May, who outright accused Russia of using chemical weapons (CW) on UK grounds, without delivering any evidence. Strangely, there is no indication where Skripal and his daughter are, in which hospital the pair is being treated, no poison analysis is being published, they cannot be visited; there is absolutely no evidence of the substance they allegedly have been poisoned with – do Sergei and Yulia actually exist as victims of a poison attack?

As a consequence, Theresa May expels 23 Russian diplomats, who have to leave the UK within a week. Then came Boris Johnson, the Foreign Minister clown, also an abject liar. He said — no, he yelled — at his fellow parliamentarians that it was “overwhelmingly likely, that Putin personally ordered the spy attack.” This accusation out of nothing against the Russian President is way more than a deep breach in diplomatic behavior, it is a shameful insult. And no evidence is provided. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in fact, said that Johnson’s personal attack on President Putin was “unforgivable”.

Not to miss out on the bashing theatre, UK Defense Secretary, Gavin Williamson, got even more insolent. Russia “should go away and shut up”. In response to all this demonizing Russia for an alleged crime, for which absolutely no proof has been provided, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said that the undiplomatic comments meant that the British authorities are nervous and have “something to hide,”. Lavrov also strongly objected, wanted to initiate a joint UK-Russia investigation into the case – is he dreaming? – and responded to a question of diplomatic retaliation, yes, that Russia will also expel UK diplomates ‘soon’.

There is no doubt that the UK acted as Washington’s poodle. In the course of this anti-Russia tirade, Trump twittered that he fully supported UK’s position. Indeed, the European puppets, Macron, Merkel, May and their chief, The Donald, signed a joint statement blaming Russia for the nerve gas attack on the former double agent, “There is no plausible alternative explanation than that Russia was to blame for the attack”. Bingo, that says it all. The presstitute picks it up and airs it to the seven corners of this globe – and the western sheeple are brainwashed once again: The Russians did it.

Well, we know that. But the real point I want to make is that Russia always reacts to such nonsensical and outright false accusations; Russia always responds, rejects, of course, the accusations but usually with lengthy explanations, and with suggestions on how to come to the truth – as if the UK and the west would give a shit about the truth – why are they doing that? Why are you, Russia, even responding?

That is a foolish sign of weakness. As if Russia was still believing in the goodness of the west, as if it just needed to be awakened. What Russia is doing, every time, not just in this Skripal case, but in every senseless and ruthless attack, accusations about cyber hacking, invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and not to speak about the never-ending saga of Russia-Gate, Russian meddling and hacking into the 2016 US Presidential elections, favoring Trump over Hillary. Everybody with a half brain knows it’s a load of crap. Even the FBI and CIA said that there was no evidence. So, why even respond? Why even trying to undo the lies, convince the liars that they, Russia, are not culpable?

Every time the west notices Russia’s wanting to be a “good neighbor”, about which the west really couldn’t care less, Russia makes herself more vulnerable, more prone to be accused and attacked and more slandered.

Why does Russia not just break away from the west? Instead of trying to ‘belong’ to the west? Accept that you are not wanted in the west, that the west only wants to plunder your resources, your vast landmass, they want to provoke you into a war where there are no winners, a war that may destroy entire Mother Earth, but they, the ZionAnglo handlers of Washington, dream that their elite will survive to eventually take over beautiful grand Russia. That’s what they want. The bashing is a means towards the end. The more people are with them, the easier it is to launch an atrocious war.

The Skripal case is typical. The intensity with which this UK lie-propaganda has been launched is exemplary. It has brought all of halfwit Europe – and there is a lot of them – under the spell of Russia hating. Nobody can believe that May, Merkel, Macron are such blatant liars… that is beyond what they have been brought up with. A lifelong of lies pushed down their throats, squeezed into their brains. Even if something tells them – this is not quite correct, the force of comfort, not leaving their comfort zone – not questioning their own lives – is so strong that they rather cry for War, War against Russia, War against the eternal enemy of mankind. I sadly remember in my youth in neutral Switzerland, the enemy always, but always came from the East. He was hiding behind the “Iron Curtain”.

The West is fabricating a new Iron Curtain. But while doing that, they don’t realize they are putting a noose around their own neck. Russia doesn’t need the west, but the west will soon be unable to survive without the East, the future is in the east – and Russia is an integral part of the East, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), that encompasses half the world’s population and controls a third of the world’s economic output.

Mr. Putin, you don’t need to respond to insults from the west, because that’s what they are, abusive insults. The abject slander that Johnson boy threw at you is nothing but a miserable insult; you don’t need to respond to this behavior. You draw your consequences.

Dear President Putin, Dear Mr. Lavrov, Let them! Let them holler. Let them rot in their insanity. Respond to the UK no longer with words but with deeds, with drastic deeds. Close their embassy. Give all embassy staff a week to vacate your country, then you abolish and eviscerate the embassy the same way the US abolished your consulates in Washington and San Francisco a bit more than a year ago. Surely you have not forgotten. Then you give all Brits generously a month to pack up and leave your beautiful country (it can be done – that’s about what Washington is forcing its vassals around the globe to do with North Korean foreign laborers); block all trade with the UK (or with the entire West for that matter), block all western assets in Russia, because that’s the first thing the western plunderers will do, blocking Russian assets abroad. Stealing is in their blood.

Mr. Putin, You don’t need to respond to their miserable abusive attacks, slanders, lies. You and Russia are way above the level of this lowly western pack. Shut your relation to the west. You have China, the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), Russia is part of the OBI – President Xi’s One Belt Initiative – the multi-trillion development thrive, emanating from China, connecting continents – Asia, Africa, Europe, South America – with infrastructure, trade, creating hundreds of millions of decent jobs, developing and promoting science and culture and providing hundreds of millions of people with a decent life.

What would the west do, if suddenly they had no enemy, because the enemy has decided to ignore them and take a nap? China will join you.

Everything else, responding, justifying, explaining, denying the most flagrant lies, trying to make them believe in the truth is not only a frustrating waste of time, it’s committing political suicide. You will never win. The west gives a hoot about the truth – they have proven that for the last two thousand years or more. And in all that time, not an iota of conscience has entered the west’s collective mind. The west cannot be trusted. Period.



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Why I Disagree With The Strategy Of Exiting Facebook, Twitter And YouTube

ORIGINAL LINK

Earlier this month Ben Swann, an important voice for whom I have nothing but respect, expressed a sentiment in one of his excellent Reality Check videos that I’m seeing more and more in anti-establishment circles, and I happen to strongly disagree with it.

In a presentation titled “Internet Purge of Dissenting Voices?” on the recent increase in censorship of anti-establishment voices by large social media corporations, Swann said the following:

“The problem for any dissenting voice is that if you are using your voice on someone else’s property, i.e., YouTube or Facebook, you will never have control of it. Which is why the next frontier must be decentralized platforms. Platforms like Dtube and Steemit, built on blockchain, will be future of how content, the good the bad and ugly, will be stored. And the efforts to silence dissenting voices, will actually be the undoing of YouTube and Facebook.”

I disagree not with Swann’s endorsement of decentralized platforms like Dtube and Steemit (which are both excellent and essential weapons in our revolution against the establishment oppression machine), but with Swann’s assertion that the social media giants’ censorship of dissenting voices will be their undoing. It will not.

“2017 was a strong year for Facebook, but it was also a hard one,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month. “In 2018, we’re focused on making sure Facebook isn’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being and for society. We’re doing this by encouraging meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content. Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.”

Two questions:
(1) Does this sound like normal corporate talk to you? A corporation deliberately decreasing its advertising revenue for the benefit of “people’s well-being and society”?
(2) Does anyone honestly believe that Mark Zuckerberg has ever once in his life cared about “people’s well-being and society?”

Fast Company reports that time spent on Facebook is down a whopping 24 percent in a tone that seems to be warning that the company is in trouble, but Zuckerberg is actually publicly boasting about the loss and how beneficial it is for mankind. Not only has he drastically slashed his viewership, surely at great expense, but he’s also massively increased his overhead, hiring an extra 14,000 people to help fight “fake news”, which is expected to have risen to 20,000 by year’s end.

What kind of corporation does that? What kind of multibillion dollar corporation slashes its own profits that drastically without being legally compelled to, and does it for the good of “people’s well-being and society”?

These questions make it clear that we are looking at two possibilities here:
(1) That a Silicon Valley tech plutocrat, who censors the speech of political dissidents and hoards tens of billions of dollars while the poor starve, honestly cares about “encouraging meaningful connections” and being “good for people’s well-being and society” so much that he would slash his own profits to make that happen.
Or,
(2) This isn’t about helping people, and it isn’t about money. This is about marginalizing dissident voices as part of Silicon Valley’s extensive and well-documented alliance with the national security state.

Millionaires think in terms of money and profit. Billionaires think in terms of power and dominance. Zuckerberg isn’t filtering non-mainstream media off of Facebook for the good of society, and he isn’t doing it for money either. He’s doing it because he is an oligarch in the borderless new empire, and it is in the empire’s interest that dissident voices be silenced.

Silicon Valley is so intertwined with the agendas of intelligence and defense agencies that it’s gone beyond being used for surveillance and propaganda, and we now see things like Google straight up building AI for the Pentagon’s drone program. In an environment wherein money translates directly into political power, it’s impossible to grow beyond a certain size without learning to collaborate with existing power structures. Defense and intelligence agencies are the biggest enforcers of existing power structures in the new empire, and they will either empower you or your competition based on how willing you are to collaborate with them.

My point with all this is that the few clear-eyed rebels are not going to kill Facebook, Youtube and Twitter by marginalizing themselves into the fragmented fringe of alternative social media outlets like Steemit, Dtube, Gab, Minds, MeWe, etc. That’s exactly what these bastards want. They want us far away from their mainstream livestock. They want us to exit into some fringe circle that they will then invent a name for and smear as the place where all the kooks go. All of a sudden you’ll see all the mass media outlets simultaneously start using that label (“fringe conspiracy sites”, “fringe media”, who knows) in a derogatory and dismissive way, and from then on their herd will be immunized from our influence.

We should absolutely be expanding into new social media platforms (MeWe is an especially pleasant and collaborative site right now due to the current absence of pro-establishment disruptors), but we need to be engaging the mainstream as well, because they will not follow us. If Facebook can absorb a 24 percent dip that it caused by its own actions, then it can absorb the far smaller group of anti-establishment activists who would exit it as well.

I know it’s intensely creepy that these Silicon Valley corporations are being used to gather information on us. I know it’s incredibly frustrating to watch them strangle our numbers further and further into marginalization. But the reason they are fighting so hard to wedge us out of their mainstream platforms is because they want us out. Saying “Okay, well if you don’t want us here, we’ll leave!” is not a punishment, it’s a reward.

Tell Me More About How Google Isn't Part Of The Government And Can Therefore Censor Whoever It Wants? #Google #censorship #drone #pentagon #AI https://t.co/V6DKPWYodB

 — @caitoz

We need alternative social media platforms to enable us to talk to one another, but we need mainstream social media platforms to enable us to convey information to the mainstream as well. The empire is happy to have all of its dissidents marginalized into a small fringe group that it can then paint over with smear campaigns; what jams the gears of the propaganda machine is counter-narratives being shown to mainstream westerners.

Contrary to what the ideology of libertarians like Ben Swann would lead you to conclude, this isn’t a problem that the free market can sort out, because this is not a free market. The scales are being heavily weighted toward the social media outlets which collaborate most extensively with the interests of the empire, and that is where the mainstream population is going to remain for the foreseeable future. We cannot shut them down by exiting and taking some small amount of ad revenue away from them, but we can frustrate them so much that they are forced to expose their ham-fisted totalitarianism more and more.

By taking the revolution deep into the guts of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, we can force them to either allow us to speak or become more and more totalitarian with their censorship, until they are forced to reveal to mainstream America just what kind of beasts they really are. Either way, we’d be making it harder for them instead of doing their job for them by marginalizing ourselves.

The mainstream will not follow us if we exit mainstream platforms into tiny websites most people don’t even know exist. The average American isn’t going to say “Hmm, I’ve noticed there’s a disappointing lack of anti-imperialist ideas in my news feed, maybe I should go check out that Twitter imitation with the frog logo?” They’re going to stay right where the propagandists want them. So since we can’t pull them out, we’ve got to go in after them.

Noam Chomsky said that the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum, and that’s exactly what the propagandists are engineering with their censorship practices on Facebook, Twitter, and Google/Youtube. The only thing on the menu in cable news is an extremely heated ongoing debate ranging from the corporatist Orwellian warmongering neoliberalism of MSNBC to the corporatist Orwellian warmongering neoliberalism of Fox News, and they want that debate to be happening on mainstream online discourse as well.

As long as we refuse to leave mainstream social media circles, it’s like they’ve got Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity telling everyone what to think, and a bunch of fiery-eyed rebels keep storming the studio and kicking over their desks.

Stay where they don’t want us to the extent that you are capable, please. If you’ve left, go back in. Go back in and shine as bright as you can, attracting as many followers as possible and telling as much truth as you can get away with. Don’t leave until they drag you out kicking and screaming.

___________________________________

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Joe Biden Camp Braces, Attacks Before ‘Secret Empires’ Book Launch

ORIGINAL LINK

A forthcoming book due out next Tuesday is already drawing incoming attacks from members of former Vice President Joe Biden’s camp.

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In Rare Interview Kim Dotcom Says Obama-Jarrett are Directing Shadow Government From Their DC Bunker (VIDEO)

ORIGINAL LINK

.OBAMA_ATTACKS_CITIZENS_m.png

by Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit: Kim DotCom spoke out against the Deep State in a rare interview this week. The YouTube video is going viral and was promoted by Julian Assange. Kim DotCom believes Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett are running a shadow government against the Trump administration from their DC bunker. Kim DotCom: […]

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Ex-FBI Assistant Director: There Was A "High-Ranking" Plot To Protect Hillary; Brennan Leaked "Weekly"

ORIGINAL LINK

Former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom said that there was a plot among "high-ranking" people throughout government - "not just the FBI," who coordinated in a plot to help Hillary Clinton avoid indictment. 

"I think we have ample facts revealed to us during this last year and a half that high-ranking people throughout government, not just the FBI, high-ranking people had a plot to not have Hillary Clinton, you know, indicted," Kallstrom told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo.

"I think it goes right to the top. And it involves that whole strategy - they were gonna win, nobody would have known any of this stuff, and they just unleashed the intelligence community. Look at the unmaskings. We haven't heard anything about that yet. Look at the way they violated the rights of all those American citizens."

Brennan the leaker?

Expounding on the "high-ranking" plot to protect Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump, Kallstrom rattled off a list of involved parties - ending with Obama's CIA director, John Brennan...

Kallstrom: There's no question that he and McCabe and others in the FBI and the Justice Department, and, we're gonna find out the State Department and the National Security Advisor to the President, and the Deputy National Security advisor, and John Brennan.

Brennan notably fired off an aggressive tweet after FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's Friday night firing, stating "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you."

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you. https://t.co/uKppoDbduj

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018

Kallstrom and Bartiromo discussed Brennan's tweet, noting that the ex-CIA director had projected extreme animosity towards Trump, and was directly involved in leaks to the press

Kallstrom: My sources tell me that he was leaking almost weekly and daily. He was taking that bunch of phony crap supposedly from Russia, and peddling that through the Congress, all his buddies in the media, he was one of the active people. I've known him a long time.

Bartiromo: You think he's involved?

Kallstrom: Oh I think he's involved, absolutely. And I think it goes right to the top Maria.

In December, Kallstrom spoke with Fox Business News's Stewart Varney, where he said that the FBI's top brass has been conducting a highly politicized witch-hunt, and that a "cabal" of individuals, including McCabe, which set out to undermine Trump. 

Discussing the infamous "insurance polcy" text, Kallstrom said 

"People tweet each other and they send text messages, but they don't plan. The FBI is not in the business of planning to destroy a President of the United States," adding "I think they were way above their capability. This guy thinks he's the lone ranger, this Peter Strzok." 

If that's his thinking, and they were obviously in Andy's office plotting some kind of thing. And I think that some kind of thing is what we're seeing right now. And we've seen for the last, what, ever since he's been elected we've seen this facade and this phony challenge to Trump about collusion and Russia, which nothing could be further from the truth. All the collusion is with the Democrats, and it's very very depressing to be FBI agents. 99 percent are hard working patriotic guys and girls that come to work for the good of the country.

And you've got this cabal of people. You've got this deputy director (McCabe) who should have been out a long time ago for his actions. And then you’ve got Peter Strzok and who knows how many others. -James Kallstrom



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Snowden: Facebook Is a Surveillance Company Rebranded as ‘Social Media’

ORIGINAL LINK
Snowden Facebook Surveillance(ZHE) — NSA whistleblower and former CIA employee Edward Snowden slammed Facebook in a Saturday tweet following the suspension of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, over what Facebook says was imporoper use of collected data. In a nutshell, in 2015 Cambridge Analytica bought data from a University of Cambridge psychology […]

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US CENTCOM Chief Comes Clean: General's Three Stunning Admissions In The Mid-East

ORIGINAL LINK

Via Haaretz.com,

Assad has won, Iran deal should stand and Saudis use American weapons without accountability in Yemen: head of U.S. military’s Central Command's stunning Congressional testimony

The top U.S. general in the Middle East testified before Congress this week and dropped several bombshells: from signaled support for the Iran nuclear deal, admitting the U.S. does not know what Saudi Arabia does with its bombs in Yemen and that Assad has won the Syrian Civil War.

U.S. Army General Joseph Votel said the Iran agreement, which President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw from, has played an important role in addressing Iran's nuclear program.

"The JCPOA addresses one of the principle threats that we deal with from Iran, so if the JCPOA goes away, then we will have to have another way to deal with their nuclear weapons program," said U.S. Army General Joseph Votel.

JCPOA, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is the formal name of the accord reached with Iran in July 2015 in Vienna.

Trump has threatened to withdraw the United States from the accord between Tehran and six world powers unless Congress and European allies help "fix" it with a follow-up pact. Trump does not like the deal's limited duration, among other things.

Votel is head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia, including Iran. He was speaking to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the same day that Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson after a series of public rifts over policy, including Iran.

Tillerson had joined Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in pressing a skeptical Trump to stick with the agreement with Iran.

"There would be some concern (in the region), I think, about how we intended to address that particular threat if it was not being addressed through the JCPOA. ... Right now, I think it is in our interest" to stay in the deal, Votel said.

When a lawmaker asked whether he agreed with Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford's position on the deal,Votel said: "Yes, I share their position."

Mattis said late last year that the United States should consider staying in the Iran nuclear deal unless it was proven Tehran was not complying or that the agreement was not in the U.S. national interest.

A collapse of the Iran nuclear deal would be a “great loss,” the United Nations atomic watchdog's chief warned Trump recently, giving a wide-ranging defense of the accord.

Iran has stayed within the deal’s restrictions since Trump took office but has fired diplomatic warning shots at Washington in recent weeks. It said on Monday that it could rapidly enrich uranium to a higher degree of purity if the deal collapsed.

Syria

Votel also discussed the situation in Syria at the hearing.

During the Syrian army's offensive in eastern Ghouta, more than 1,100 civilians have died. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, backed by Russia and Iran, say they are targeting "terrorist" groups shelling the capital.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned on Monday that Washington "remains prepared to act if we must," if the U.N. Security Council failed to act on Syria.

Votel said the best way to deter Russia, which backs Assad, was through political and diplomatic channels.

"Certainly if there are other things that are considered, you know, we will do what we are told. ... (But) I don't recommend that at this particular point," Votel said, in an apparent to reference to military options.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was too strong to say that with Russia and Iran's help, Assad had "won" the civil war in Syria.

"I do not think that is too strong of a statement," Votel said.

Graham also asked if the United States' policy on Syria was still to seek the removal of Assad from power.

"I don't know that that's our particular policy at this particular point. Our focus remains on the defeat of ISIS," Votel said, using an acronym for Islamic State. 

Saudi Arabia

In a stunning exchange with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, Votel admitted that Centcom doesn't know when U.S. fuel and munitions are used in Yemen. 

“General Votel, does CENTCOM track the purpose of the missions it is refueling? In other words, where a U.S.-refueled aircraft is going, what targets it strikes, and the result of the mission?” Warren asked.

“Senator, we do not,” Votel replied.

The Senator followed up, citing reports that U.S. munitions have been used against civilians in Yemen, she asked, “General Votel, when you receive reports like this from credible media organizations or outside observers, is CENTCOM able to tell if U.S. fuel or U.S. munitions were used in that strike?”

“No, senator, I don’t believe we are,” he replied.

Showing surprise at the general's response, Warren concluded, “We need to be clear about this: Saudi Arabia’s the one receiving American weapons and American support. And that means we bear some responsibility here. And that means we need to hold our partners and our allies accountable for how those resources are used,” she said.



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Maria Zakharova blows apart poisoning hoax: US should “be put under question

http://theduran.com/maria-zakharova-blows-apart-poisoning-hoax-us-should-be-put-under-question/

U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un/u-n-has-testimony-that-syrian-rebels-used-sarin-gas-investigator-idUSBRE94409Z20130505

Many Americans have no clue what transpired in Syria. Here are 3 narratives explaining the conflict in Syria | Syrian War For Dummies – Three Versions

http://theduran.com/many-americans-have-no-clue-what-transpired-in-syria-here-are-3-narratives-explaining-the-conflict-in-syria/

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Nine Major Problems with James Comey’s Involvement with the Trump Hoax Dossier

ORIGINAL LINK

NEW YORK -- James Comey took to Twitter on Saturday to respond to an earlier tweet by President Trump about the Russia probe, with the former FBI director exclaiming that the “American people will hear my story very soon.”

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How The New York Times Is Making War With Iran More Likely

ORIGINAL LINK

It’s not easy to say which country America will fight in its next ill-advised war. Iran? Or, assuming President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un don’t hit it off at their summit, North Korea? Maybe even Venezuela or Russia?

It’s easier to say what one of the major causes of the war will be: the failure by many Americans — notably politicians, journalists, think tankers, and other elites — to employ a specific mental power that we’re all capable of employing.

That power is called cognitive empathy, and it’s not what you might think. It doesn’t involve feeling people’s pain or even caring about their welfare. Emotional empathy is the kind of empathy that accomplishes those things. Cognitive empathy — sometimes called perspective taking — is a matter of seeing someone’s point of view: understanding how they’re processing information, how the world looks to them. Sounds unexceptional, I know — like the kind of thing you do every day. But there are at least two reasons cognitive empathy deserves more attention than it gets.

First, because the failure to exercise it lies behind two of the most dangerous kinds of misperceptions in international affairs: misreading a nation’s military moves as offensive when the nation itself considers them defensive, and viewing some national leaders as crazy or fanatical when in fact they’ll respond predictably to incentives if you understand their goals.

The second reason cognitive empathy deserves more attention is that, however simple it sounds, it can be hard to exercise. Somewhat like emotional empathy, cognitive empathy can shut down or open up depending on your relationship to the person in question — friend, rival, enemy, kin — and how you’re feeling about them at the moment.

And, to make matters worse, there’s this: In Washington, lots of money is being spent to keep us from exercising cognitive empathy. Important institutions, most notably some we misleadingly call “think tanks,” work to warp our vision. And the reality-distortion fields they generate can get powerful when the war drums start beating.

You may have trouble understanding why Iran would fear an unprovoked attack.

Consider, as a case study, a recent piece about Iran in the New York Times.

It was a front-page story — the lead article in the physical edition of the paper — written by Ben Hubbard, Isabel Kershner, and Anne Barnard. The headline, in the top-righthand corner of the front page, read, “Iran Building Up Militias in Syria to Menace Israel.”

Just about any expert on Iran would agree that, strictly speaking, this headline is accurate. However, a number of experts would add something that these three reporters failed to add: From Iran’s point of view, the purpose of menacing Israel may be to prevent war; having the capacity to inflict unacceptable damage on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv can be a way of keeping both Israel and the U.S. from attacking Iran.

You may have trouble understanding why Iran would fear an unprovoked attack. Most Americans don’t think of their country as wantonly aggressive and most Israelis don’t think of their country that way, either. But Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran — and eight years ago assassinated Iranian scientists on Iranian soil. And America, for its part, has repeatedly signaled that it reserves the right to bomb Iran and that it would stand by Israel in the case of war with Iran.

Against the backdrop of Iranian history — including America’s support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which produced hundreds of thousands of dead Iranians — it’s hardly surprising that Iran views both Israel and America as forces to be deterred; or that Iran sponsored anti-American Iraqi militias after a massive American military force invaded and occupied neighboring Iraq in 2003; or that when America and its allies armed Syrian rebels, thus turning a probably doomed insurrection into a full-scale civil war, Iran sent forces into Syria to save its longstanding ally, Bashar al-Assad’s regime, rather than see it toppled possibly by pro-American forces.

If you want this kind of insight into Iran’s perspective, I recommend avoiding the New York Times and checking out the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. There you’ll find a piece by Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, called “Iran Among the Ruins.”

Nasr writes that “the Israeli and U.S. militaries pose clear and present dangers to Iran.” He explains how this threat, along with hostile Arab neighbors and other perceived threats, has given rise to Iran’s policy of “forward defense.” He writes: “Although Iran’s rivals see the strategy of supporting nonstate military groups” — in Syria and Lebanon — “as an effort to export the revolution, the calculation behind it is utterly conventional.” Iran’s foreign policy, Nasr explains, is driven by national interest more than revolutionary fervor and “is far more pragmatic than many in the West comprehend.”


Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Dr. Vali Nasr testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about "Syria after Geneva" on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 26, 2014. AFP PHOTO / Jim WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Vali Nasr testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about “Syria after Geneva” on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 2014.

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images


The New York Times reporters don’t seem to have consulted Nasr, or any of the other respected analysts who have similar views of Iran’s strategic perspective. The result is unbalanced reporting.

The Times piece tells us that Israel and the U.S. “fear Iran’s growing influence,” that Israel “fears that it could face a threat” from Iranian proxies in Syria, that “many Israelis” sense “danger,” and that Iran’s behavior “worries Israel.”

All true. But there’s no mention of Iranian “fears” or “worries” or perceived “danger.” There’s also no mention of what, from an Iranian perspective, is a glaring asymmetry: Iranians and Iranian proxies in Syria are there with the permission of Syria’s government. But when Israeli jets routinely enter Syrian airspace to bomb those proxies, Israel doesn’t have the government’s permission and so, is violating international law. So too with the American troops that are stationed in Syria without the government’s permission and that have fought against pro-Assad forces; this is illegal under any but the most tortured reading of international law.

Far from highlighting this asymmetry, the Times story could give the casual reader the idea that the asymmetry points in the other direction. The story opens with this sentence: “When an Iranian drone flew into Israeli airspace this month …” No mention of the fact that this incursion, apparently by a surveillance drone, not an armed drone, was such an aberration that some observers think it was accidental. And no mention of the many Israeli violations of Syrian airspace that had preceded it, sometimes with lethal consequences. (And, at the risk of getting too picky, no mention of the fact that the “Israeli airspace” the Times said was violated was actually over the Golan Heights, which under international law is Israeli-occupied Syrian territory.)

The unbalanced presentation isn’t surprising in light of the Times reporters’ choice of sources.

This unbalanced presentation isn’t surprising in light of the Times reporters’ choice of sources. They quote an American official and an Israeli official and a former Israeli official, but no Iranian officials or former officials. And their selection of D.C. think tanks to rely on for analysis doesn’t exactly skew to the left.

The first Washington think-tank expert quoted in the piece is Amir Toumaj from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As John Judis noted in a Slate profile of this think tank several years ago, back when the Iran nuclear deal was taking shape, FDD’s “positions have closely tracked those of the Likud party and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — not just on the Iran deal, but on the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the desirability of a two-state solution.” In its original application for tax-exempt status, FDD — then called EMET, the Hebrew word for ‘truth’ — said its mission was “to provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations.” FDD has gotten funding from various far-right, “pro-Israel” donors, including Sheldon Adelson, who once seriously proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran — just in the desert, he emphasized, to convey that “we mean business.”

So, naturally, when the New York Times is assembling a story about a conflict between Israel and Iran, it turns for impartial guidance to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

FDD does an impressive job of cultivating experts who can give journalists useful and sometimes hard-to-find information — and who, in return, get quoted a lot in the media. Almost invariably, the quotes strike a balance: They don’t overtly editorialize — and indeed are often defensible observations insofar as they go — yet they carry a subtle slant. The FDD quote in the Times piece is a good example: “The ultimate goal is, in the case of another war, to make Syria a new front between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran. They are making that not just a goal, but a reality.”

It’s no doubt true that if there’s a war with Israel, Iran would rather it not take place in Iran. But nowhere in the New York Times piece is there even consideration of the possibility that from Iran’s point of view the main point of robust proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon is to reduce the chances of war by deterring Israeli and American aggression.

I’m not saying we know that’s the case; I’m just saying this possibility is taken seriously by enough experts to warrant, say, 20 or 30 words in the course of a 1,700-word piece whose headline says Iran aims to “menace” Israel. Yet the Times piece never suggests that Iranian strategy could be aimed at reducing the threat to Iran by any means other than pushing the arena for war away from Iran’s borders.


A picture taken on February 11, 2018 shows an Israeli soldiers deployed in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights near the border with Syria.Israel issued stark warnings on Sunday over Iran's presence in neighbouring Syria after a confrontation threatened to open a new and unpredictable period in the country's seven-year civil war. / AFP PHOTO / JALAA MAREY (Photo credit should read JALAA MAREY/AFP/Getty Images)

A picture taken on Feb. 11, 2018, shows an Israeli soldiers deployed in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights near the border with Syria.

Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty Images


The Times piece includes a powerful visual aid: a map of Syria showing lots of “long-term positions held by Iranian forces or their allies.” I have no idea how this data was gathered, so I guess we’ll have to trust the source. But if you look at the credit line, you’ll see that the source is the Institute for the Study of War, another D.C. think tank whose objectivity is dubious at best.

The Institute for the Study of War’s ideological profile is clear: Its board members have included various neoconservatives, such as Bill Kristol, and it has gotten money from neoconservative and otherwise hawkish donors (including, in fact, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), as well as from defense contractors. The institute’s founder and president has argued for U.S.-backed regime change in Syria because, as she put it, the “security of the United States and its allies would be significantly enhanced if Assad fell and Iranian influence over Syria were removed.”

The Times piece does mention one D.C. think tank that isn’t ultra-hawkish. Near the end there’s a quote from an expert at the vaguely centrist Atlantic Council. But it turns out that this particular expert, Ali Alfoneh, was until 2016 at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and before that was at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.

Alfoneh’s quote is: “Iran has realized that it is actually possible to maintain a front against Israel where there is no war but also no peace.” No mention of the fact that virtually all violent encounters between Israel and Iranian proxies in Syria — the incidents that have meant there is “no peace” — have been initiated by Israel, not the proxies.

Reporters from the Times are relying for “analysis” on sources that, in some cases, seem intent on drawing the U.S. into military conflict with Iran.

The New York Times famously helped get America into the Iraq War with reporting, by Judith Miller and others, that relied heavily on neoconservative and other hawkish sources. This reporting helped keep us from understanding what was going on in Saddam Hussein’s head: He was trying to hold onto power in Iraq and save as much face as possible, not hide a secret weapons of mass destruction program.

This misreading was abetted not just by the Times, but by various media outlets and various think tanks, ranging from the American Enterprise Institute to the “liberal” Brookings Institution.

And now we’re repeating the exercise with Iran. Reporters from the Times and other media outlets are, like Miller, relying for “analysis” on sources that, in some cases, seem intent on drawing the U.S. into military conflict with Iran. And it’s not as if these sources are keeping their agenda hidden. A week before the Times piece ran, Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tweeted in support of the idea that the U.S. military should attack “vulnerable Iranian forces” in Syria.

One reason the reality distortion field surrounding Iran has gotten so amped up is that Washington’s traditional source of funding for specifically anti-Iran talking points — far-right, “pro-Israel” donors — has increasingly been supplemented by money from Sunni Arab states that are Iran’s regional rivals. Another is that various players in the Trump administration have various reasons for favoring anti-Iran policies.

Still, Iran isn’t the only case of a media-abetted perceptual distortion that could bring war. The extent to which both North Korea’s and Russia’s behavior is defensively driven tends to get underplayed, and the craziness of their leaders — particularly in the case of Kim Jong-un but occasionally in the case of Russian President Vladimir Putin — tends to get overplayed.

In all of these cases — Iran, Russia, and North Korea — the problem is a lack of cognitive empathy, a failure to understand what’s going on inside the heads of adversaries. The good news is that cognitive empathy is often not as hard to muster as emotional empathy; you don’t have to try to feel sorry for leaders who have done horrible things. The bad news is that cognitive empathy is harder than it seems and can be impeded by activating such emotions as fear.

For that reason, it’s understandable that Israelis wouldn’t extend much cognitive empathy toward Iran. Given Israel’s history and the hostility it faces from various neighbors — and the way some Iranian leaders spout anti-Zionism talking points — it’s only natural that many Israelis and many of Israel’s most ardent American supporters dismiss as hopelessly naïve the idea I’ve put forth: That Iran, too, has deep fears about its security and these may explain some of its seemingly threatening behavior. By the same token, it’s understandable that people in Gaza and Lebanon who have endured massive and deadly Israeli military campaigns doubt the Israeli claim that these are motivated defensively, to preserve a security that feels tenuous.

“Think tanks” that actually deserve that name should help us transcend these and other tribal perspectives, not reinforce them; help strengthen, not impede, cognitive empathy. And so should journalists — even if impeding cognitive empathy is good for traffic and conveniently streamlines the reporting process.

Top photo: Iran’s T-72B3 tank competes in a relay race during the Tank Biathlon semifinal event as part of the 2017 International Army Games, at Alabino shooting range on Aug. 10, 2017.

The post How The New York Times Is Making War With Iran More Likely appeared first on The Intercept.



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