by Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit: Dr. Cyril Wecht joined Kennedy on FOX Business Network on Wednesday night to discuss Jeffrey autopsy results. Dr. Wecht, who is a doctor and lawyer, told Kennedy a Montreal study found only 2 of 239 hanging death resulted in a broken Hyoid bone — or less than 1% of […]
August 16, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – In the aftermath of the second Democratic primary debate on July 31, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard emerged as the most Googled of all candidates, an indication that her performance (which included a stunning takedown of California Sen. Kamala Harris over her criminal justice record) attracted the attention of many viewers. This heightened level of attention produced blowback, both from Harris, who dismissed Gabbard as “an Assad apologist” (a reference to Syrian President Bashar Assad), and from the mainstream media, typified by CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who alleged that Gabbard—a major in the Hawaiian National Guard, with two tours of duty in the Middle East under her belt—is taking the side of Assad over the U.S. intelligence community and U.N. inspectors when it comes to assigning blame for chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.
“What you are referring to are [sic] cynicism as skepticism that I have expressed, because I’ve served in a war that was caused by people who lied to us, who lied to the American people, who presented false evidence that members of Congress and U.S. senators believed and voted for a war that resulted in the loss of lives of over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform,” Gabbard replied to Cuomo. “It’s our responsibility as lawmakers and as leaders in this country to make sure that our U.S. military is not being activated and deployed to go to war unless we are certain a) that it serves the best interests of the American people; and b) that that action will actually have a positive impact. The questions I’m raising are based on this experience that I’ve had.”
As someone who challenged the position of the U.S. government regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs before the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, I believe that Gabbard’s skepticism over allegations that the Assad government used chemical weapons to attack the towns of Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and Douma in 2018 is well placed.
My purpose here is not to check the veracity of Postol’s research, rebut Higgins’ claims or fact-check Gabbard’s web page. What Iwill do, as a veteran Marine Corps intelligence officer and experienced weapons inspector, is throw my weight behind Gabbard’s expression of skepticism.Gabbard has detailed her concerns about allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria on her campaign website. Her position, and her reliance on the work of Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has published critical assessments of both the Khan Shaykhun and Douma incidents, has drawn the ire of many in the mainstream media and elsewhere, including Eliot Higgins, founder of the website Bellingcat, who published a scathing rebuttal of both Postol’s work and Gabbard’s reliance on it.
The chemical incident at Douma on April 7, 2018, has been largely debunked—the initial claims regarding the use of the nerve agent sarin have been shown to be false, and evidence has emerged that indicates that a pair of chlorine tanks claimed to have been dropped by helicopters belonging to the Syrian military as weapons were, in fact, manually placed at the scene by opposition forces. There is no doubt that the initial assessment of the situation used by the U.S. government to justify a military strike in response to the allegations regarding Douma was fundamentally flawed, and that Gabbard—alone among all the Democratic presidential hopefuls—was correct to expressed her doubt over its veracity.
More complicated is the incident that occurred at Khan Shaykhun on April 4, 2017. Here, investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) claim to have uncovered evidence that civilians from Khan Shaykhun were exposed to Sarin. The key question surrounding the Khan Shaykhun incident isn’t whether Sarin was used, but rather who used it. The U.S. government and the OPCW have concluded that the Syrian government is responsible for the attack. Postol, Gabbard and I all have concerns over that conclusion.
No independent investigator has been to the site of the Khan Shaykhun incident, including the OPCW investigators who assert Syrian government responsibility. This is a crucial fact that fundamentally affects how data is evaluated. Khan Shaykhun was, at the time of the alleged attack, under the control of opposition forces loyal to the Nusra Front, an al-Qaida offshoot. Several nongovernmental organizations also were present, including the White Helmets, a civil defense/rescue organization, and the Syrian American Medical Society, or SAMS, which provides volunteer medical care in opposition-controlled Syria. Both the White Helmets and SAMS operated under the auspices of the Nusra Front while working in the Khan Shaykhun region. In conducting its investigation, the OPCW relied exclusively upon the White Helmets and SAMS for information regarding the alleged attack, access to alleged victims of the attack for interviews and medical testing, and physical samples alleged to have been removed from the scene of the attack.
This reality is fatal to the credibility of any finding issued by the OPCW. In my 10-plus years as a weapons inspector in both the former Soviet Union and Iraq, I helped write the book on on-site inspections, including developing initial procedures for establishing chain of custody for chemical samples gathered during an inspection. I can assert, without fear of being contradicted, that there can be no formal, legally binding attribution or conclusion made from evidence that lacks an absolute chain of custody from moment of collection to final analysis. This was the case with the United Nations Special Command (UNSCOM) in Iraq, and with the U.N. mission to investigate alleged chemical weapons incidents in Syria. That mission, which operated in Syria from Aug. 19 through Sept. 30, 2013, is on record as rejecting numerous evidentiary materials on the basis of being unable to “independently verify the information received” or “verify the chain of custody for … sampling.”
The OPCW, however, modified its procedures to allow the introduction of both the White Helmets and SAMS into the evidentiary chain of custody, embracing them as a means of information verification even though OPCW investigators were not part of the initiating processes involved in witness selection and screening. This failure to adhere to fundamentals has cast doubt on the credibility of the OPCW’s findings, if for no other reason than that it allowed an al-Qaida-affiliated entity—the Nusra Front—to fundamentally shape its investigation, thereby opening its conclusions to challenge.
Postol and Higgins expend significant effort on discussing the science of sarin; I take a more basic approach to the Khan Shaykhun incident: How did the sarin get there? The OPCW concludes that “a relatively large bomb” delivered “from a medium or high altitude, of between approximately 4,000 and 10,000 m[eters]” is the probable delivery means of the sarin used at Khan Shaykhun. This assessment is highly problematic, especially because it was impossible for the aircraft the OPCW asserts was used to deliver this bomb—a Syrian air force Su-22—to accomplish this task. If it was impossible for the Syrians to drop a chemical bomb on Khan Shaykhun from an aircraft, then the entire episode, as recounted by the OPCW—based upon evidence provided by the Nusra Front, the White Helmet and SAMS—must be viewed as a fabrication.
The OPCW cites radar maps provided by the United States and France that place an Su-22 aircraft over Khan Shaykhun on the morning of April 4, 2017. “The aircraft was depicted as flying in a circular loop pattern in the vicinity of Kafr Zayta and north-east of Khan Shaykhun,” the OPCW report noted. “The map indicated that the closest to Khan Shaykhun that the aircraft had flown had been approximately 5 [kilometers] away.”
This information conforms with Syrian air force logs provided to the OPCW by the Syrian government, as well as a statement provided by a Syrian pilot who flew the Su-22 aircraft on the morning of April 4; the pilot claimed the closest he had flown to Khan Shaykhun was seven to nine kilometers, while carrying out an attack using conventional munitions near the village of Kafr Zayta, situated approximately eight kilometers southwest of Khan Shaykhun.
The OPCW said it consulted with an unnamed “weapons expert” to determine “the confluence of distance and altitude from which it might be possible to hit Khan Shaykhun with an aerial bomb.” The “expert” concluded that “depending on a number of variables such as altitude, speed and the flight path taken, it would be possible for such an aerial bomb to be dropped on the town from the aforementioned distances.” The OPCW did not provide the variables used by the “expert” in making this determination, or an example by which these variables could produce the outcome claimed.
There is a simple reason why it did not—the “expert” is dead wrong.
A briefing provided by a Russian air force officer directly contradicts the OPCW claims that an Su-22 aircraft dropped a bomb on Khan Shaykhun on the morning in question. For the Su-22 to carry out an attack, the Russian officer noted, it must visually acquire the target and, from an altitude of no more than 4,000 meters, fly directly at the target at a speed of 800 to 1,000 kilometers per hour. Based upon these parameters, the release point of a bomb would be between 1,000 and 5,800 meters distant from the target. Even then, the Su-22 would require an additional three to nine kilometers to make a turn away from the target after dropping the bomb. The radar track used by the OPCW shows an Su-22 aircraft flying west of Khan Shaykhun, on a path parallel to the town. The flight path is not consistent with that needed to deliver a bomb on Khan Shaykhun.
While Western “experts” have dismissed the Russian presentation as a charade, I find it credible. As a former aircrew member of a Marine Corps OA-4 Skyhawk light attack aircraft, which possesses performance characteristics similar to that of the Su-22, I have flown air-to-ground strike missions similar to that claimed for Khan Shaykhun. I could fly the flight profile indicated by the U.S. radar track 100 times, and never get a bomb anywhere near the area where the Khan Shaykhun crater in question is located. This point is furthered by the fact that a basic analysis of the crater puts the azimuth of strike nearly perpendicular to the line of flight of the Su-22 when passing west of the town; for a bomb to have been delivered, the aircraft would have had to significantly depart from its flight path, overflying the target, before turning and resuming its course. The radar shows no such deviation. (The “loops” flown by the aircraft north of Khan Shaykhun could likewise never have provided the direction of attack needed to deliver a bomb to the crater in question.) This is the crux of the problem facing the OPCW—it claims that an aerial bomb loaded with sarin was used to strike Khan Shaykhun, and yet the evidence it provides regarding the presence of the sole vector capable of delivering this weapon—the Syrian Su-22—disproves its case.
The tale of the Syrian Su-22 represents both the alpha and omega of the allegations of Syrian government complicity regarding the use of sarin at Khan Shaykhun. One can debate sarin persistency, alternative vectors for agent delivery and other tangential issues until they are blue in the face. But for the Nusra Front, White Helmet and SAMS narrative to be viable, there must have been an attack by a Syrian air force Su-22 that delivered an aerial bomb to the center of Khan Shaykhun. Yet the evidence provided demonstrates conclusively that this could not have occurred. Based upon this reality, everything that follows must be viewed as a “false flag” incident or, as Gabbard’s website notes, “evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.”
“I believe,” Gabbard states on her website, “that we should all carefully look at the evidence before coming to any conclusions as to whether or not al-Qaeda or the Syrian government were responsible for these particular attacks.” That she has done so with a critical eye is not only commendable, but what one would expect from a soldier who seeks to be the commander in chief of the U.S. military.
That the mainstream media continue to attack Gabbard for her stance on Syria and chemical weapons is indicative of the low bar that exists for American journalism today. That President Trump and all the Democratic presidential candidates have failed to display a modicum of intellectual curiosity about what really happened in Douma and Khan Shaykhun should alarm any American who professes to care about issues of war and peace.
Scott Ritter spent more than a dozen years in the intelligence field, beginning in 1985 as a ground intelligence officer with the US Marine Corps.
This article was originally published by “Truthdig” ––
Plans for the Boston Public Library, the nation’s second-oldest public library, were approved in 1852, the same year Massachusetts passed the country’s first compulsory schooling law. Both public libraries and public schools are funded through taxation and both are “free” to access, but the similarities end there. The main difference between public libraries and public schools is the level of coercion and state power that public schooling wields.
Voluntary vs. Compulsory
Libraries are open and available for anyone to access. You can quickly sign up for a library card if you want borrowing privileges, but you don’t have to. You can come and go freely, spend time in whatever library sections most interest you, ignore ones that don’t, and leave when you want. You can ask for help and support from a librarian if you choose. You can participate in a class that the library offers or access one of the library’s many online resources, but those are all optional. You may not always like a library’s programming, but you don’t have to participate in anything you don’t want to. If you don’t like your neighborhood library, you can freely visit one in another neighborhood or another town. You mix daily with a wide assortment of people of all ages and backgrounds at your library, reflecting the diversity of your community. Aside from the public levy, everything is voluntary.
Moreover, you don’t ever have to step foot in a library and still have access to books and resources through bookstores and online retailers. Your library has no control over what your local bookstore sells, and the library system can’t dictate rules to Amazon.
Public schools, which are more aptly called government schools because of the force associated with them, are nothing like public libraries. Parents are required to register their children for school under a legal threat of force, and the ages at which a child must attend school are lengthening. Parents can choose to homeschool or enroll their child in a private school, but in most states, homeschooling and private schools are regulated by the state under compulsory schooling statutes. Education is controlled by the state, even for non-public entities that receive no public money.
This is akin to your public library monitoring the books that Barnes & Noble sells, but it goes well beyond that. In each state, young people are required to meet certain attendance thresholds in terms of hours of classroom learning. It would be like the library system mandating that you visit your library – assigned to you based on your zip code – a certain number of days and hours each year, or, alternatively, visit Barnes & Noble for those same number of days and hours with a report to the state to prove it. While you’re at your library or bookstore, you are also required to learn about specific subjects whether you want to or not. And there may be a test.
Freedom over Force
If the public library system had the same power as the public schooling system, there would be far fewer private booksellers. When you are required by law to receive library services for a certain number of hours per year, you will likely go with the “free” option rather than paying to receive your mandatory library services at Barnes & Noble, which would charge a fee. Indeed, this happened with mandatory schooling.
In his book Schooled to Order, historian David Nasaw explains that as government schooling became compulsory in Massachusetts, the number of private schools in the state dropped from 1,308 in 1840 to only 350 by 1880.[1]Similar trends occurred in other states as they enacted compulsory schooling laws, with private school enrollment subsequently plummeting. It’s hard to compete with “free” and compulsory.
Most of us would never tolerate a level of coercion and state power associated with public libraries that we routinely accept with public schools and education more broadly. As back-to-school time nears, it’s worth celebrating the many ways that public libraries facilitate non-coercive, self-directed learning for all members of the community and questioning why we would ever want our children to learn in spaces where force, not freedom, prevails.
[1]Nasaw, David. Schooled to Order: A Social History of Schooling in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 83.
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This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
[Image Credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Katie Gieratz]
Even during Question Period, it’s unusual for every seat in the Canadian House of Commons to be occupied. But, over four days in April, a not-for-profit organization called Equal Voice Canada held its second annual conference there and filled the chamber with politically active young women from every region of Canada. The taxpayer-funded event, entitled Daughters of the Vote (DotV), was intended to encourage women’s participation in electoral politics. After the youthful delegates took their places in the handsome chamber-room, with its ornate wooden panelling and stained glass windows, they were welcomed by the Hon. Kim Campbell, Canada’s first and only female prime minister. (Campbell, a Conservative, served briefly in 1993 when she inherited a faltering administration from Brian Mulroney.)
The National Observerreported that, of the 338 young attendees, 146 “identified as a visible minority” and 39 were Indigenous. “Many of you,” Campbell acknowledged, “are activists…for issues about which you feel passionately…who want to make changes…to fulfill your vision for the country.” But, she warned, anyone serving in Ottawa must remember that everyone else there “had exactly the same right to express their views.” Civility, Campbell added, “is even more important in the age of social media.”
Within an hour of Campbell’s plea, approximately 40 delegates stood up at their seats and turned their backs on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to protest his expulsion of two female MPs from the liberal caucus the previous day. In March, Equal Voice had presented Trudeau with their annual EVE award for his “commitment to amplifying women’s role in public life.” Now, at an event he had made possible by sending tax dollars their way, young women were accusing him of ignoring misogyny, indigenous genocide, Inuit suicide, and Islamophobia. When Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer spoke, dozens of delegates walked out of the chamber. The Green party leader Elizabeth May, on the other hand, was greeted with loud hoots of delight.
The protesting delegates were dismayed to find themselves criticized for these actions in the media and by many of their peers. Six of them contacted the National Observer, an independent newspaper, which then shared their story in a lengthy and highly sympathetic article. The six women, the Observer reported, had experienced “a series of discriminatory encounters” at the conference “that left them feeling unsafe, unacknowledged, and traumatized.” Equal Voice responded with an apologetic message on its website, which read, in part: “Of the 338 delegates, it was clear that the majority had an overall positive experience…Equal Voice sincerely regrets that some delegates experienced harassment in person or online.”
But Equal Voice’s critics were not so easily appeased. Now, an even uglier episode has plunged the organization into an existential crisis, battered by accusations of racism and white supremacy that it is seemingly helpless to deflect. The newly hired executive director is facing a personnel and public relations nightmare. What follows is the story of a well-intentioned initiative ambushed from within by a radical minority of activists whose zealotry threatens to destroy a program set up to help women enter political life. To observers, this row offers a reminder that the greatest threats to progressive campaigns come not from the conservative Right, but from their own puritanical fringes.
Three New Hires
Equal Voice was founded in 2001 to assist Canadian women who wish to enter electoral politics and raise the proportion of female representation at all levels of government. Executive director Eleanor Fast describes the organization as “multi-partisan,” which she affirms means “supporting women of all political stripes.” It is not a large organization. In addition to a handful of staffers at the national office, there are nine regional volunteer-supported chapters, which help provide services like campaign bootcamps for aspiring female politicians. It is not a charity and can’t issue tax receipts.
After some lean years during the previous Conservative administration, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals turned the taps on after their return to power in 2015. Money rained down on Equal Voice—over five million dollars’ worth—to enable the Daughters of the Vote conference and other programs. Fast, an experienced non-profit administrator with a warm and engaging smile, stepped into the position of executive director on the eve of the 2019 DotV event. It was her job to oversee the newly-expanded staff and a host of ambitious—if abstract—initiatives, including the systemic change program.
Shanese Indoowaaboo Steele, 26, Cherie Wong and Leila Moumouni-Tchouassi, both 23, told the National Observer that “they were hired to help the organization become more equitable…[because] Equal Voice had a problem with racial discrimination.” Given their youth, they did not have extensive employment backgrounds but all had been very active at university. Moumouni-Tchouassi was a former vice-president of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) and Wong had led the campus Green Party affiliate there. Steele was the Vice-President of Equity for the Trent University Student Association, where she proposed a speaker for an event entitled “It’s Okay To Be (Against) White(ness).”
Wong, who was hired as a policy analyst for the systemic change project, has stated that the new hires were not trying to create equality, but equity, an important distinction which focusses not on equality of opportunity but equality of outcome. “I literally need equity just to survive,” Steele told a local radio host after her dismissal. Despite their job titles, it is apparent that the young women were not given much, if any, autonomy in their roles and their remarks make it clear that their co-workers mistrusted their judgment, and, increasingly, their work habits. From their point of view, they were providing exactly what they had been asked to provide—strategies to overcome systemic barriers—and they were being ignored or shut down. “We were constantly being told that we don’t understand. That we [don’t] have enough experience on [Parliament] Hill,” Steele told the Hill Times, an Ottawa political newsletter.
The three young women felt thwarted over many of the details for the DotV event in April. They later said they had to fight to get a black-delegates-only panel, a designated safe space room, anti-racism and anti-oppression training sessions, and that many of their other requests were refused. Tensions continued through the spring and summer. As Wong later told reporter Fatima Syed, “We had literally been banging our heads against the wall.”
Increasingly dissatisfied with the performance and attitude of the three young women, Eleanor Fast did what any prudent manager would do—she increased her supervision of their activities and she laid out her expectations for them. She directed them to stop using Equal Voice equipment for outside projects, stop watching TV during work hours, and account for their time and activities. These reprimands were not well received. “My ancestors,” Steele complained, “did not survive 300 years of slavery to feel like I had an overseer.”
After a tense staff meeting in May, Moumouni-Tchouassi emailed Fast to complain that she was making “abhorring and generalized statements.” The three staffers were “faced with the most malapropos work practices.” The email called Fast’s competence and integrity into question. “[T]here is only so much harassment, mismanagement, and discrimination we will take.” She concluded the email with “Best regards.” The fact that she made her correspondence with Fast public can only mean she believes that anyone reading it would take her side in the dispute.
Moumouni-Tchouassi was hired as an engagement officer but, ironically, when she was a vice-president at the student federation at the University of Ottawa, she was accused of helping to create a toxic work environment and being an aloof and negligent administrator. Her modus operandi was to de-platform those she perceived as ideological foes. In 2017, she ordered the members of the Right to Life club to take down a public display. The club later received an unsigned but awkwardly worded email stating: “This email is to inform you of your club’s removal from the SFUO clubs system. This decision was made due to the ways in which your mandate is in contention with the SFUO’s principles.” She was successful in cutting off funding for the pro-life club, but not in her efforts to defund the University’s two Jewish clubs and to pass a BDS resolution.
Equal Voice is an organization that has refused to draw the line. Whenever policy or political ideologies are brought up—like, “why are you supporting this candidate who is blatantly racist?”—we don’t talk policy, we only talk about, “support all women in politics.” That’s their catchphrase: “we support all women no matter what they believe in.” And that has manifested into a kind of tolerance for white supremacy.
Wong had referred to a female candidate as a “Nazi defender” on one of her personal social media accounts and was warned by Fast, but Wong would not concede that libelling women was not appropriate for someone working in a multi-partisan organization. Equal Voice is a corporate entity restricted not by a mere “catchphrase,” but by its articles of incorporation, and it is therefore unable to draw a line to exclude the women Wong dislikes. Equal Voice was founded—and is funded—“to create public awareness about the under-representation of women…in elected political positions.”
Deviating from their mandate would not only defeat Equal Voice’s reason for existing but threaten its very existence. Furthermore, the executive director is responsible for ensuring that grant monies are spent for the purposes stipulated by the donors, and not on the political agendas of the staff. When I asked Fast if she had attempted to drill these basic, easily comprehensible facts into the head of her recalcitrant staffer, she declined to comment, citing privacy and confidentiality issues. Wong’s refusal to accept and abide by the foundational premises of the organization should have been grounds for dismissal. Instead, things took a much more personal and ugly turn.
In late July, Steele posted “my E[xecutive ]D[irector] is an ignorant white colonizer” on her Instagram account, and Moumouni-Tchouassi and Wong re-posted the comment to their own. Three days later, they were all were fired, reportedly for harassment of their colleagues at Equal Voice and defamation of Fast. A publicity nightmare swiftly ensued that shows no signs of abating. The National Observer responded to these developments with another sympathetic article by Fatima Syed, who had profiled the six DotV protesters, and the three former staffers lit up Twitter, with the most effective online attacks coming from Cherie Wong: “Very ironic in how I was responsible (& successful) to make systemic change happen for elected womxn, but fired for attempting systemic change in my own workplace.” She has also called out Equal Voice’s corporate donors and asked them to stop supporting the organization.
Very ironic in how I was responsible (& successful) to make systemic change happen for elected womxn, but fired for attempting systemic change in my own workplace #NotSoEqualVoice#cdnpolihttps://t.co/8epODVX7lf
Convinced that racism was the reason for their termination—an accusation that Eleanor Fast emphatically denies—Steele claimed that Equal Voice had taken down the staff profiles from the organization website to hide the fact that there were no longer any women of color on the payroll. “That is absolutely untrue,” Fast tells me. She says the staff profiles were pulled down at the request of some of the remaining staff, who—owing to the negative coverage and the blistering social media campaign—were receiving abusive messages. “The safety of our staff is paramount.” Fast kept her own profile up. “I have continued to receive a lot of abuse online,” she says.
From the Right and the Left
The conflict between management and the young staffers at Equal Voice is not only an ideological divide, but a generational one, and the younger cohort employs a particularly dramatic lexicon. There is no such thing as valid criticism. There are only “attacks,” “bullying,” “blowback,” “gaslighting,” and “silencing.” People don’t go somewhere, they “enter a space.” There is no anecdotal testimony which may or may not reflect the truth of the larger picture, there is only “lived experience” and “our own truths.”
After days of being called white supremacists, and being outflanked and condemned on the Left, Equal Voice responded with another meek apology: “We know we can do better. We are committed to doing better.” Their soft answer did not turn away wrath, however, it only inflamed it. The passive voice non-profit jargon, with its talk of commitment and empowering and stakeholders and best practices, now seems out-of-date and particularly feeble in the face of the onslaught against the organization.
But Equal Voice also has its critics on the Right who believe conservative ideas and conservative women have gotten short shrift from the organization over the years. It was not only delegates of color who felt bullied at the 2019 DotV event. Hannah Dawson Murphy, a 22-year-old conservative candidate from Nova Scotia, admitted to me that she disapproved of the walk-out and described it as a “hissy fit.” Her disapproval brought a swarm of invective. “One girl came up to me and called me a racist for clapping for [a Conservative pro-life MP].” Other attendees insulted her weight and appearance, and told her she shouldn’t wear the little crucifix necklace she always wears.
Intolerance and hatred at Daughters of the Vote. ** Additional note: I know I'm not very well spoken in this video. This was a very hard subject to talk about and speaking out made me quite nervous. Thank you all so much for your kind words and support!
There is evidence that some of the delegates gave as good as they got: an Inuit woman who complained of being bullied sent a (since deleted) tweet after a meet-the-politicians-event which read: “Please tell me why slimy white old men were made to “mingle” with the [delegates]?” Another delegate recently tweeted: “I said to another delegate after she went after me for ‘disrespecting our former prime minister.’ Why should I show respect to someone who makes me feel like less than a person on my ancestral homelands?” A Muslim delegate was the target of hundreds of anonymous abusive and frightening social media posts and comments, to which she responded with courage and dignity. But she could not resist playing politics, and tried to implicate Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, although she presented no evidence in support of her claim.
This youthful cohort are completely uninhibited about emphasizing their emotional fragility. They could benefit from studying the video of Kim Campbell’s adamantine strength under pressure when she walked out onto an empty stage to give her concession speech after the catastrophic 1993 election, when her party was reduced from 154 seats to just two. For this new generation of feminists, such stoicism is disdained in favour of being “in tears,” “devastated,” “literally weeping,” and “literally tear(ing) up in shock,” like the unhappy DotV delegates who “sat in a room for six hours and cried over their experience.” When Moumouni-Tchouassi suggested that alcohol be banned from the DotV event, a manager replied, “If [the delegates] can’t be around alcohol, they’ll never make it on the Hill.” This remark, Moumouni-Tchouassi told reporter Fatima Syed more than three months later, had left her “shaken.”
Fast told the Hill Times, an Ottawa political newsletter, that Equal Voice has since hired a “senior equity adviser.” “Senior” hopefully means someone older than 25.
Outpoliticked
Equal Voice is not, and cannot be, the kind of organization the three fired staffers and their allies want, and for the simple reason that it was not incorporated for that purpose. This was a lesson Moumouni-Tchouassi failed to learn when her radical agenda and high-handed tactics at the University of Ottawa helped lead to the destruction of the SFUO and its replacement by another student union. However, the lip service paid by Equal Voice to equity and diversity, and the emphasis on recruiting Daughters of the Vote from marginalized backgrounds has, quite understandably, laid them open to charges of hypocrisy and tokenism.
Amy Kishek, a former board member of Equal Voice, co-host of the “Bad and Bitchy” podcast, and a grievance officer for a government union, has publicly stated that the organization she formerly supported is now past saving. “You cannot fix a broken political system without disrupting the current social order,” she wrote. “You cannot bring more young women of colour and Indigenous women into political spaces without also doing the work of decolonizing these spaces.”
Michelle Rempel, a conservative member of parliament, is dubious about the premise of a multi-partisan organization and thinks that the organizers of Equal Voice have not always been representative of the full spectrum of Canadian politics. At a time when many women on the Left would deny that a conservative woman can even be a feminist, “we have to unpack the notion of feminism.” Good intentions are not enough. She thinks an organization should receive public funds only if it can demonstrate that it has “achieved the purported results—how many women have been elected?” Conservative MP Rachael Harder thinks Equal Voice is a “noble” idea, but she feels the leaders of the organization “have traditionally been quite left leaning,” as evidenced by “what we saw with DotV in the spring and the way those on the political Right were treated by the staff and by other girls within the program.”
The efforts of Wong, Steele, and Moumouni-Tchouassi to advance their own political agendas made a rupture inevitable. And perhaps the rupture and its loud fallout was not only inevitable, but intentional. As part of her vigorous Twitter campaign against her former employer, Wong asked the rhetorical question: “Why do we keep pouring taxpayer money…into an organization that upholds white supremacy and oppression? Why do we not give money to organizations that are engaging women meaningfully?”
Why do we keep pouring tax payer money, and sponsors who pay into, an organization that upholds white supremacy & oppression?
Wong is now promoting The Young Womxn’s Leadership Network (YWLN) as the kind of organization that deserves support. As it happens, the YWLN was founded by Arezoo Najibzadeh, a friend and supporter of the three fired women, and a fierce critic of Equal Voice. As a delegate at the inaugural Daughter of the Vote event in 2017, she planned to protest the sexual harassment of women in politics by refusing to take her seat. As she recalls, the Equal Voice organizers (who at that time were mostly volunteers) would not cooperate with her plan to mount a campaign on the back of an event they had organized and paid for. As she told Desmond Cole when she appeared on his show with Steele, “As long as you were…going with what they had planned for you, [the organizers] were okay…but as soon as you started to build your own narrative and use that space to tell your own story…you were constantly shut up….I was totally erased from the narrative.” Two years later, a cohort of about 40 delegates grabbed the spotlight and hijacked the event.
Equal Voice was established to teach young women about the ins and outs of politics. Instead, Equal Voice is getting schooled. As more and more former Daughters of the Vote go online to allege that their free trip to Ottawa was a horrible, traumatic, miserable experience because of the pervasive misogyny and racism to which they were allegedly subjected, they are showing an adeptness with social media and a facility for partisanship which rivals that of the most experienced old backbencher. Equal Voice, meanwhile, continues to respond to its critics’ fury with meekness—Eleanor Fast said she would “be happy to discuss” giving a political action grant to a group of young women who have accused her of gaslighting and traumatizing them. “We will advance change, with or without @EqualvoiceCA,” Wong has tweeted. “Either be the change, or be the obstacle that we destroy.”
Lona Manning is a former non-profit administrator. She has served on constituency associations (local political organizations), run for public office, and volunteered in political campaigns in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada. Manning is the author ofA Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park, and its sequel, A Marriage of Attachment.You can follow her on Twitter @laowaiatlarge
The ridiculous corporate media freakout over Senator Bernie Sanders’ entirely legitimate accusations of pro-establishment bias continues today, with shrill, absurd new headlines like “Sanders campaign continues attacks on journalists” and “Bernie Sanders isn’t sorry” featuring hysterical MSM drama queens rending their garments over the suggestion that plutocrat-owned media outlets could be favorable to the plutocrat-owned establishment.
In response to this cartoonish display of billionaire-sponsored performance art, The Hill’s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjati aired a segment on their online show Rising which is as damning an exposé on the dynamics of mass media empire propaganda as we are ever likely to witness. With startling frankness and honesty, the pair disclose their experience with the way anyone who is critical of the establishment consensus is excluded from mainstream media platforms, as well as the way access journalism, financial incentives, prestige incentives and peer pressure are used to herd mainstream reporters into toeing the establishment line once they’re in.
I strongly urge you to watch the eight-minute segment for yourself, but I’ll be transcribing parts of it as well for those who prefer reading, as well as for posterity, because it really is that historically significant. I will surely be referring back to this segment in my arguments about plutocratic media bias for years to come, because it confirms and validates everything that analysts like Noam Chomsky have been saying about mass media propaganda like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Status quo propaganda is the underlying root of all our problems, and Ball and Enjati have gifted us with an invaluable tool for understanding and attacking it.
After laying out the evidence from some recent examples of bias against Sanders in the mainstream media, former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball (yes, her real name) asked rhetorically, “Now the question is why?”
“Look, obviously I’ve worked in this industry for a minute at this point and journalists aren’t bad people, in fact, they’re some of my closest friends and favorite people,” Ball said. “But they are people, they’re human beings who respond to their own self-interest, incentives and group think. So it’s not like there’s typically some edict coming down from the top saying ‘Be mean to Bernie’, but there are tremendous blind spots. I would argue the most egregious have to do with class. And there are certain pressures too — to stay in good with the establishment [and] to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism. So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too.”
“Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run,” Ball continued. “I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”
“Every journalist at every outlet knows what they can say and do freely and what’s going to be a little stickier,” Ball said. “No one is ever going to have their anti-Bernie pieces called in to question since he stands outside the system. Their invites to the DC establishment world are not going to be revoked, and may even be heightened by negative Bernie coverage. “
“Back in the run up to 2016 I wanted to cover the negotiations on TPP more,” Ball disclosed a bit later. “I was told though, in no uncertain terms that no one cared about trade and it didn’t rate. To be clear, this was not based on data but on gut feeling and gut feeling that had to influenced by one’s personal experience mixing and mingling with upscale denizens of Manhattan. I didn’t really push it; maybe they were right. Of course TPP and trade turned out to be one of the most central issues in the entire 2016 election. It turns out that people did, in fact, care. Now this class bias translates into bad coverage of candidates with working class appeal, and it translates to under-coverage of issues that are vitally important to the working class.”
Many journalists - either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement - are completely misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up: https://t.co/AgznEp3LB1
Ball’s co-host Saagar Enjati went on to describe his own similar experiences as a White House correspondent.
“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” Enjati said. “It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”
“I’ve definitely noticed this in the White House press corps, which is a massive bias to ask questions that make everybody else in the room happy, AKA Mueller questions,” Enjati continued. “Guess what the American people don’t care about? Mueller. So when you ask a question — I’ve had this happen to me all the time. I would ask a question about North Korea, like, you know, war and nuclear weapons that affect billions. Or I would ask about the Supreme Court, the number one issue why Trump voters voted for President Trump, and I would get accused of toadying to the administration or not asking what Jim Acosta or whomever wanted me to ask. It’s like, you know, everybody plays to their peers, they don’t actually play to the people they’re supposed to cover, and that’s part of the problem.”
“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
“Every time I took that message to ask Trump a question, I knew that my Twitter messages were going to blow up from MSNBC or Ken Dilanian or whomever for ‘toadying’ up to the administration, and it takes a lot to be able to withstand that,” Enjeti concluded.
As we just discussed the other day, Ken Dilanian is literally a known CIA asset. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s a well-documented and historically undeniable fact, as shown in this Intercept article titled “The CIA’s Mop-Up Man”. The testimony that Dilanian’s establishment sycophancy affects not just his own reporting but those of other reporters as well via strategically placed peer pressure is highly significant.
For obvious reasons these insider confessions are as rare as hen’s teeth, so we must absorb, circulate them, and never forget them. I’m still floored and fall-to-my-knees grateful to Ball and Enjati for putting this information out there for the sake of the common good. Our task is now to use the information they provided to help wake people up from the narrative control matrix.
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Or perhaps "Epstein was an intelligence asset" is just a tissue-thin cover for a much more destructive reality: those at the top of the American state have no moral compass at all.
Let's start by stipulating that the Jeffrey Epstein story is so sordid and outlandish that it's like a made-for-TV movie about the evil proprietor of a nightmarish enclave of private perversion and sexual exploitation, Lolita Island.
For Epstein's victims, the nightmare was all too real.
Next, let's stipulate that in a nation with a functioning system of justice, every individual who knew about Epstein's degenerate empire and did nothing to stop it should be ushered into a Federal prison cell to ponder their sins against the exploited girls and against the nation.
Yes, as in treason, as in "throw them in prison and let them rot" treason. As I have explained, corruption and debauchery undermine the legitimacy of the state, and so doing nothing while Epstein et al. gratified the desires of the rich and powerful for degenerate debauchery was treasonous: the American state will collapse not from military conflict but from moral decay, and every individual who enabled (or made use of) that moral decay is guilty of treason.
Which leads us to the basic questions of the case: who protected Epstein for decades, and why? There are several explanations floating around for the why: those in power enjoyed their diabolically exploitive visits to Lolita Island and wanted to continue their criminal gratifications.
The second explanation is that Epstein was a spy for a "friendly" foreign intelligence agency and therefore off-limits. ("Friendly" is in quotes because when it comes to intelligence, one's "friends" can do more damage than one's worst enemies.)
Let's say this turns out to be true. Wouldn't the NSA, CIA and FBI know of Epstein's activities and connections to a foreign intelligence service? Of course they would. So at a minimum, we can infer the NSA, CIA and FBI enabled Epstein's operation to continue for some benefit, perhaps relating to "honeypot" blackmail and control of "assets," unwilling or willing.
This narrative is the "explanation" for Epstein's wrist-slap conviction a decade ago: he was supposedly an "asset" of US intelligence.
So exploiting vulnerable girls served the "national interests" and therefore it's all OK. If we're supposed to believe this is the heart of the matter, how is America any different from a corrupt developing-world kleptocracy organized to gratify a handful of oligarchs and their cronies?
Or perhaps the "he was an intelligence asset" is just a tissue-thin cover for a much more destructive reality: those at the top of the American state have no moral compass at all. That honeypots and blackmail are standard-issue tools of spycraft targeting individuals in the employee of other nations is a given, but presumably the CIA doesn't recruit 14-year girls as bait (although nothing should surprise us at this point).
But Lolita island (a.k.a. Orgy Island) was not spycraft; it was a privately operated wholesale exploitation of underage girls for the gratification of the Western world's male elites. That some enterprising agency recruited (or blackmailed) Jeffrey Epstein was predictable, as the treasure trove of compromising videos could yield all sorts of useful leverage on highly placed individuals.
Many of us sense an existential crisis is close at hand, and the U.S. is ill-prepared for such a crisis. Possibilities broached by others include a global war, a break-up of the U.S. into regional states, or a civil war of some sort.
My bet is on a moral and financial crisis in which the ruling elites and the federal state lose their legitimacy, i.e. the consent of the governed. As their Federal Reserve "money" loses value and the corruption of the ruling elites and the government they control reaches extremes, the citizenry will no longer heed their corrupt, self-serving "leaders."
If America's ruling elites will not let justice be done, then they guarantee a revolt against the elites that could track a very grim path if that is the only option left open to the citizenry.
Once again I turn to The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats for a poetic evocation of the coming crisis:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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Creepy as hell! #TimPool says his posts are being suppressed. When I include his Twitter tag in my tweet, THE TWEET WON'T POST! Here's the YouTube link again: youtube.com/watch?time_con… He does a great job of explaining how #Google will prevent Trump's reelection, Now at 165K views
Scientists have declared that the era in which the Ebola virus is considered an incurable disease has come to an end. The announcement, made Monday, comes after two experimental treatments proved so effective in recent trials that they will now be offered to all patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country is currently in the throes of a year-long outbreak of Ebola—the second-largest outbreak ever.
Spending hours on smartphones and tablet devices has frequently been linked to exacerbating mental wellbeing, but new research claims the damage might start in users as young as two. After just one hour of screen time, children and adolescents may have less curiosity, lower self-control and lower emotional stability, which can lead to an increased risk of anxiety and depression, claims a US study published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports. The researchers found that those aged 14 to 17 are more at risk for such adverse effects, but noticed the correlations in younger children and toddlers, whose brains are still developing, as well. The study found that nursery school children who used screens frequently were twice as likely to lose their temper. It also claimed that nine per cent of those aged 11 to 13 who spent an hour a day on screens were not curious in learning new things, a figure which rose to 22.6 per cent for those whose screen time was seven hours a day or more. Authors Professor Jean Twenge, of San Diego State University, and Professor Keith Campbell, of the University of Georgia, said: "Half of mental health problems develop by adolescence. "Thus, there is an acute need to identify factors linked to mental health issues that are amenable to intervention in this population, as most antecedents are difficult or impossible to influence. "Compared to these more intractable antecedents of mental health, how children and adolescents spend their leisure time is more amenable to change."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.
Whatever was behind the "sonic attacks" experienced by US government personnel in Havana, Cuba, starting in late 2016 remains a mystery - but a new study published Tuesday looks inside the workers' brains for clues. MRI brain scans from 40 patients - 23 men and 17 women - showed variations in brain structure and functional connectivity ... when compared with 48 other adults. "There were group differences all over the brain," said study author Ragini Verma. "Especially in an area called the cerebellum, which is also implicated in the kind of clinical symptoms that most of these patients were demonstrating, which is balance, eye movement, dizziness, etcetera." Differences in connectivity were also observed in the brain's auditory and visuospatial areas. These patterns don't fit a clear picture of a specific disorder. "It certainly does not resemble the imaging presentation of traumatic brain injury or concussion, although they present with clinical symptoms which are concussion-like," Verma said. "The sounds were often associated with pressurelike or vibratory sensory stimuli," according to the study. One patient reported hearing two 10-second pulses, while others said they could hear the sound for more than 30 minutes. State Department and federal investigators have testified that they were unable to determine the source or cause of the ailments in Havana, stating only that they "were most likely related to trauma from a non-natural source."
Note: Read more on these mysterious "sonic attacks." Sound weapons developed for war and increasingly used against civilian populations are well-documented. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on non lethal-weapons from reliable major media sources.