Just from what I know so far (and I’m always open to changing my mind if I find anything new), I’ve kind of concluded that this is a “good-guy” intel operation.
See what it accomplishes:
1. Gets to bring up the US gripe with Chinese hackers against the US, while simultaneously giving the Chinese a bit of a fright, with indications of how far they’ve been hacked. Lots of room here for swinging between arm-twisting and the kind of hugging boxers do before matches
2. Brings out of the closet the massive extent of the US surveillance state and does it in a colorful “sexy” way, replete with pole-dancing, a little gender-tweaking, spy versus spy. Desensitizes the public to some of it, while alerting it about some of its dangers.
3. Lets the “bad guys” and terrorists know that the USG has their number.
4. Scares away any minor trouble-makers from joining “the revolution” (Wolf’s point). Creighton’s point is exactly the opposite - that Snowden is a provocateur.
5. Now comes my favorite explanation - “maps” social networks and assesses real-time responses, in a form of cyber war-gaming or, if your prefer it, a kind of opinion poll.
6. Informs people of the need to encrypt communications. This is the good guy part. The government is concerned that a lot of its data bank is being used by criminals and private contractors for their own purposes. So mom and pop need to be told it’s a good thing to encrypt (it is, if you can).
However, even Snowden admits tacitly that the NSA can get its hands quite easily on anything you write, even encrypted, by spying at other points in the chain of communication.
7. Separates bloggers/activists/other trouble-makers into groups:
a. Those who will support their fearless leader, not matter what. And those who won’t.
b. Those who will play the game, and those who aren’t into game playing, generally.
c. Those who can be allowed a greater voice. And those who can’t.
8. Feeds bogus information about the NSA into the internet to confuse foreign intelligence agencies (and my heart is not breaking for any of them)…. because the “battle-field is everywhere”.
9. Feeds bogus information to activists at home who might otherwise inadvertently disclose sensitive security matters.
10. Possibly hurts another agency or department (i.e. interdepartmental outing, a favorite sport of the government (think State versus CIA or FBI versus Military Intelligence).
11. Payback against Booz Hamilton or maybe this is a government versus contractor pay-back?
12. Creates a credible and popular voice in the alternate media.
I want to clarify that I don’t mean by this that anyone who supports Snowden is a tool. Not at all.
But, unless they have inside information that they can’t or won’t disclose (or even indicate they have), they cannot possibly be so sure, since what we know so far about Snowden is so sketchy and contradictory.
I have to infer that they are be taking things on authority from Greenwald (or Binney or Ellsberg) and tying their own credibility to his.
Or they are simply digging themselves in, because it’s “for the team,” so to speak.
That might suit, if you think this is all about Team A versus Team B…
But I don’t buy that as a working model for blogging. I just don’t.
So, no, you can support Snowden and not be a tool.
And conversely, you can oppose him and not be a fink. How’s that for fair?
Bob Wenzel, at EPJ, is now looking at the Poitras angle as well.
To give him credit, Anthony Wile did get it right from the start….courtesy of Creighton. Give him credit for reading everyone, not just his ideological pals.
Foundation-funded activism and “gate-keeping” by the left (and by the right) is one of the premier reasons that real journalism gets subverted, so I’m very happy to read this post, especially as this is an argument best made by native-born Americans.
Scott Creighton:
“Poitras has a long history of making films that expose various horrific aspects of our new Global War OF Terror… to a point. Her preoccupation with the “blow back” meme is troubling to me as is her recent payday (more in the quote below) and to my knowledge she doesn’t focus on the fact that we own and support many of the terrorist destabilization campaigns across the globe. How can an investigative journalist have that much access, that many frequent flier miles and not know the most basic fundamental foundation of the manufactured War Of Terror? For that matter, how does she explain being such a thorn in the side of the establishment and keep flying around the world without a care talking to “terrorists”? Oh yeah, they take her aside when she goes through customs sometimes. That’s her credibility story.
“But her role as the first point of contact for disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs has drawn the glare of attention to the independent filmmaker who, abruptly, has pushed documentaries deeper into the realm of journalistic immediacy.
For peers and backers of Poitras, the 2012 recipient of a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, it’s unsurprising that she has seized a story worth telling. However, her crucial involvement with a confidential source and two newspapers on the same big exclusive is extraordinary.” Huffington Post
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a 5.6 billion dollar slush fund financing NGOs in over 60 countries across the world. MacArthur was a banker owning Bankers Life and Casualty and other businesses. Their focus is on the media and public affairs.
When you want to silence an outspoken critic, the best and least troublesome way to do it is to buy them off with a foundation grant. Just ask Amy Goodman about that. And Poitras got a half million dollars last year?
Curiously, it was Poitras herself who reportedly brought in the Post reporter and Greenwald on this story after having been anonymously emailed by Snowden back in Jan of this year.
Snowden understands that no email is absolutely untraceable and he sent her and Greenwald emails explaining his desire to snitch out the NSA?
Greenwald has had a target painted on his back for a long time. At least since the Stratfor files leaks and the HBGary scandal. They’ve wanted to shut Glenn up for years. Now’s their chance……”
AND
“With Obamagod talking about “welcoming the discussion” and saying things like “you can’t have 100% security and 100% privacy” it seems pretty clear that what is happening isn’t about exposing the NSA but rather modifying the public opinion toward the Big Brother state we live in.
And for the record, the NSA may have predicted this would be the real CHANGE of the Obama presidency, but so did MANY of us while independent journalists like Greenwald welcomed the ushering in of George W Obama.
[Lila: I, on the other hand, spotted Obama as the hedge-funds' candidate in 2007 and voted for no one, although I supported in Ron Paul in 2008.
In 2012, I supported the Paul candidacy on educational grounds until December 2011 and then stopped supporting him too. I finally supported the excellent candidate NOBODY, who so far, hasn't let me down one bit...]
SCOTT CREIGHTON:
“So that wasn’t too difficult to see even back then… meaning you didn’t need to work for the NSA to figure it out.
The only question surrounding this story at this point, at least for me, as a not-so Obama-loyal democrat, is how much does Greenwald really understand about all of this crap he’s found himself in and how deep is he willing to dig himself into the sludge before he can bring himself to admit he’s been set-up with a Bush gone AWOL document?
Does he have his own MacArthur Foundation paycheck? Is he just too damn proud to admit he’s been had? Is he fighting to push this thing beyond it’s reasonable limits because he fears it will destroy the last remaining opposition to our slide toward Big Brother or has he just gone full retard in his effort to finally land that big ground-breaking world changing story?
The trouble with passion sometimes is that it can be manipulated by people skilled at doing so in ways that leave you blind to reason. The harder you try to defend what you feel passionate about, the looser your grip becomes on the rational. Ask any fundamentalist religious fanatic how that works. Ask any of the remaining Obamaites. Or a Redskins fan (not really fair now that we have RG3… but for two decades it was an apt comparison)
So Mr. Greenwald, you never go full retard. Not as a journalist. And I know I don’t qualify because I don’t get weekly direct deposits from such noble institutions like the Guardian that supported NATO’s merciless bombing of Libya and the ongoing terrorist destabilization campaign in Syria (to say nothing of the WMD claims of yesteryear)
But take the advice of a little lowly blogger who got it right back in 2008 when so many others didn’t… this is not about exposing the NSA. It’s about exposing you Mr. Greenwald and us by association.
In short, the question isn’t is Edward Snowden a legitimate whistle-blower… the question is whether or not Glenn Greenwald is a legitimate journalist or just another tool?”
Lila: Yes. Of course, that’s what it’s all about. So why don’t activists with a great deal of intelligence and far more political and marketing savvy than me figure that out? You tell me.
Hmm. Ole Wenzel at EPJ wakes up and smells the freshly-brewed Langley Java, now that dissent diva, Naomi Klein Wolf says it’s OK to be suspicious….
Well, we forgive him. The boy works hard.
Thus, yours truly again saves the credibility of free-marketers, much tarnished from ill-conceived enthusiasms caught by sticking too close to each other and not close enough to the facts.
“Whether it’s the Gallup or Pew poll of Americans on surveillance, there is not a rock hard super-majority that is against the surveillance state. Americans haven’t experienced the possible downsides of a state that can go back years to hear and read their most private communications.
[Lila: Actually, that is what happened to me, and, as best as I can understand it, it wasn't the surveillance state as such, but some private individual who employed contacts at the state to access my private information, without any authorization. I was able to confirm my suspicions after talking to counter-surveillance specialists who had formerly worked in the government who said that private and corporate accessing of individual information, illegally, was a huge problem.]
They are blissfully unaware of the workings of police states and the role played by the state’s possession of files on everyone. They do not understand that when the blackness of the human heart is combined with the control of such vast information sources, the most horrible oppression results. They cannot imagine the horrible workings of suspicion, greed, envy, snitches, and hatred, or the workings of the reformers, the religious, the utopians, the social planners, the intellectuals, the power-hungry and the idealists when they gain such power. They do not understand that when the machinery of oppression and dominance is rolled into place, and this includes access to private information on anyone and everyone, that all it takes is a pull of the switch — a crisis, real or manufactured — for Congress to pass a law that turns on the police state. They do not understand that once it is turned on, the nation must go through the wringer to get it turned off, and that could take generations.
Dismantle the machinery of oppression now! It is much easier to do it now, than later, and it is already very hard to do this even now.”
Attrition.org (William Knowles…which coincidentally just happens to be one of the nom-de-plumes of my cyberstalker) has an idea worth a hundred cyberspoo-er-warriors/heroes/titans etc.
Do It Yourself:
“The idea here is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the world’s intel agencies will be too busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all.
Anyone who has read the source code of my homepage or Prayers Pay will see the list below with some additions here and there, You might want to sprinkle some of these words into your X-headers for a little fun. Most to nearly all of these words have been collected using open sources, (books, online, seminars, conventions, broadcasts, movies, etc…)But I am always looking for more. Mail me if you have any.
At arstechnica, Edward Snowden, with years at the CIA under his belt, looks for a cushy European posting that he thinks he can wangle by pretending an interest in Middle Eastern “hell-holes”.
“Thank god for wars,” he says, in true Sophie Scholl fashion…
“Say, Department of State. They’re understaffed right now, but Europe posts are competitive, but you can get in the door much easier if you express an interest in going to near-east hellholes. Once you’re in, tough out the crappy tour and you should be able to pick from a list of preferred posts.
Alternately, get a clearance. If you’re cleared, have a lifestyle, and have specialized IT skills, you can go anywhere in the world right now.
Snowden has been described as an accomplished player of a video game called “Tekken,” a fight game. In Language of Empire, I wrote about the use made of video-games by the military to desensitize adolescent males to violence and rehearse them in the mentality of the killers they will be trained to become.The US, of course, is not alone in using video games in this way. A recent piece in the Guardian describes the popularity of video-games among the world’s militaries.
That same piece describes the extent of US research into this new frontier of mind-control and brainwashing:
It’s a toxic relationship in Turse’s opinion, since gaming leads to a reliance on remote-controlled warfare, and this in turn makes combat more palatable.”
Please note that by the late 1990s, the center of the US military’s partnership with Hollywood and the Gaming industry was Southern California. Please note that Ryuhana was established in 2002 ( accidentally wrote 2012 before) , next to the NSA in Fort Meade. Please note that after it folded up there in 2004, it moved to California.
The LRC claim was based solely on Snowden’s 2 year stint at a Japanese anime company.
However, as I noted in my previous blog, that company, Ryuhana, was sited next to the NSA when Snowden, whose parents were both in the service of the state, went to work for it. The chances are that Ryuhana had some kind of government connection, since comics have long been a venue for state propaganda.
And why not? Comic strips are read more widely than any kind of opinion editorial. If editorial writing and reporting is closely monitored by the state, why wouldn’t comic book writing?
“Unlike government titles charged with turning sewage treatment processes or Social Security benefits into the stuff of page-turning drama, this title featured government work in all its two-fisted, action-packed glory, with page after page of machine-gun strafing, saber disembowelings, and other vividly rendered war-time carnage. Issues like this one also featured dozens of actual black-and-white photographs of Marines in combat—hanging out in foxholes, poking enemy dead with bayonets, carrying their wounded brethren on stretchers.
In Government Issue, Richard Graham notes that while many commercial newspaper comic strips featured content depicting the war, including depictions of “Nazis as Teutonic buffoons and the Japanese as blood-drooling torturers,” the Office of War Information worried that such depictions were “too simplistic and could lead to over overconfidence” because they portrayed “the enemy as lazy and posing little threat.”
Perhaps that’s why on the cover of this Marine-approved comic, Prime Minister Tojo is depicted as a lively eight-legged sea-monster.”
But comics have their uses not only in demonizing the enemy in war-time. They can also be used to “sell” a country to its allies.
A piece at Japan Today, August 9, 2010 analyzed the American use of Japanese comics as the American military’s new Okinawa strategy:
“The U.S. military has produced a four-part manga series in Japanese titled, “Our Alliance – A Lasting Partnership.” The BBC, Yahoo news and various other sources picked up the AFP story without any mention of the obvious – this is pure propaganda concocted for the sole purpose of brainwashing Japan’s youth into accepting the massive American military presence right in their backyard.
At a time where opposition to the 47,000 U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa and other parts of Japan has reach a tipping point, it seems the new U.S. strategy may be to simply outwait the more vocal older generations and instead focus on the younger generations who are already largely apathetic to such issues.
In the first issue of the comic (which can be seen at http://www.usfj.mil/manga), an American boy, Usa-kun (U.S.A.-kun), comes to Japan and befriends a Japanese girl called Arai Anzu (sounds like “Alliance when spoken by Japanese). He tells her he has come to defend her home because they
are “important friends.”
“It’s good to have a friend you can rely on to go with you,” the little girl concludes.
Typical of modern reporting, the media articles merely regurgitate the press release given to them without adding any neutrality to the story, submitting obediently and serving as mouthpiece to the story’s “source” – which in this case was just a phone call with no apparent follow-up or questions challenging the motives of the manga.
Some gems spewed by U.S. forces’ propaganda office rep, Neil Fisher, include explanations on how the cute bunny-like characters “explore and learn about the U.S. military in Japan and its role in the U.S.-Japan alliance.” He nearly gives away his hand when he admits the U.S. chose manga because it’s “a very common way of communicating in Japan,” or “It is read as much if not more than newspapers” and “A lot of people love manga… Manga is a very light-hearted way to carry information.”
This isn’t the first time the U.S. has used comics to infiltrate the minds of Japanese children. In 2008, amid heavy opposition to an American nuclear powered aircraft carrier being permanently stationed at Yokosuka just south of Tokyo, the U.S. handed out 26,000 copies to children and young residents of a 200-page comic staring an American navy hero. The comic depicted the U.S. navy servicemen as ideal neighbors at a time when safety concerns over nuclear energy and crimes committed by Americans stationed in the area were in the spotlight”
Given this history, Snowden’s “Ryuhana,” situated as it was right next to the NSA (2002-2004) at Fort Meade, in Maryland, might well have been actively involved in state propaganda and Snowden’s stint there, far from being anomalous, his first work for the surveillance state.
True, he was a webmaster at an (ostensible) anime company in 2002.
But, by 2004, the company had wound up its business.
That means it was open for business for all of two years. And guess where it was? At Fort Meade in Maryland, right next to the National Security Agency:
“Ryuhana closed in 2004 as the primary proprietors went off to college and opened a new business in California, according to the website. Other contributors to the site could not be reached for comment.
The defunct company listed an address in Fort Meade, Md., next door to the National Security Agency.”
I saw this blog postsuggesting that Snowden was worried by the surveillance state in 2006, because someone with the handle The TrueHOOHAh, whom the blog identifies with Snowden, comments at a site called arstechnica:
“NSA’s new surveillance program.
That’s the sound of freedom, citizen!”
on May 19, 2006.
May 2006 would be only two years after Snowden had signed up for the Special Forces and then the NSA, where he worked as a security guard.
Well, we applauded Sophie Scholl in “Mobs,” but just as reductio ad hitlerum is a rhetoric of desperation, so too is such “sophi-stry.”
Asserting without evidence that every self-proclaimed act of whistle-blowing (endorsed by such notable organs of the state as The Guardian and The New York Times, mind you) must be the same as the resistance of the White Rose is merely an admission that you have no other arguments on your side except US versus Them.
This is an appeal to the mob and demagoguery. I had hoped for more from Mr. Hornberger.
So for him… and for all the LRC cohorts who see any refusal to buy the latest creation of the intelligence services as a sign of “commies,” “Obamaites,” and government stooges…..let me, as none of those three, count the incredibly obvious differences between Sophie Scholl and Comrade Edward:
1. Sophie Scholl was the child of a principled family, with a history of political dissent. Her father and brothers were dissenters. Her friends at high school were chosen for their political opinions. She had a credible history of being a dissenter of conscience. Her father was imprisoned for a critical remark about Hitler.
His family lived all its life off of the state, with no evidence that they ever objected. His father belongs to the US coast guard; his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology in the US Federal Court in Baltimore. Functionaries of the police state, dear reader, are not known to spawn dissenters.
Maryland - the environs of the capital of empire and site of all too-many judicial fixes, anthrax scares, CIA capers, and political assassinations - is as good as the belly of the beast.
In that belly, Edward was quite happy.
He joined no political parties, wrote no papers denouncing the empire, organized no protests.
In fact, he repeatedly sought employment in the security state and not in any innocuous (if there be such) part of it.
He enlisted in the US Army….and not in 2001, when he might be forgiven, since 9-11 had just occurred (whatever you think of that).
No. He enlisted in 2004 (2003 in some accounts) when the whole world had already marched against the Iraq war, when the evidence of torture and the use of Daisy Cutters and white phosphorus in Iraq was all over the internet.
At a time when the REAL equivalent of Sophie Scholl, Sergeant Samuel Provance, was outing his seniors in the army and facing genuine harassment rather than wall-to-wall coverage from the major media, Edward Snowden was signing up for the Army, and not just the Army, but the Special Forces.
By then special forces had already been proved to be involved in war crimes. But Edward the Dissenter was eager to join them.
2. Sophie Scholl’s brother was arrested in 1937 for participating in the German Youth Movement.
2. Edward Snowden’s sister is an attorney in Maryland who has not been arrested for anything.
3. Sophie Scholl was an avid reader, with a deep interest in philosophy and theology. She graduated from high school and wrote a paper entitled “The Hand That Moved The Cradle, Moved The World.”
3. Edward Snowden dropped out of school, got a GED, and studied computers at a community college. In other words, his principle interests were technical. Again, no obvious signs of philosophical objections to the state, or even interest in the question. To all appearances, a guy looking to make a good living the quickest way he could.
4. Sophie Scholl was a committed and public Christian who had developed a philosophical and religious objection to Nazism.
4. There is no public record of Snowden having any kind of principled philosophy of resistance to the state until his recent anointing by the spectrum of official activists in the US. [Correction: There are arstechica forum posts under the handle, the TrueHOOHA that express an awareness..and a distrust..of the surveillance state (see update at the top of the page).
5. Sophie Scholl took a job as a nursery school teacher, hoping to get out of working in the National Labor Service, at the time a requirement for anyone who wanted to go to University. In other words, she jeopardized an academic career for which she had great talent in order to be true to her principles.
5.Edward Snowden, as a computer expert, could easily have worked in the private sector, but chose to join the military. He was in the US Army Reserves for all of 4 months, long enough to break his legs and get discharged. Not long enough to face fire, do anything difficult, or get any awards. He didn't even have the persistence to go back and finish his 14 week training.
Instead, convinced of the goals of the US military (saving people from oppression), he went one better. He opted to join the National Security Agency as a security guard (a cushy and well-paying job needing not much in the way of expertise or hardship).
6. When her nursery teaching proved insufficient, Sophie Scholl reluctantly joined the auxiliary war service, although still in the innocent field of nursery teaching. Afterward, she enrolled in the University of Munich in Biology and philosophy. By then, she was already practicing passive resistance to the war and was a vocal and public part of a group of artists and writers who were struggling with moral questions about the individual's duty under a dictatorship.
Sophie Scholl formed the White Rose after listening to an anti-Nazi sermon by the Catholic Bishop of Munster and after a long discussion of the issues in correspondence with her boyfriend.
6. The only evidence we have that Snowden had any interest in privacy rights is the insistent repetition by The Guardian, the New York Times (known outlets of state disinformation) that he had stickers of the Electric Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project on his laptop. This is very much the type of signalling used by Rolling Stone in its write up of Jacob Applebaum (one of the Wikileaks group). In that piece, "The Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace," there were the same type of pointed references to Applebaum's liking for the movie "V for Vendetta". Vendetta is a movie most likely intended to prep the public mind for the role of the hactivist-hero (think of Julian Assange or Anonymous) as the new mouthpiece for globalist propaganda, following the discrediting of the major newspapers in the wake of the Iraq War.
Apart from that, Tor encryption is known to have back-doors for the US government and allied corporations. It was likely pushed for just that reason, by Applebaum and his colleague at Wikileaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an employee of Microsoft, a corporation with close government ties.
7. While in the University, Scholl and her circle started passing out pamphlets encouraging Germans to engage in passive resistance to Nazism. Passive resistance is completely consistent with the Christian principles in which the White Rose believed.
Booz Allen makes a healthy profit from promoting the security state. Edward was making money off of that.
Contractors of the state are paid a whole lot more than employees and have to conform to no rules. I need not remind you that the whole heart of the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib was the nexus of private contractors and CIA - precisely where Snowden chose to position himself.
As a system administrator for all of 4 months at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden was stationed in high-priced Hawaii at a salary of $200,000 (by his account) or $ $112,000 (according to his bosses). He passed out no pamphlets objecting to torture, war, propaganda, or anything else, as far as I know.
8. Sophie Scholl's boyfriend was also a resistor, with whom she had long impassioned discussions about moral questions.
Remember the Assange story and Julian's "reputation"? Whether you consider it good or bad, it is likely to be riveting to the mass of young self-styled rebels.
Snowden admits he had a very "comfortable" life with her. No earnest discussion of moral conundrums have come to light so far.
However, well before his emergence as a latter-day Gandhi in June of this year, Snowden did approach a film-maker in January 2013. That was Laura Poitras, who happened to have written about a more credible NSA whistle-blower William Binney. Poitras is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. MacArthur is one of several foundations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller) known to collaborate with the CIA, according to Frances Stoner Saunders (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War).
Poitras also just happens to be a board member of the Freedom of Press Foundation, along with Glenn Greenwald, and - surprise! - old faithful Daniel Ellsberg. She has also been involved with "surveillance teach-ins" with Jacob Applebaum.
And while Greenwald asserts that Poitras's harassment by Homeland Security (she was detained and questioned at the border on many occasions) was for no reason at all, The Weekly Standard (admittedly a neocon outfit) reports, credibly, that there was reason for it, because some soldiers allege that she had foreknowledge of an Iraqi ambush and didn't warn American soldiers about it.
[This is not to endorse any harassment of Poitras on that account. It's merely to demonstrate that there's a lot more going on here than a rerun of The White Rose.]
To a cursory eye, it looks like a recently cobbled together effort.
Meanwhile, just in case you miss the point, Greenwald has been pushing Snowden as a “hero” and “whistle-blower” on his prominent blog at the Guardian.
It’s much the same way he pushed Julian Assange from his blog at Salon, making sure to let you know that if you had any questions about St. Julian, this qualified you for public branding as a totalitarian.
From www.thepeople’sview.net come more interesting revelations substantiating my hunch that Mr. Greenwald, conscience of the nation-’n-all, ain’t as spotlessly disinterested as he would have us believe, and, no, that undisclosed Cato gig is the not only reason to believe that.
“The very same Glenn Greenwald who is accusing the SEIU of trying to use OWS’ language (heaven forbid!) for their own purposes (which, as a union, just happens to be supporting working people), penned another column earlier last week trying to sell (and promote) winter gear for the OWS protesters being disbursed by the notorious Firedoglake. But of course, Greenwald fails to mention that he stands to financially gain from donations to FDL, as the treasurer of FDL’s PAC, Accountability Now, and his company, DMDM Enterprises, is used to taking money for “administrative expenses” from Accountability Now.
An examination of FEC reports shows that Greenwald’s DMDM Enterprises received more than $40,000 from FDL’s Accountability Now from 2008-2010, and of course, we have no idea how much more he has received as salary as Treasurer. (For those interested, yes, I have been working on a story on this with some help, and it keeps getting pushed back for different reasons - but expect a campaign finance story on Greenwald, Hamsher et al. to drop soon).”
Of course, this doesn’t mean I subscribe to the politics of the blog on which this tidbit has been served up. But one doesn’t have to be an Obamite to worry about Greenwald. Remember, he was also one of the strongest supporters of Julian Assange…which about says it all.
“Long before Edward the Great made his plans, all of this was exposed on international television on RT by another NSA whistle-blower, William Binney, former NSA crypto-mathematician, who apparently didn’t lie about his background… and where was the indignation? Where were all the Stand with Willy movements?
Where was FACEBOOK on this one? Where was Reddit?
He named the Narus devises, said they were sweeping up EVERYTHING from EVERYONE so it could be used in the future if the powers that be ended up not liking you are your particular agenda.”
One might ask the same question about Anna Hazare (in India). Where was his anti-corruption movement without Facebook? And what happened to Baba Ramdev, the man who was really leading an anti-corruption movement when Western intel decided it needed to step in and take control of the movement, as it has done in so many instances of revolution?
Look at his enemies, I told myself, biting my lip and unburdening myself only to the one or two others who were equally skeptical of the verbose civil libertarian….. like Douglas Valentine.
Only after conscientious independent activists like Mr. Creighton at Willy Loman show up the Greenwald-Snowden act for the media event it is, does an establishment outlet admit the truth:
Business Insider now concedes what anyone with any knowledge about the matter already knows - that Snowden isn’t telling us anything new.
There have been NSA whistle-blowers before of far greater credibility, only the establishment wasn’t yet ready to give them any air time.
“His [the NSA whistle-blower's] name is William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the secretive agency, and one of the best codebreakers in NSA history — who appeared in an Aug. 2012 video shot by Laura Poitras for The New York Times.
Binney detailed a top-secret surveillance program called “Stellar Wind” — the scope of which had never been public — which tracked electronic activities, including phone calls, emails, banking, travel records, and social media, and then mapped them to collect “all the attributes that any individual has” in every type of activity and build a profile based on the data.
“So that now I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time,” Binney said in the interview.
From The Times:
“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year.
Another whistleblower named Thomas Tamm — an official with the Justice Department — also came forward after uncovering the Bush administration’s secret authorizations to intercept emails and phone calls inside the U.S. without warrants.”
Meanwhile Greenwald, dubbed a second Jefferson by the hilariously obsequious EconomicPolicyJournal, manages to interview his hero Snowden, without calling him out even when he echoes Binney:
“The most important thing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has said comes at the end of his interview with Glenn Greenwald. In the final minutes of his interview he makes clear that the infrastructure is in place to bring tyranny onto the people of the United States. Only a switch has to be flipped, he correctly calls it, “turnkey tyranny.”
“Wired Magazine “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)” by James Bamford
03.15.12
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
…
…
Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, [William] Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.”
This mimicry and repetition of key-phrases of dissidents is one way in which the establishment co-opts the energy and attention of potential supporters.
The mimicry muddies the narrative (who said what when), diverts attention to the establishment’s chosen sock-puppet rebels, and makes sure that the status-quo is not disturbed in ways that might actually challenge the power of the elites.
I reread my posts and think that I’m far too cavalier in my language about Ellsberg and Greenwald (although not Assange). I do NOT mean that Ellsberg was NOT a whistle-blower. Of course, he was. And a brave one. I mean that he has since then seemed to be used to endorse establishment positions. His role, I believe, was part of a “limited hangout” for the establishment. To what extent he is actually complicit in that role, I don’t know. I give him the benefit of the doubt. The establishment has many means at its disposable to make people amenable to playing its game. I should clarify, again, it is not Ellsberg himself, but the role he is allowed to play that I find suspicious.
Same goes for Greenwald. He may well believe in Snowden. He may well have WANTED to believe. But, in my opinion, his bona fides have been used in this case.
“Obviously, I stand by my original theory on all of this… it’s part of an elaborate scheme by the intelligence complex themselves to create unrest or at least the narrative of unrest prior to the summer of discontent in America. The “hero” whistle-blower is actually a career NSA agent, former CIA spook who trained to be Special Forces (unconventional warfare)
He is breathlessly revered by the Guardian as the next best thing to happen to democracy since Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning yet what he “leaked” is well known to anyone paying attention over the past few years.
The paper describes him as having a bumper sticker on his laptop that reads “I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation” as well as having a copy of Angler, the biography of former vice-president Dick Cheney sitting on his hotel bed. Oh, the duality of the guy. Does anyone wonder how he was working at the NSA and the CIA for a company like Booz Allen Hamilton with an Electronic Frontier Foundation bumper sticker on his laptop?
Glenn Greenwald’s secret whistle-blower has exposed himself for reasons yet unknown. Well, I’ll tell you one of the reasons, they got sick of Greenwald doing all those interviews, now they got “their guy” front and center to take the spotlight off Glenn.
His name is Edward Snowden and by his own account he is a very high-paid employee of NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s been with them for at least 4 years working at the NSA facility in Hawaii.
According to a Guardian article which revealed his name, the guy is now hiding out in Hong Kong, which he readily offers up himself, in a “nice” hotel, sitting in his room with some kind of blanket hood over his head and laptop.
He claims he doesn’t want to live in a world like this… but it didn’t seem to bother him for 4 years while he was raking in $200,000 a year living like a king in Hawaii with his girlfriend.
The Guardian story is full of praise of this guy and they make sure to tell you to consider him a hero. Here’s our new hero’s background:
“In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces.”
“After that, he got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland. From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.
By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.”
“He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan” Guardian
Aside from the obvious sticky sweet nature of the Guardian article and the ham-handed props they adorned his hotel room with, he does give a few clues as to both his where-abouts and his mission:
“On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since.”
“It is a plush hotel and, what with eating meals in his room too, he has run up big bills.”
“”We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”” Guardian
So he’s in a plush hotel right up the road from the CIA station in Hong Kong “running up bills” on his credit card. That shouldn’t take the CIA or the NSA or ANYONE more than a few minutes with Google to figure out where he is.
Notice something else… MAY 20th
How does that factor into what I wrote the other day?
Provocateur Kokesh announces “The Final American Revolution” (May 6, 2013) Armed March Announced
I couldn’t be more pleased. The minister, a part of the Rajapaksha government, was sent the book by someone who wanted to inform him about the depth of propaganda in the Western media.
“Some weeks back I was sent, by a friend in England, a book entitled The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media. It was by someone called Lila Rajiva, but doubtless that was not the only reason to assume it would interest me.
I took some time to start on the book but, once I did so, it had to be finished. Published in 2005, it is a graphic and convincing account of the manner in which the Americans ignored all moral restraint in the war against terrorism they were engaged in.
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
That part was convincing, and simply fleshed out what one knows anyway, that countries in pursuing their own interests will stop at nothing. What was more startling was the suggestion that the wholesale prevalence of this absolutist mindset also represented a takeover of the ruling political dispensation by a culture of chicanery that strikes at the heart of supposedly predominant American values.
At the core of this transformation is the corporate supremacy represented most obviously by Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the takeover of much supposedly military activity by private contractors and special agents, who move with seamless dexterity from one world to another. Exemplifying this, and indicative of what C S Lewis would have described as a Hideous Strength which finds its own partisans dispensable, is the strange story of Nicholas Berg, the shadowy contractor whose beheading served to deflect the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, and in some minds excuse the institutionalized torture that was taking place there.
Weapons of mass destruction
The book should be essential reading for those concerned not just with human rights, but with human civilization….”
This is for all my well-wishers out there who’ve taken the time to poke this blog to see if it’s dead or merely comatose.
I’m here. I’m alive. I just got tired of the off-line harassment - snooping on my private life through illegal surveillance of my home, my family and friends, private conversations, and email correspondence…. that’s in addition to the online stuff.
The whole globe is awash in the same inane, idiot-making advertising of the neo-liberal marketplace and the global war on terror.
Meanwhile, tectonic shifts are taking place, not just in Iran, China, or Pakistan (check out the spate of earthquakes in those regions), but in the economies and polities of any state so unwise as to join the Global War on Terror either as friend or foe.
Where I am, down in the sunny South, such unwisdom is poisoning not just the media, but just about everything…from the banking system to technology to transport ….
(more later)
Note: Links on some of these posts I’ve referenced have vanished. This keeps happening to certain posts, whether for technical reasons or for others…
Bear with me. I’ll add them back when I get a moment.
At last. One honest journalist out there has the spine to tell the truth about the Western establishment’s vengeance against upstart South Asian finance, known to the moron masses as the Galleon group/Gupta insider trading (non) case.
Here’s businessman and journalist Shankar Sharma in a piece that puts to shame the drivel emanating from the entire western press (Bloomberg included), not to mention the rags published by various Indian satraps (Livemint etc):
“On July 21, 2008, Hank Paulson, the then US treasury secretary, met around 15 major hedge fund managers at the offices of Eton Park in New York — itself one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. At least five of the 15 who attended were ex-Goldman Sachs, the firm that was headed by Paulson before he became the treasury secretary.
That very morning, Paulson had spoken to The New York Times reporters and editors and had assured them that the government was looking into the book of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that this would calm the markets that had been fearing an imminent bankruptcy of these firms.
This was material, non-public information, being selectively disseminated to a group of people whose jobs were to profit from such information. And, by no less than the serving treasury secretary. (Imagine the brouhaha if something like this were to happen in India.)
Those who attended were the who’s who of Wall Street: Taconic Capital, James Chanos of Kynikos Associates (a known short-seller), Steve Mandel of Lone Pine Capital, Dinakar Singh of TPG Axon, GSO Capital (part of Blackstone group), Daniel Och of Och-Ziff and Roger Altman of Evercore Partners.
Seven weeks later, on September 6, the government did indeed take over Fannie and Freddie and put it into conservatorship, wiping out the equity holders. Their stock prices fell 85 per cent from September 5 to September 6, i.e. overnight. Precisely as Paulson had told the hedge fund group.
The government gave scanty information on the names of those present at the July 21 meeting to Bloomberg, who sought this information under the Freedom to Information Act. Paulson’s press secretary told Bloomberg to refer to Paulson’s book on the financial crisis, On the Brink. Except for the little inconvenient fact that there is no mention of this meeting in the book at all.
Now, here is an interesting thing: the fund manager who recounted this tale to Bloomberg, was already short the stock at the time of the meeting. And, he did not cover his short position after this meeting because Paulson had clearly informed the group that the government was going to “wipe out the equity holders”. So, by not cutting his already short position in these names, that fund manager ended up profiting handsomely, by riding the short position all the way to the bottom… all based on Paulson’s generous advice.
And, what is even more significant is that given the negativity surrounding Fannie and Freddie at that time, it is almost given that nearly all those who attended that Paulson meeting would have been short these stocks. The whole world was short Fannie and Freddie (for the record, short interest in both these stocks rose after the July 21 meeting to hit a yearly high on July 24). Paulson revealing the government’s hand made the decision very easy for all these funds: “Don’t cut your shorts, since these stocks are going to zero.” Perfect.
What is even more curious is: why would Paulson reveal this to a bunch of hedge funds? Revealing this to commercial bankers would probably have some minuscule sense attached to it, i.e. to get them prepared for an impending catastrophe. But, hedge funds? And, an even more damning question arises: why would Paulson reveal negative information to these hedge funds, i.e. that the equity investors would get wiped out by the government takeover? This sort of information from a regulator/government official is unheard of: they are supposed to give out generally positive information, not catastrophic, unsettling information like this. Paulson’s information could lead to only two trading outcomes: one, hang on to your shorts in Fannie and Freddie, or, two, go short some Fannie and Freddie. This short-trade generating advice coming from a regulator, and that too a seasoned pro like Paulson, is extremely suspicious, to say the least.
If this is not giving out material, non-public information, then what is? If Rajat Gupta is guilty, why isn’t Paulson? If Gupta had given Raj Rajaratnam information that Goldman Sachs was going to get an investment from Warren Buffet (and suppose, if Rajaratnam had not sold an already long position in Goldman stock based on this material, non-public information), would this have amounted to a criminal offence on Gupta’s part?
Of the many things I don’t like about this Rajat Gupta affair, one is the Indian media’s sickeningly fawning portrayal of the American justice system as one that “doesn’t spare the rich and powerful, unlike ours where the well-connected get away”, and “how justice is dispensed speedily in the US”, and so on.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The US protects its own rich and powerful better than we can ever do. Paulson got away clean. Not even an investigation. No investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into the trading by these attendee hedge funds. Nothing. Just a conspiracy of silence.
Then, we have the strange case of David Sokol. He was Buffet’s No. 2, and was widely tipped to take over from the old man. Sokol bought shares of Lubrizol, prior to getting Buffet to buy the company outright. After the deal was done, Sokol told Buffet of this purchase. Buffet waved it aside, saying it was no problem. No problem? Sokol traded on inside knowledge of material, non-public information, and Buffet joined him in keeping this a secret.
When the problem came out, Sokol resigned, Buffet shrugged. And, that was it. The cover up had happened. Because any serious investigation would have led to Buffet himself becoming a party to any offence, since he chose not to report this to the authorities. Consideration for his old age? Well…
But in the meeting with the hedge funds later that day, Paulson sang a completely different tune: he revealed in precise detail (according to someone who attended that meeting) what the government proposed to do with Fannie and Freddie. He told the elite group, whose sole business was to profit from any superior knowledge and analysis of events, that the government planned to seize the two firms, and place them into “conservatorship”: a move that would allow the firms to stay in operation, but would wipe out the equity holders.
So Rajat Gupta gets two years in the Federal penitentiary for gossiping about Goldman with a close associate.
Let me recount the ways in which this is a confused sentence.
If, as Judge Rakoff contends, what Gupta did was “disgusting” and a horrendous crime, then obviously two years is far too light a sentence. I mean, you can go to jail that long for a few traffic offenses or getting caught with some pot, neither of which any reasonable person would call depraved or “disgusting” behavior.
By giving Gupta only two years, Rakoff tacitly conceded that what Gupta did wasn’t really all that big a deal at all. He conceded that all the verbiage of outrage and offense was only so much moral puffery for the Occupy crowd, for whom a rich man is always guilty as charged.
And to be foreign and rich, now that really is a capital offense.
Let’s be honest.
What Bernie Madoff did was disgusting. What Job Corzine did, what Hank Paulson did, what Alan Stanford did - they were swindles and are disgusting.
What Gupta did (if he did do it) was something too trivial for this hooplah.
Except that it was an officer of a publicly-traded company who profited from the trading, you’ll say.
Except that he didn’t profit, I’ll reply.
And we don’t know if the guy even knew his good buddy Raj was trading on his words.
So, then, what we’re left with is a guy who said something to some other guy about something that was highly “confidential” but still being discussed at water-coolers round the country, a tip from which at least one Goldman board member, the very very waspy Byron Trott, later profited.
That sort of profiting, you’d think, would be insider-trading too, except, for some reason it isn’t. It never is when very very waspy people with monosyllabic Saxon names and Roman numerals behind them do it.
Everyone was talking about it. Other Goldman board members were talking among themselves about it. How secret could it have been?
At least one of those board members, and maybe two or three, were known to talk about Goldman affairs outside school.
So Gupta wasn’t alone in what he did.
And what he did isn’t even regarded as a crime by dozens of learned economists from Milton Friedman to Murray Rothbard.
Over here, I am not a learned economist, so I can think straight, and sure, gassing about confidential stuff when you have a fiduciary responsibility to keep your lips zipped, is clearly unethical, and an infraction deserving a penalty.
But it’s an infraction against the folks to whom you owe that responsibility.
That would be Goldman Sachs.
Whose middle name, I can confidently assert, is not fiduciary responsibility.
In fact, Goldman Sachs’ business model for some decades has been insider-trading.
That is roughly what the commodity and bond business is built on.
At notorious gold trading firm J. Aron, Lloyd Blankfein, Gupta’s principal nemesis on the witness stand, was not famous for either fiduciary responsibility or squeaky clean ethics.
Neither was Gary Cohn, his bosom buddy.
In fact, for Blankfein to finger Gupta on the stand, is like Ted Bundy giving testimony against Shelly the Shoplifter.
It would be hilarious, except that it’s not. It’s pathetic and, yes, disgusting.
If Gupta broke Goldman’s rules, Goldman should be hauling him over the coals. Since when is it the government’s job to police Goldman’s corporate culture?
As for the idea that Gupta somehow cheated Goldman public shareholders, that too is laughable. There is good evidence to show that insider trading actually profits non-insider buyers. And non-insider sellers are surely selling voluntarily, are they not? No one puts a gun to their heads to do it, right?
What’s more, there’s nothing to show that having insider information leads to a successful trade. Many’s the punter who’s lost his shirt over what he took to be a sure thing.
Besides all that, why should anyone give a rat’s ass about Goldman shareholders?
How super-ethical can any shareholder in Goldman Sachs be, in the first place? Here’s a company so dirty it’s a by-word in the markets, yet you have investors that want to hold directors to such high standards quite content to sink their money into this cess-pool.
Yeah. What a bunch of angels.
If Gupta really did do something that ripped off Goldman Sachs and its “little investors,” I for one would pin a gold medal on him.
The “little investors” knew that by buying Goldman they were subsidizing its graft and crime. But it didn’t matter, so long as they made money.
Why is that any less unethical than trading against Goldman?
In my book, it’s worse. Anyone who helped this firm, was profiting from its criminal actions and fueling them. Anyone who hurt it, was actually doing a public service.
I say, everyone who bought Goldman shares enabled its sleaze. And profited from its insider-trading. And Goldman’s insider trading was of a scale that makes Raj’s Galleon look like the good ship Lollypop.
If Gupta truly did do something that was horrendous - say, defraud a company - he deserved ten years.
Personally, I think he deserves at least five for ever working for an organization like Goldman Sachs. Directing Goldman or McKinsey is not the hall mark of a man of integrity in my book. Resigning from them would have been. But the morality of crony capitalism not what’s at issue here, is it? If it is, then Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and several thousands of other CEOs should be joining Gupta in the pokey.
The two years Rajat Gupta got shows that the whole trial was a contemptible charade and the figure at the center of it only a scapegoat to appease a crowd slavering for blood.
Rajat Gupta was right not to grovel.
He should chalk this down as experience, and then put up a real fight:
1. Refuse to reimburse Goldman
2. Appeal Rakoff’s absurd rulings.
3. Get his rich friends to help him run the biggest investigation possible into Goldman Sachs and its cronies.
4. With his gold-plated Rolodex, he can sound out his government and corporate contacts to coordinate an investigation across the world. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg that is Government Sachs.
5. Finally, Gupta should counter-sue Sachs and its flunkies under international racketeering laws.
Even the son of Anil Kumar, the man who “cooperated” to put Rajat Gupta in jail, thinks highly of “Uncle” Rajat.
Here’s a big selection of letters written in support of Rajat Gupta, from Bill Gates and Mukesh Ambani, to his daughters and wife.
The most interesting part for me was the section in Mrs. Gupta’s letter where she describes Goldman Sachs’ interactions with Gupta. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein first wanted to kick Gupta out for wanting to consult for KKR (which other Goldmanites were doing).
Then, when GS got into trouble, Blankfein wanted him back.
Gupta - stupidly - went back, trying to be loyal to them.
They rewarded him for that loyalty by setting him up as a patsy when the sharks at the DOJ began circling.
Gupta -again, foolishly - trusted the system. The system did what it usually does. Chewed up the innocent (at least, relatively innocent) and rewarded the unscrupulous and powerful.
Blankfein hired a PR firm, took up gay rights activism, and came out smelling, if not like a rose, at least, somewhat less like a sewer.
Dobelli [Lucerne, Switzerland] Can you increase happiness by knowing your cognitive errors (and by
avoiding them)?
(A side note: I believe that happiness is not equal to the absence of disaster – or vice versa. It’s not a linear opposite. The two properties (happiness and unhappiness) are somehow correlated, but in a strange way. But that’s for the happiness researchers to figure out, for the Dan Gilbert types.)
Taleb [New York] Let me repeat my statement about small mistakes. You will not increase happiness by
increasing cognitive fitness and rationality. Happiness requires some wisdom about big things, but childishness with the small things.
Comment:
Rolf Dobelli, one of the genuinely brilliant minds of the business world, has shown himself at home in philosophy, fiction, business, and finance.
Modest, yet outgoing, with the intellectual equipment of a scholar and the conviviality of the bon-vivant, Dr. Dobelli also manages to be an approachable nice guy, a creature apparently found in more abundance in Switzerland than in certain other geographical locations.
Maybe his next book should be “The Art of Being a Good Guy.”
Seems like that would fill a huge vacuum, say, around the DC beltway and hinterland.
Dobelli’s comment about happiness is insightful. Happiness is not unrelated to being free of unhappiness, as he points out. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive, either. There is asymmetry in the correlation. It is non-linear.
Meanwhile, Taleb’s assessment also struck home with me.
The “childish small things” I fancy are animals and… soft toys.
I “rescued” a brown and white fluffy rabbit the other day, left right on top of the dumpster, hardly a stain on his synthetic fur, looking all forlorn, one ear up and one down, his nylon whiskers askew.
Wetted down with a damp towel and soap, then sun-dried, he now has pride of place among the silent muses and “angels” I keep around me to guard that space of joy that no circumstance in life will ever take from me again.
Soft toys embody my love of story-telling, carried over from an idyllic childhood filled with books, music, imaginative play, and loving family. Even thinking back to it brings back a smile to my face, even in the blackest mood.
As a child, I would go to bed, telling stories to anyone who would listen, a patient, half-asleep sib or my weary parents, if I was lucky.
Otherwise, I had to content myself with the menagerie of teddy bears, giraffes, tinker-bells, baby elephants, dolls, and stuffed dogs that were my imaginary playmates and the compliant actors in the tableaux I staged across my bedroom with pillows and sheets for building blocks.
I’ve no doubt anyone who came across me today, in one of my ventriloquist moods, animating a toy rabbit, would think I was crazy to enjoy make-believe at this age.
But, in fact, the older I get, the more I like fantasy, children’s stories, and theater. There seems to be something of the gods in these things.
When I look out the window, on the other hand, all I see is that trivial, vulgar thing called, for some inexplicable reason, “real life” ….and, along with it, too many stunted beings who shrink with each passing second, yet glory in being called “grown ups.”
In a brilliant piece of debunking, Barackryphal proves that the pictures being circulated libeling Obama’s mother as a porn star are fabricated and might well expose the creator of them to charges of circulating child porn.
“This [a picture of Obama's mother] picture appeared in Exotique #23, on page 22. In 1958. When Ann Dunham was only 15 years old. Two years before Ann Dunham even moved to Hawaii.
We may never know who the mystery model is. But the Dunham family didn’t move to Hawaii until the summer of 1960. Unless Ann Dunham had access to a time machine in the 1960s, it simply cannot be her.
Moreover, Joel Gilbert knows this. He found that opera glove photo; it was not circulating the web as an ‘Ann’ photo prior to his videos. He knows it came from Exotique, a magazine that ceased publication in 1959. From WND: “Gilbert found that several of the photos in the collection appeared in a magazine called Exotique, published by pin-up photographer Leonard Burtman, who worked in New York City.”
Thus he knows this picture was published two years before Ann first stepped foot in Hawaii, years before she could have met Frank Marshall Davis. And yet he explicitly claims, multiple times, that the photo was TAKEN at Christmastime 1960. This is not a lie of ignorance or mistake; it is a lie of pure, fully-informed malice.
And that’s the BEST-case scenario for Gilbert. Gilbert knows that Ann was born in 1942, and he knows he found these pictures in 1958 magazines. If Gilbert truly believes that these ARE somehow pictures of a 15-year-old Ann, then he’s been distributing hundreds of thousands of DVDs featuring nude and erotic pictures of someone he believes to be an underage girl.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gilbert has thus far refused to disclose the actual sources of the erotic photos he put in his videos. He identified six issues, none of which checked out, and five of which contradict his 1960 date anyway. As shown above, to disclose the true issues would be to destroy his own claim that the photos are of Ann, and to let his audience know that he’s lying to them. And so he refuses to cite his sources, even when they’re just magazine issue numbers.
So there you have it. The people who’ve said ‘Frank Davis took naked pictures of Stanley Ann Dunham in December of 1960′ are provably wrong. The woman they claim is Ann was having her photographs from this very shoot published at least as early as 1958. When Ann was a 15-year-old in Washington, years before she ever stepped foot on Hawaii or could have conceivably even met Frank Marshall Davis. Joel Gilbert has unnecessarily obscured the actual publication dates of the pictures he found, because he knows those simple facts will prove to everyone that he’s lying about them being taken in 1960, and lying about Frank Marshall Davis taking them of Ann, and lying about them being evidence of an intimate relationship between Frank and Ann.
As I wrote in my first post in this series, “I can’t promise that I’ll convince everyone that Joel Gilbert is a charlatan and his film is a joke, but I think by this time next week, anyone who continues to trust Gilbert has some depressingly low standards for what they’ll believe.” I’m sure some people will still prefer to believe in him and his photos, and nothing will convince them otherwise. To them, I can only say this: just as Joel Gilbert has known for months, you now know that his photos were being published in 1958. Possibly even earlier. So if you still want to believe that the woman in those photos is Ann Dunham, that means you also have to believe that the woman in those photos is no more than 15 years old. Keep that in mind as you talk about them, and post them online, and save them on your computer. I know you’re not doing anything illegal or morally disgusting (because it’s not Ann), but what are you telling yourselves?
Finally, even though I’ve reached #1 in this series and I think I’ve solidly proven my case, I had two more research developments on Monday that I’ll be typing up in the next few days. So be sure to keep an eye out for those to come.”
Comment:
American media culture gives me a severe migraine with its schizophrenia.
It’s a proud achievement that merits putting her on Time’s list of the hundred most influential people when one Erika Leonard promotes pedophilic bondage and sadism…..
And it’s positively chic for the French president’s wife (or is it his ex-wife? I lost track..) Carla Bruni, to have actually posed for explicit photos and have a collection of them hovering in the background, ready for use for blackmailing at any time.
It’s super for Gore Vidal to have been a pederast…and have endorsed and promoted the work of the documented child-abuser Alfred Kinsey,
It’s hip for women of all persuasions (from Wendy McElroy on the right to Naomi Klein on the left) to publicly discuss their sexual histories…
But if some one digs up some highly questionable photos purporting to show a woman who doesn’t even look much like Obama’s dead mother in soft-porn poses, then porn is suddenly a sign of degeneracy, perversion and immorality, the end of the republic is at hand, and Alex Jones gets to pound the table to tell us he’s mad about it.
Which is it?
The American media and the public can’t make up their minds.
To me it looks like it amounts to this:
Porn is chic and wonderful when our kind of people.…white - especially Jewish, liberal/libertarian, wealthy, aristocratic (or with pretensions to aristocracy) do it …. and when one of our favorite corporations or corporate honchos are selling it and making tons of money off of it.
It’s suddenly terrible and awful when we use it to smear someone who isn’t one of us…who’s half-black, a socialist, possibly a foreigner, maybe even, God forbid, a “Muzzie.”
I saw this story in 2008. But it’s far too speculative, irrelevant to public interest, and a horrendous abuse of privacy. It is really nothing more than an excuse to trash a dead woman in titillating terms that translate into website hits and media.
The sexual histories of presidential candidates (unless there is the possibility of blackmail) should be off-limits.
Even if there is a story involved (as in the Clinton sexual harassment/assault cases), it should be handled in a discreet manner, consonant with the dignity, right to privacy, and presumption of innocence of all people, even government operatives/bureaucrats.
The sexual histories of family members of political candidates are even less relevant than the candidates’ histories.
Besides those considerations, the photos themselves don’t amount to much. Anyone can dig up a picture on the net that bears a resemblance to someone. Ann is a common first name. There is surely an Ann of roughly the same physical proportions as Ms. Dunham who worked somewhere in the porn industry at some time. A little photo-shopping, a refusal to cite sources (thank god for anonymous sources - they can tell you anything you want about your enemies, right?) - and there - a human being can be turned into a whore, pedophile, pimp, or anything else.
The dates don’t match. The photos don’t look alike. The whole thing is bogus.
But the damage is done.
A woman who isn’t here to defend herself is maligned in the worst way in a medium that is indelible, eternal and global.
This is the real truth of the so-called “woman” friendly face of the West.
I’m now waiting for “Fifty Shades of Jesus,” wherein it will be proved, in the style of all those sites promoting Christian porn or Christian BDSM, that Jesus was actually a sado-masochistic cannibal, who invited his followers to eat him and enjoyed his flagellation, torture and killing on the cross. [Note: THIS IS SARCASM]
The disturbing fact is that in an age of multiple-choice tests and zero-sum debates, the ability to place things in context, balance the weight of a piece of evidence against contradictory claims, the ability to study a text on its own terms without projecting onto it the prejudices and obsessions of the contemporary world, has vanished.
No matter how carefully a scholar frames a question, all the nuances are thrown aside when the media gets hold of a piece of information.
Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus was married. It was a requirement among Jewish rabbis. Perhaps he was married when he was younger and his wife died. Or she herself became a teacher. Or maybe she was a silent part of his ministry. Who knows. Even, if against all odds, this new research finds support in the future, I fail to see how it affects Jesus’ explicit teaching about sexuality. Nor does it alter the judgment of his contemporaries, as recorded in the Gospels, that “there was no sin found in him.”
Since they were looking very very hard for it, I think that’s fairly conclusive just there.
However, knowing that there are many people who have an axe to grind with the traditional Christian teaching that elevates celibacy (which is also elevated in Buddhism and Hinduism), I also know that it isn’t dispassionate scholarship or intellectual curiosity or respectful disagreement that drives these debates. Rather it is political activism that wants to rewrite the people and events of the past into forms more palatable to modern sensibility. I have advice for them. If you don’t like what Jesus had to say, don’t read him or follow him or try to follow him. Get a teacher after your own heart.
Major news outlets, such as the New York Times, are reporting on the discovery of a new document that refers to Jesus’ wife. More precisely, a small fragment from a previously unknown document contains a statement by a character named “Jesus” referring to “my wife.”
Does this give us new historical evidence for the literal marriage of Jesus of Nazareth to some woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene?
Professor Karen King displays the fragment of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Photo from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/090512_AncientPapyrus_1714_605.jpg
No, says Karen L. King, the scholar who recently revealed the existence of the manuscript fragment in which “Jesus” speaks of “my wife.” In an article to be published in the Harvard Theological Review, King writes:
This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century.
Near the end of her article, King, with contributions by AnneMarie Luijendijk, reiterates:
Does this fragment constitute evidence that Jesus was married? In our opinion, the late date of the Coptic papyrus (c. fourth century), and even of the possible date of composition in the second half of the second century, argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus.
Of course, King’s measured judgment here will do little to stop the coming tidal wave of claims that we now have definitive evidence if not proof that Jesus was actually married. Dan Brown and his spokesman, Sir Leigh Teabing, appear to have been right all along! At least this is what we’ll hear in the days to come.
In fact, as Karen King rightly observes, the discovery and publication of the fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife in fact tells us nothing about the first-century man we know as Jesus of Nazareth. If it is genuine, the fragment of the otherwise unknown document will tell us something about the beliefs of people who lived a century or two after Jesus, though what exactly we should conclude on the basis of this small piece of an ancient manuscript is yet to be determined.”
If you think showing athletes in admittedly skimpy outfits doing what they do in slow-motion with music behind is “porny,” by today’s standards, you must come from another planet.
Or, perhaps there’s an agenda? NBC is after all the major media.
Is this a way to defuse criticism about the pornification of culture? Concede the issue where it’s non-existent, so you one can let the real offenders fly under the radar?
Sort of like celebrating Ramadan in the White House but toning down the Christian accoutrements, on one hand, while slyly promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric and psyops on the other.
That list is pretty much a list of elite–approved figures. Of the two Indian figures on the list -
Anjali Gopalan is a gay rights advocate and her bio is written by Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City and a Marxist writer given the “brown” beat in New York) and Mamata Banerjee is the “strong woman” from Bengal who can out-Marx the Marxists.
The 2012 list also included E. L. James (the alias of Erika Leonard) of “Fifty Shades of Grey” (read by many astute critics as a manual of pedophilic rape and grooming), who is coyly described as a writer of “saucy” stories whose work has “deeply stirred” people. The book, in my estimation, is not simply a mainstreaming of BDSM, or even of pedophilic rape (see my earlier blog post), but almost certainly an elite psyop full of trigger words and memes for any careful reader. If one believes in the existence of “Monarch mind-control” - and the evidence I’ve seen is suggestive but mostly speculative - this is surely an instance of it.
That Ron Paul figures on such a list is almost as good as placing a sticker on him with the word “elite-approved” on it.
His presence on the list also belies the notion that he is somehow a dark horse, being suppressed by the media.
I also noticed another figure promoted a lot at LRC - Salman Khan. And his write up is by Bill Gates.
ORIGINAL POST
Ralph Nader on the pros and cons of voting for Obama:
“He’s below average because he’s above average in his intellect and his knowledge of legality, which is violating with abandon.”
“I don’t know whether George W. Bush ever read the Constitution,” said Nader. “This man taught the Constitution, and this is what we got.”
Nader gave Obama this much: He’s the lesser of two evils when compared to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But he said Obama is “the more effective evil because he brings credibility, he brings the democratic heritage to it, he has legitimized the lawless war-mongering and militarism abroad of George W. Bush.”
Comment:
This is why I don’t recommend voting for Obama, even if he is more the “peace” candidate than Romney… on paper.
In the first place, peace or war can be thrust on a president by external circumstances, so we can end up with war even if we did vote for Obama.
Second, Obama is quite an effective and plausible imperialist, being both brown-skinned (and thus more palatable when he’s assassinating brown folk) and smooth-talking. You could make a good case that ineffective evil is always to be preferred to effective evil. Having a Goldman Sachs-related, Wall Street hustler in office, with a Mormon background (not that I have anything against Mormons), might make it quite easy to unite people against the empire.
So, as I’ve been saying, forget about voting. Don’t waste your time or energy or money. Save them for yourself. Leave the handicapping to people paid to do it and take care of yourself first.
By a series of links involving the holocaust of Russians during the Stalin years, I landed up on a blog called ZionCrimeFactory.
Like many such blogs, it conflates being anti-Zionist with being pro-Nazi. While there is no need to exaggerate or embellish what Hitler did, there is a point when these sorts of blogs actually break with reality.
ZCF (which I won’t link) claims that Hitler wasn’t the murderous psychotic of history books.
Schellenberg, a highly-ranked Nazi, describes the eugenicist projects of the Nazis, the arrangement of sexual unions between racially “superior” types, and many other repellent features of the Hitler regime that developed well before the events of the Holocaust.
To portray these developments as simply German nationalism resurgent is delusional.
Psychiatry online has a piece about the Nazi eugenicist program (h/t Henry Makow):
“By 1940, six killing centers designated as euthanasia institutions were established at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar. The Hadamar Psychiatric Institute near Wiesbaden, Germany, code-named “Facility-E,” was refashioned for use as a psychiatry euthanasia facility in November 1940. From mid-January 1941 under Dr. Ernst Baumhard’s direction, with a staff of approximately 100, busloads of patients arrived daily at the killing operation. The patients were offloaded, weighed, photographed, and led to the gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the cellar. At least 10,000 mentally ill adults were gassed and cremated at Hadamar in the first 9 months of 1941. In August 1942, after a short break, the facility again functioned as a euthanasia center, using lethal medication doses or starvation. After removal of various organs for medical research, the bodies were buried in F1 located on the hospital grounds. The killing center remained operational until its liberation by American troops on March 26, 1945 (4).
Operation-T4 claimed approximately 200,000 lives. Psychiatric euthanasia institutions served as training centers for the Schutzstaffel (SS) who used the experience to construct larger killing centers (Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc.). The psychiatrist Dr. Imfried Eberl, Treblinka’s first commandant and the only physician to command a death camp, established the facility following his experience as superintendent of Brandenburg Psychiatry Hospital (2).”
Back to ZionCrimeFactory, which sports the German double-eagle on its mast.
Here is typical headline on one of its articles: “Disease infested cockroach Nutanyahoo is a schizoid.”
This is of course the obverse of the racist language of Zionists about Muslims:
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan.”
I don’t know who runs ZFC, but it’s amazing that genuinely anti-Semitic sites thrive and flourish, while reasonable criticism is marginalized.
It makes you wonder if such sites are set up by intelligence (or encouraged) to track potential trouble-makers or if there is really a resurgence of neo-Nazi thinking at the grass-roots.
“There was something missing from the release of a tape showing Mitt Romney pandering to fat cats in Boca Raton, Florida with these very inflammatory words: “There are 47 percent who are with him, (Obama) who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax.” Romney said his job “is not to worry about those people.”Mr. Romney, says Nader, doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” (Photo: AP)
Hey, Mitt, why start with the 47 percent? Fully 100 percent of the nation’s 500 biggest corporations are dependent on various kinds of corporate welfare – subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, waivers, and other dazzling preferences – while many pay no tax at all on very substantial profits (see their familiar names – General Electric, Pepco, Verizon etc. – here).
Are the corporations that receive this corporate welfare going to vote for President Obama? (Mr. Romney has declared that corporations are people.) Of course they’re not. Nor are all of the 47 percent of people who are “dependent upon government.”
Mr. Romney doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” Romney has lost control of his self-consciousness. Here is a man who talks about 47 percent of American households paying no income taxes (more on this later) while he has refused, unlike his father, to release back years of tax returns because they’ll show he has parked much of his wealth and income in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas precisely in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Indeed, as tax expert and former New York Times Pulitzer prize-winner David Cay Johnston said on Democracy Now, Romney has maneuvered the tax laws so that his five sons will continue to receive millions of tax-free dollars from their parents’ enormous pot of wealth.
Why aren’t the big-time Democrats making much more of an issue of this “make or break” Romney campaign vulnerability? Maybe it is because, as author Kevin Phillips once said, “The Republicans go for the jugulars while the Democrats go for the capillaries.”
Essentially, [Mitt Romney) is a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.
Now, either ignorance, callousness or both infected Mitt Romney’s pejorative characterizations of the “government dependent” 47 percent with victim mentalities who believe that they are entitled to the government providing them the necessities of life without paying income tax. Let’s see who these people are in these recessionary times. Unemployed Americans. Americans who are too poor to pay income taxes. Elderly Americans who live on their social security checks from money for which they spent their decades of working years paying. Americans using the “earned income tax credit,” so vigorously supported and extended by President Ronald Reagan. And disabled Americans who have no dollars for any income tax.
What do many of the 47 percent pay to the government? They pay payroll taxes for social security and Medicare, federal fees and state and local taxes on their property, and sales taxes.
The avarice of Romney and his buddies at the strip-mining, job-exporting, bankrupting private equity company called Bain Capital has no bounds. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for companies like Verizon, Boeing, Duke Energy, Navistar, Wells Fargo and Pepco to use all of our country’s government funded public infrastructures and services, and yet not only pay no income tax but actually rig the tax system so they can get billions back in “benefits” from the U.S. Treasury, as General Electric has done for years. At the same time, Romney never speaks out against 35,000 super-wealthy Americans who also do not pay any federal income tax. He rarely questions crony capitalism, wants to maintain an even bigger bloated military budget, and spearheads the many-sided supremacy of corporations over real people throughout our entire political economy. He is, essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.
If the Democrats are anything but inept and defeatist, they will wrap Romney around Congressman Paul Ryan, his vice-presidential nominee, and recover the Congress in November. The Romney-Ryan campaign is now hanging by a few threads, unmasked even before those millions of American voters who dutifully vote for politicians who disrespect and betray their economic plight and political powerlessness once in office.”
“Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, my Gurudeva and founder of Hinduism Today, gave” a succinct description of our divine nature: Deep inside we are perfect this very moment, and we have only to discover and live up to this perfection to be whole. We have taken birth in a physical body to grow and evolve into our divine potential. We are inwardly already one with God. Our religion contains the knowledge of how to realize this oneness and not create unwanted experiences along the way.”
These opposite perspectives on man’s nature–sinner and divinity–were candidly juxtaposed during a 2012 interfaith panel discussion in Midland, Texas, at which I represented Hinduism. The issue arose as clergy from five faiths responded to the question “In your faith, is humanity considered a one family?”
My answer was: “The Hindu belief that gives rise to tolerance of differences in race and nationality is that all of mankind is good; we are all divine beings, souls created by God. Hindus do not accept the concept that some individuals are evil and others are good. Hindus believe that each individual is a soul, a divine being, who is inherently good. Scriptures tell us that each soul is emanated from God, as a spark from a fire, beginning a spiritual journey which eventually leads back to God. All human beings are on this journey, whether they realize it or not.”
The next speaker, Dr. Randel Everett of the Baptist Christian faith, put forth a distinctly different perspective. “The idea of the oneness of humanity–this is where Christianity would differ from some of the religions. We do believe in the oneness of humanity but that the oneness of humanity is that we are a fallen people. We do not believe that we are inherently good. We believe we are inherently selfish and self-centered, and that’s why we need to be rescued or redeemed–that Christ rescues us from the domain of darkness.” (You can view the entire 2-hour interfaith panel discussion here.)
Looking more closely at the Hindu belief that man is not inherently sinful–rather, the essence of man is divine and perfect–a further question arises: “What is the Hindu view of sin?” Gurudeva responds in Dancing with Siva: “Instead of seeing good and evil in the world, we understand the nature of the embodied soul in three interrelated parts: instinctive or physical-emotional; intellectual or mental; and superconscious or spiritual…. When the outer, or lower, instinctive nature dominates, one is prone to anger, fear, greed, jealousy, hatred and backbiting. [Lila: This is tamas guna. I would say fear, envy, and sloth are tamasic. Anger seems rajasic to me.)
When the intellect is prominent, arrogance and analytical thinking preside.
{Lila: Rajas. It also includes greed, ambition).
When the superconscious soul comes forth, the refined qualities are born--compassion, insight, modesty and the others. {Lila: Sattvic).
The animal instincts of the young soul are strong. The intellect, yet to be developed, is nonexistent to control these strong instinctive impulses. When the intellect is developed, the instinctive nature subsides. When the soul unfolds and overshadows the well-developed intellect, this mental harness is loosened and removed."
This understanding of man's three-fold nature--instinctive, intellectual and spiritual--explains why people act in ways that are clearly not divine, such as becoming angry and harming others. There is more to man than his essence or inner nature. We also have an outer nature. However, man's actions, whether beneficial or harmful, sinful or divine, are all expressions of a one energy. That energy finds expression through the chakras, fourteen centers of consciousness within our subtle bodies.
[Lila: seven chakras in front and seven corresponding in the back, I assume]
Many of us have seen the system for water usage at temples in India: a long pipe with faucets along its length from which many people draw water to wash their hands and feet before entering the temple. That’s a nice analogy to energy and the chakras. Our subtle body is like a pipe with fourteen spigots. Water is water; it can come out of any of the spigots. It’s still water. Energy can come out through any of our chakras; it’s still energy.
Energy flowing through the higher chakras expresses the superconscious or spiritual nature. How do we control or direct our energy to keep it flowing through the higher chakras? Gurudeva used to say, “Energy goes where awareness flows.” We control our energies through consistent meditation and devotional activities in the home shrine, chanting, performing puja, attending puja and going to the temple on a regular basis. Listening to and playing refined music and performing traditional dance and other creative arts are also ways of channeling the energies through the higher chakras.
Our regular activities determine how our energy flows. If we are engaged in spiritual pursuits, occasionally we might get up to the chakra of divine love. And hopefully we frequent the chakra of direct cognition, in which we are able to look down on our mind and understand what we like and don’t like about ourselves, and work steadily to change what we don’t. And we get into the chakra of willpower. These are the qualities we tend to manifest if we are engaged in regular spiritual/religious activities.
If we are not elevating the energies, we are just living an ordinary life in the force centers of willpower, reason, memory, maybe fear and occasionally anger. If we see the flow of energy impersonally, then we can control it through the activities we choose to engage in.
I like to say that we have an inner perfection and an outer imperfection. We can take heart in identifying more with the inner perfection, our soul nature, and realize the outer has its problems, which we can work on–and that is the purpose of our life on earth, to work on ourselves, to learn, evolve and ultimately know God. With this attitude, born of the belief in our divinity, we are more detached from our shortcomings and difficulties. It’s just energy flowing through our various chakras, more water flowing through one spigot or another. It is not who we are. We realize that we can control that energy flow. “Which spigot shall I turn on today? How do I want my energy to flow? Which negative habit do I want to improve today?” It all becomes easier to tackle because we look at it in an impersonal way.
The concept of the fourteen chakras can help us put our failings into perspective so that we do not become discouraged by them. Shortcomings, such as occasionally being hurtful toward others, do not at all change the fact that our essence is divine. We can deepen our experience of inner divinity and overcome shortcomings by consistently following the various practices found in the Hindu religion. When we feel good about ourselves, we can more readily identify negative patterns and change them. If we have a negative concept of our self, believing that we are inherently flawed and sinful, we are not in such a good position to advance on the spiritual path. And one thing we can all feel good about is that Hinduism assures us not only that we are not sinners, but that every human being, without exception, is destined to achieve spiritual enlightenment and liberation.”
Came across this tidbit recently:
(Haven’t tried to verify its accuracy..just passing it along, since there was recently a debate among some Austrians and their detractors about whether the Rothschild controlled the gold market)
The Missionary Review of the World, Volume 29, printed in 1906 disclosed:
“The Possession of Wealth: One Jewish banking house is estimated to control $30,000,000,000. The Rothschilds in ten years loaned $482,000,000. Nearly one-half of the gold coined, of the entire world, is said to be in Jewish hands.”
How they figured that out is a bit mystifying, but there it is.
And more on the Rothschilds:
Dutch economist Ad Broere, in his 2010 book “Ending The Global Casino,” informs us that,
“The 19th century became known as the age of the Rothschilds when it was estimated they controlled half of the world’s wealth. While their wealth continues to increase today, they have managed to blend into the background, giving an impression that their power has waned. They only apply the Rothschild name to a small fraction of the companies they actually control.”
A movie about Operation Valkyrie - the plot to overthrow Hitler, headed by the aristocratic German officer, Claus von Stauffenberg.
This is what real resistance look like.
Compare his character and his actions to the people who claim to be leading resistance today.
I’ll save you the trouble by going down the list.
One won’t make a move without asking you for money which ends up in his family coffers.
Another poses in an evening dress before being arrested for jay-walking.
A third sells t-shirts and mugs to college students.
A fourth plans to vote fascists out of power.
A fifth doesn’t dare name any names.
A sixth identifies them as lizards.
A seventh hides in a mansion, emerging only for photo-ops in night-clubs, to sign books, or discuss movie deals.
“The costs of our most basic needs, from food to education to health care, are at the same time being pushed upward with no control or regulation. Tuition and fees at four-year colleges climbed 300 percent between 1990 and 2011, fueling the college loan crisis that has left graduates, most of them underemployed or unemployed, with more than $1 trillion in debt. Health care costs over the same period have risen 150 percent. Food prices have climbed 10 percent since June, according to the World Bank. There are now 46.7 million U.S. citizens, and one in three children, who depend on food stamps. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Obama has, meanwhile, expelled 1.5 million immigrants, a number that dwarfs deportations carried out by his Republican predecessor. And while we are being fleeced, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank has since 2008 doled out $16 trillion to national and global financial institutions and corporations.”
Comment:
I don’t really see the removal of these support systems as such a calamity for the beneficiaries, except in a minority of cases. I see it mostly as a calamity for the providers and political allies of the support system.
That is cynical, but, here where I am, it’s hard to get anyone to work for less than $15 an hour, which is only ten dollars less than what I’ve worked for lately and much more than I’ve worked for when much younger.
So, not to be heartless, but cry me a river.
If you can’t find cheap or even free food somewhere in the US being given out by private donors/churches, then you are simply not looking hard enough.
You can live on sprouts raised in a one-bedroom apartment. You can grow food on the fringes of an abandoned lot or, with nice neighbors, in someone’s garden.
Health care bothers me more, because, really, if you have a sick child in need of brain surgery, alternative medicine isn’t going to help you. So yes. That’s a serious issue.
Food costs rising 10%. Wow. Over how long? What sort of food? Where are you shopping? You can still get bread for around a dollar a loaf if you look. And canned veggies can run between 50 cents and a buck a can.
Spinach is up a buck from a few years ago. So stop eating spinach and eat kale which is still around the same price, or just a bit more.
Instant coffee is up a lot, but it’s not good for you anyway. If you look around and buy non-brands, or ground, you can still manage, if you must have your shot of caffein.
But that’s not starvation, by any means.
Having got that caveat out of the way, let’s indulge Mr. Hedges and agree with everything else he says.
So what is he proposing to do about it?
Nothing, except write eloquent tracts and vote for a third party. More politics, in other words.
Here’s my solution.
It doesn’t require voting.
It requires public support and anger.
Can you muster up some anger that’s directed and focused, instead of wasted on “Illuminati,” “lizards,” “German death cults” and so on?
Let’s stick with those we can get our hands on, and then I promise you the Illuminati will be delivered dead as a door-nail to you.
Instead of attacking Iran, let’s attack the financial institutions and corporations that got public money to the tune of $16 trillion.
How hard is that? Most of the corporations are HQ’d here on US soil…or on Israeli soil, which is maybe not all that different these days.
All it would take is a bit of will power.
Declare the enemy to be those 100 or so individuals named by the establishment itself as the cause of the financial crisis (check out Vanity Fair).
To be fair and balanced, we can add a few more to bring the total to about 200-300.
They all come with attached corporations. Declare a retaliatory war on all of them. Don’t waste time assigning levels of guilt. Don’t waste time trying to do any of this through the legal system either. It’s been bought off.
Create a military tribunal special to the commission of war crimes. Because we are in an economic war. A war conducted through the stock exchange.
Any legal action taken against the b******* will not affect the body of law or constitutional theory because it will pertain to war-making. America is full of clever lawyers. Someone can spin a good theory that will keep the enemy tied up in court while public opinion builds up against him.
Declare these 300 enemy combatants and round them up.
All bail-out money can be frozen immediately and seized.
All senior managers of bailed out corporations, with no exceptions, can be fined for their dereliction of duty during the financial crisis.
It costs too much and the system is too captured to go after individuals.
For the most culpable individuals, we can toy with the possibility of the electric chair, or, at least, life imprisonment…. but not at tax-payer expense.
Their punishment can be billed to their corporations for life.
Just indict the senior managers of all companies guilty of (economic) war crimes.
That would be a start.
We’ll spare them and us a Nuremberg trial, since we’re not interested in grand-standing prosecutors getting air time.
Quietly, quickly, seize the equivalent of the bail-out funds from their assets and return that money to the public treasury.
Then, divest the criminals of their citizenship, divest their corporations of legal status and protections. Exile them to any country that will take them, with the proviso that they are permanently disbarred from working as managers, consultants, brokers, advisers, ever again, either directly or indirectly.
They can try manual labor in some place that’s thoroughly un-policed; where it’s each man for himself.
Libertarian nirvana.
Let’s see how they like it, when they’re starving nobodies and the bribers and blackmailers are no longer their friends but their enemies.
Publish photo IDs on the net, with no compunction, so they can be turned in wherever they flee, because one and all of these criminals have supported the spy state and surveillance for the rest of us. One and all of them have made money off of it.
A taste of their own medicine will be salutary.
Co-ordinate with the laws of other countries to ensure that rules aren’t bent for them.
Drive the top three hundred racketeers off the face of the US, confiscate their booty, and voila, problem solved.
So why doesn’t anyone do it?
Because, you, dear reader, are unwilling to do your part.
Which is to actually use your head and stop trusting people who manage to be so very angry..in a general way… but never actually name any names.
Who never ask for major criminals to be prosecuted, but waffle on about the sanctity of property and gun ownership.
They’re all for prosecuting criminals who attack their own own homes and properties. Then, there’s no mercy or compassion.
But if you don’t want the criminals at the top prosecuted, then you shouldn’t want those at the bottom prosecuted either.
If you believe in compassion and mercy for criminals, let it be all for all criminals.
Either punishment for all or punishment for none.
If you won’t jail the financiers, then open the jails and never jail anyone again.
Break open Super Max.
Batter down the doors of Alcatraz.
Let the murderers walk. Let the serial killers go free. Forgive the child rapists and the arsonists.
Weep for the bankers? Then you must weep for the burglars.
Put down your gun when the home invaders come. When your wife is raped, embrace the rapist and talk to him of mercy and compassion.
When Ted Bundy or Jeremy Dahmer stalks the land, talk about mercy and forgiveness to them too.
Then..and only then… will I believe you.
Either prosecute the top 300 criminals of the financial crisis, the ones named by your own pet institutions and pet journalists, or shut up forever.
And you fools out there. You suckers who line up to hand your pitiful savings to charlatan activists.
Stop following clowns and jokers.
They are whited sepulchers. The numbers prove it.
300 or so corporate bosses/financial honchos on one side. Three hundred million non-bosses and non-honchos on the other.
Do the math.
Can’t you see if that if we can’t get the job done, it’s not for lack of man-power but from lack of will?
It’s because we prefer to sit on our backsides, play with slogans, t-shirts, and pretty girls on videos telling us how Google or Microsoft really really loves us, while we high-five our buddies on forums.
Do we really care about changing the system?
Or do we just want to talk about…or pay other people to talk to us about…. how someone else can change the system….if he’s paid enough to do it….
Think about that the next time someone complains about politicians, bankers, elites and the rest.
Take a good look in the mirror.
Let’s ask ourselves what any of us have done to change things. Ask ourselves if it cost us anything. Ask ourselves why we expect anyone else to do what we ourselves are unwilling to do.
[Note: I hadn't planned to vote for anyone, but I sure feel more sympathetic toward Johnson than to Paul.
Further note:
A vote for Johnson will probably help Romney, because it will be one less person voting for Obama.
Romney is Goldman Sachs' candidate and seems to be salivating for war. So if you want to vote, on paper, theoretically, Obama makes more sense.
That is the mess the Paul campaign left us with by going soft on Romney for most of the time.
Best course of action? Spend your time getting prepared and save your money for your family.
Turn off your TV, hang up the phone on people calling for contributions, tear up letters asking for money and use them to line the bird cage. Arrange your affairs so you'll be fine in case of global war, should Romney win; and in case of high taxes, regulations, and collapsing businesses, should Obama win. In both cases, prepare for depreciation of the currency, rising prices, currency controls, and possibly emergency or martial law.
If you can, leave the US, but only for something better, which isn't easy to find or cheap.
If you are middle-class and have no savings, forget that and stay put, preferably in a warm, relatively cheap state. Texas is good if you need a job; otherwise, any warm cheap state is better than freezing through the next four years.
If you're not doing well, avoid people and get a dog. This makes for happiness easier than anything else. You need to be happy somehow or other to get through the next few years.]
“What’s the biggest difference between Congressman Ron Paul and Governor Gary Johnson? It’s not ideological, although there are some key and important distinctions on their positions.
The biggest difference is money. How much they have and how they’ve spent it.
For Gary Johnson, his whole campaign has been a shoestring affair. Having raised only several hundred thousand dollars in pursuit of the Presidency, he’s spending the limited funds he has on travel and critical campaign operations. Calling the Johnson campaign “budget conscious” would be an accurate descriptor. They know their resources are tight, the money they have raised has not come easily and they seem legitimately dedicated to stretching their campaign-dollar to the maximum.
The same cannot be said for Ron Paul’s latest bid for the Republican nomination or the myriad organizations he and his family members have spawned to fleece the “true believers” of their every last dime. People don’t just support Ron Paul, many are personally obsessed with the man. They give and give, and then give some more. In fact, it often seems like Ron Paul’s role model is less Barry Goldwater than something closer to L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction author and founder of the cult-like cash-cow known as Scientology.
[And it's no surprise to me that behind the career of libertarian Harry Browne can be found Scientologists like Michael Baybak, who also had a history of stock manipulation. Scientology is notorious for unethical financial practices. Likewise, I will not even attempt to compile the number of convictions/investigations that seem to attend the careers of prominent libertarians and their backers.]
It would be one thing if the Paul campaign spent their money as wisely as the Johnson campaign. There’s no telling how much could have been accomplished with the tens of millions of dollars that the Ron Paul machine has generated over the last half-decade. Unfortunately, we will never know what might have been.
Recently we learned that Jesse Benton, Ron Paul’s bumbling campaign manager and grandson-in-law, had been paid a staggering $586,616 by the Paul campaign and associated organizations. That number has likely grown by, at least, tens of thousands of dollars since it was first reported. Gary Johnson could have financed his entire campaign thus far on Benton’s salary alone!
The problem goes beyond just Benton, who recently enraged Paul supporters when he put out a series of statements to the public that explained a shift in campaign strategy away from active campaigning in upcoming primaries. He explained this was a way to conserve campaign resources. The press interpreted this as Paul suspending his campaign and the announcement likely cost Paul a significant number of delegates in the Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas primaries. It also signaled a desire to preserve relations with the Romney campaign and the GOP establishment, likely with the hopes of protecting the future career of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
Some of the Paul diehards have suggested that Benton “acted alone” in making these campaign policy shifts and in setting his own salary, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. This is Ron Paul’s standard operating procedure: his family gets paid, every time.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has noted that Representative Paul was one of the worst offenders in the U.S. House for using campaign and PAC money to enrich family members. In CREW’s recent survey of 2008 and 2010 spending by Congressional candidates, they noted: “Rep. Paul’s campaign committee, Committee to Re-elect Ron Paul, paid salaries to his
daughter, his grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, his granddaughter, his grandson-in-law, and another relative. In addition, his campaign committee reimbursed the congressman and several other relatives and paid his brother’s accounting firm. Finally, Rep. Paul’s leadership political action committee (PAC), Liberty PAC, reimbursed the congressman, paid his brother’s accounting firm, and paid his daughter a salary.”
Considering the way that the Ron Paul political machine has generated so much of its millions of dollars from small donors over the last half-decade, many of whom could hardly afford to give to a political campaign, it is shocking that this is how much of the money was apparently being spent. Many of the footsoldiers of the liberty movement have dedicated so much of their lives to supporting this one man, it’s reached such an unhealthy degree that they can no longer see the greater cause they are supposedly fighting for.
There is now a Libertarian governor with a resume far more impressive than that of Congressman Paul, standing up and reaching his hand out to them. And yet they largely ignore this amazing opportunity, fixated on a sad old man who has mesmerized them into attempting to etch his likeness onto everything from chocolate bars to a pub in New York City to discussion of building a statue of the man himself.
Described by some as one of the “biggest purveyors of nepotism in U.S. history,” the failure of Ron Paul to even consider passing the torch to Gary Johnson shows that he is now entirely focused on building his family’s political dynasty, and perhaps even trying to find a spot for his son Rand on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney. Ron Paul’s supporters aren’t just promoting the message of liberty, they are worshiping a man who deserves very little of their praise.
Contrast this gross abuse of donor trust with how the Johnson campaign operates. Gary Johnson’s adult son, Erik Johnson, has been working day and night on the governor’s campaign and is getting paid no salary to do so. The governor even got a little choked up when he acknowledged his son’s sacrifice in a touching moment during his acceptance speech at the Libertarian Convention last month.
Gary Johnson is an avid skier, adventurer, and bicyclist. He has reached the highest peaks on four of the seven continents, including Mt. Everest. He’s built a successful private sector business, and been elected the chief executive of a large state for two highly productive terms, during which he vetoed more bills than the governors of the other 49 states combined. His libertarian credentials are unmatched, and yet today Rand Paul endorsed Mitt Romney for President. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about the Paul clan’s priorities.”
I posted this piece because I’m interested in exploring the sources of the need to dominate others and many have located it in religion, specifically, in monotheism. That is the tenor of the piece below.
However, on second thoughts, I want to add that this doesn’t accurately portray my thoughts on the subject, or the Hindu world view, which is not simply polytheistic, any more than it is monistic.
The Hindu view is best defined as radical pluralism based on dharmic principles.
Contemporary moral relativism or multiculturalism would be unacceptable to Hindus, since dharma categorically forbids certain actions and attitudes.
Because of neo-paganism, many associate polytheism with hedonism or alternative life-styles. But Hindu polytheism is firmly grounded in a traditional way of life and if anything requires a “stricter” and more austere life-style than that allowed by the monotheist.
Drinking, gambling, and eating meat, for example, are traditionally forbidden to Hindus.
ORIGINAL POST
Dr. Vijaya Rajiva argues that Hindu polytheism is a more faithful reflection of the universe’s infinite energy than the “one-godism” of the Abrahamic Middle Eastern faiths.
[I don't endorse Rajiva's criticisms of Rajiv Malhotra, whose work I think is extremely effective and does NOT concede the intellectual terrain to his Christian interlocuters, as she contends, see here.]
“The 1008 plus hymns of the Rig Veda are invocations to multiple male and female divine energies, Agni, Indra, Varuna, the Viswa Vedas, Saraswati (invoked 78 times), and they together represent the Vedic comprehension of terrestrial, atmospheric and cosmic powers. At various times, various deities are invoked without the least feeling that only one or two or groups of them are more important than the rest. Agni is invoked as the chief messenger who carries the worshipper’s message to the rest of the pantheon, but there is no rift or rivalry with the other deities in the pantheon.
The Vedic universe’s innumerable deities convey an impression of richness and variety, a deep spirituality absent in the limited monotheistic framework. Historically, the practitioners of a monotheistic faith (chiefly Islam and Christianity) have forced their belief in THEIR one god on peoples of other belief systems. This has been so since the inception of these monotheistic creeds, from the Nicene Council of 325 AD for Christianity, and since the 8th century AD in the case of Islam. In India, this process can be dated from the 7th and 8th centuries onwards and continues to this day through jihad and conversion.
Hindus need to question why the belief in ONE (Abrahamic) god is superior to polytheism or even whether such a belief is necessary. The ONE god is an abstraction. No mortal has either seen or heard this entity. There is only the testimony of other mortal individuals. Above all, Hindus must question WHY this one god of Abraham cannot coexist in peace with other faiths and belief systems? And when this one god is actually only a political weapon of the power wielding it, it has to be rejected without hesitation.
As a system of religious belief per se, the ONE god-ists are searching for an unattainable goal, as argued by French Indologist Alain Danielou in Hindu Polytheism (1964). Contemporary Hindus can use this methodology creatively to start an inquiry into the nature and structure of Hindu spiritual diversity and the limitations of a frantic search for the ONE god, as opposed to the UNITY of God. (The 1984 edition’s first chapter is available on the internet under, Indian Gods: Hindu Polytheism). Danielou himself creatively appropriated the work of Kant.
Briefly, Danielou rebuked those who dogmatically describe God as the ONE:
“A supreme cause has to be beyond number, otherwise Number would be the First Cause. But the number one, although it has peculiar properties, is a number like two or three, or ten, or a million. If “God” is one he is not beyond number anymore than if he is two or three or ten or a million. But although a million is not any nearer to infinity than one or two or ten, it seems to be so from the limited point of view of our perceptions. And we may be nearer to a mental representation of divinity when we consider an immense number of different gods than when we try to stress their unity, for the number one is in a way the number furthest remove from infinity (Hindu Polytheism, Chapter one, p.7)”.
The Rig Veda celebrates these gods and goddesses and invokes them in profound Yagnas (ritual prayers). It is relatively easy for the determined non-Hindu with philosophical training to work his/her way into the profound philosophical speculations of Vedanta and even try to subvert them to his/her purposes by the process known as Inculturation. Bede Griffiths, after a prolonged study of Vedanta, eventually returned to the Christian Trinity. But the Vedic rituals cannot be so subverted; this is also the formidable obstacle faced by Islamic scholars. (See my article on Bede Griffiths, ‘Inculturation: The Frank Morales Jesus videos’)
The oral ritual tradition of the four Vedas may seem to be ‘regional’ and has been so dismissed in the past, as pointed out by American Vedantin Dr. David Frawley (aka Vamadeva Shastri) in his BIRD lecture of 24 March 2012. Dr. Frawley says that the universalism of Vedanta is gaining recognition in today’s world. But on the other hand, as the present writer has been stressing, it can be subverted owing to the nature of philosophical speculation, whereas the authenticity of Vedic mantras (and mudras) remains immutable.
Contemporary Hindus, therefore, must pay special attention to the preservation of this aspect of our Vedic heritage. – Vijayvaani, 4 April 2012
Unlike knee-jerk leftists, I recognize that Reagan started out with some genuine free-market leanings. Contrary to the mythology, he was well-informed about economics. And he was a realist dove, not a neo-con hawk:
“As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: “On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm’s way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer.”
In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
Lest we forget, after America’s first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to “cut and run”. Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle,” Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: “The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position … those 241 marines would be alive today.”
These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons’ blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.
The truth is that Reagan wasn’t a Reaganite; he ended the cold war through negotiation and with far fewer military interventions than his successors have managed so far in the war on terror. His actions, rather than his occasionally bombastic words, reveal a president more interested in jaw-jaw than war-war.”
But, by the second half of his presidency, the shadow state had taken over. Neocons had infiltrated the offices of the executive, were conducting espionage, pulling strings to overcome security blocks, and pushing agendas developed in their think-tanks.
Stephen Green at Counterpunch describes the decades-long take-over that started in the 1970s, accelerated in the second half of the Reagan administration, and came to full flower with Bush junior. The main figures are people like Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, with supporters like Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dector, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
Other related or overlapping networks/operations include the Enterprise and Pegasus.
All of them are tied in different ways to prominent, seemingly disparate scandals of the period - Operation Red Rock in Vietnam, the CIA-related Australian Nugan-Hand bank, the CIA-related BCCI bank, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the deaths of drug barons like Pablo Escobar and political bosses like Manuel Noriega.
To sum that up as briefly as possible, the New World Order was put in place through covert operations by a secretive element in government that is now so extensive as to control the entire government. That shadow government relies on the drug/arms trade for its funding and espionage and blackmail for its enforcement.
“My brother Jaime died in 2001, married to Astrid Velez, they had two children … Any other romantic relationship that my brother may have had was part of his personal life and is unknown to me,” Álvaro Uribe tweeted on Sunday. He denied Jaime was ever linked to the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
According to the Nuevo Arco Iris investigation, Jaime Uribe was arrested and interrogated by the army in 1986 after detectives discovered calls had been made from his carphone to Escobar, leader of the Medellín cartel.
Álvaro Uribe acknowledged that his brother had been arrested but said he had been released and charges were dropped, claiming Jaime was recovering from throat surgery in a local hospital at the time the calls were made. “His car phone was cloned by criminals,” Alvaro Uribe tweeted.
The Uribe family has long faced accusations of ties to drug trafficking. A US intelligence report from 1991, declassified in 2004, identified Álvaro Uribe as a “close friend” of Escobar, who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel”. It also says Uribe’s father was murdered “for his connection with the narcotic (sic) traffickers”. Officially Uribe’s father died while trying to resist being kidnapped by leftist guerrillas in 1983.
The US state department disavowed the intelligence report when it was published, during Uribe’s second year in office, saying it had “no credible information” to substantiate the information.
Another Uribe brother, Santiago, isbeing investigated over the alleged founding and leadership of a rightwing paramilitary group, while Uribe’s cousin Mario lost his seat in the senate and was jailed for seven and a half years over ties to paramilitaries, main players in Colombia’s drug trade.“
“Uribe’s early political career has been the subject of much speculation, rumors and accusations over his alleged links to Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. He began his political career in the late 70s, holding the posts of Chief of Assets for the Public Enterprises of Medellin (EPM) in 1976 and serving as Secretary General of the Ministry of Labor from 1977 to 1978. However it was after he was appointed as Director of Civil Aviation in 1980 that the rumors began.
From Counterpunch, analysis of Uribe’s US-backed policy of fomenting divisions in Latin American solidarity (written in 2010, when Uribe was stepping down):
“A U.S.-Colombian offensive against Venezuela at the moment of political transition presents a huge threat to regional stability. Uribe has consistently relied on the visceral response of the international right, forces within the U.S. government and nationalist anti-Venezuela sentiment in Colombia to build a fear of Chavez that is based more on created perception than on cool-headed analysis. Obviously, the vast majority of FARC, ELN and rightwing paramilitary forces declared “terrorist”, operate within Colombia.”
“Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington’s land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.
The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region’s most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.
Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the “Uribe Doctrine,” now his. It’s extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.
As Uribe’s Defense Minister, James Petras explained that Santos was an assassin, deploying military forces and paramilitary death squads “to kill and terrorize entire population centers, (murdering) over 20,000 people….falsely labeled ‘guerrillas.’
“Those who try to remain viable in the mainstream by denigrating 9-11 research or aiding and abetting other conspiracies of silence end up with neither victory nor a clean conscience, as the case of the defunct Ron Paul campaign demonstrates, says Jason Erb at Faux Capitalist.
“Lee Rogers of Live Free or Die Radio on Oracle Broadcasting has been at the forefront in the true alternative media in questioning whether Ron Paul’s campaign has been intentionally set up to fail, in saying that he wasn’t supporting Ron Paul in 2012 because of what happened in 2008.
Lee Rogers is no armchair quarterback when it comes to Ron Paul, as he conducted an interview with him in the run-up to the 2008 campaign, and he later revealed that Ron Paul said he had asked him tough questions.
Since Ron Paul didn’t win the nomination, the argument that Ron Paul should throw 9/11 under the bus again in 2012 is moot, since he didn’t win, regardless.
On April 29, 2011, I posed the question, will Ron Paul throw 9/11 Truth under the bus again, like he did in 2008?, and was met with a mostly hostile reaction on RonPaulForums.com. While I didn’t hear of him throwing it under the bus in 2012, he also didn’t embrace it or even say that those seeking a full independent account of what happened on 9/11 had some legitimate points in doubting the official story.
The fact that avoiding 9/11 Truth didn’t win him the nomination confirms the futility of that strategy, and the same strategy of any subsequent libertarian presidential candidate. To say that if he had embraced 9/11 Truth, he would’ve lost even more is like saying that it’s better to lose less in a contest where winning is the goal and there’s only room for one winner.
That is hardly a revelation. Conservative movements have been infiltrated, for sure. The real news is that so has the libertarian movement. At least, that is the mildest interpretation of events.
I for one think it is much worse. I think many “libertarian” leaders are controlled opposition, compromised in some way, working against their expressed goals, cozy with the kleptocracy, or otherwise operating in bad faith, not just from ignorance.
I’m sorry to think that. But I’ve learned to respect my gut instinct. And that is what my gut instinct tells me.
In Ron Paul’s case, I get the feeling he is being “handled” by others, and either can’t or won’t stand up to it.
“These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children,” he continues. “More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.” They went to war “predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation…. Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to.” “We’re like America’s little pit bull,” one Marine wryly told Wright. “They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.”
The mindset Wright described in Generation Kill is displayed in much greater detail in Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero, the battlefield memoir of Iraq veteran Marco Martinez.
A product of a military family from Albuquerque, Martinez enlisted in Latino street gangs as a teenager. He was “rescued” from a life of private-sector gangsterism through a federally funded, police-supervised school program called GREAT (Gang Resistance Education and Training), which eventually led him to enroll in the ROTC program at his High School. This curriculum prepared Martinez for a career as a state-authorized gang-banger.
“Salvation from a civilian existence is through these doors, boys,” Martinez and several other enlistees were told as they assembled at the local recruiting station. Like most gang-bangers, Martinez was susceptible to an appeal based on tribal and territorial loyalties, so he was an apt pupil at boot camp. Discipline refined his instinct for violence; training enhanced his capacity to inflict it; and the potted platitudes of nationalism sanctified his urge to kill into something he believed was noble.
Reciting the Rifleman’s Creed “got me so fired up that it put me into a blood lust,” Martinez recalls. “I wanted to kill America’s enemies. I could see and taste it.”
That opportunity came in April 2003, one month after George W. Bush ordered the assault on Iraq. Corporal Martinez was part of a 42-man Marine platoon that was dispatched on a “contact patrol” in the town of Al-Tarmiya, a predominantly Sunni town about sixty miles north of Baghdad.
A “contact patrol,” Martinez explains, “is the most coveted of infantry patrols…. Marines on contact patrol become human wrecking balls, leaving maximum carnage in their path, as any person encountered, armed, is to be considered hostile and killed at will.”
This was not the first time Martinez had carried out a mission of that kind. As a street thug, he and his buddies would often go out on “contact patrol” by rolling into a rival gang’s turf, seeking to provoke a firefight by throwing gang signs and calling out their “sets” at their enemies.
“You are to take out anybody displaying any type of aggression toward U.S. forces,” explained the lieutenant commanding Martinez’s platoon prior to the mission in Al-Tarmiya. How residents of a neighborhood could be guilty of “aggression” by displaying hostility toward armed invaders, the lieutenant didn’t explain. In any case, the rules of engagement were clearly intended to bring about the result Martinez described: The Marines were being sent into Al-Tarmiya to provoke a firefight and kill as many people as possible.
Shortly after the platoon was deployed, Martinez’s squad was ambushed by a group of guerrillas. The squad leader was severely wounded. Martinez identified the source of the gunfire, threw a grenade into the nearby building, then stormed in and gunned down four Iraqis.
That this was an act of individual courage is impossible to deny. Martinez’s actions saved the life of his squad leader (who was left crippled by his injury, and actually became a public opponent of the Iraq War after leaving the military). But the word “heroism” isn’t appropriate here – unless we could apply it just as accurately to similar actions taken by a street-level gangster in an inner-city turf war.
“All those times that I’d carried a gun as a teenager had been for sh*t,” insisted Martinez in Hard Corps. “My friends at the time and I were prepared to shoot and get shot at over girls, cars, money, or something as stupid as the way somebody looked at us…. But my Marine buddies and I carried weapons to defend our nation against its enemies. We, like millions who came before us, used the awesome might of America’s military power for liberation, not conquest….”
It takes a formidable gift for self-delusion to refer what was done to Iraq as “liberation,” and a complete hostility to the truth to suggest that the invasion of that country was in any sense a defensive act. Martinez’s rationalization for the state-mandated criminal violence he committed could have been adapted from the hymnal of the Soviet Cheka secret police: “To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles….”
Even when it is fought for purely defensive purposes, war is an unqualified curse. As James Madison famously warned, war is the greatest of all “enemies to public liberty” because it “comprises and develops the germ of every other.” This isn’t only the case with corruption of public policy and the consolidation of political power; the principle applies just as well to matters of individual morality on which the preservation of freedom ultimately depends. This is why Madison lamented the “degeneracy of manners and morals” that inevitably ensues whenever a country goes to war, however briefly – and why he emphasized that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Those facets of war most abhorred by Madison were considered by Karl Marx to be most admirable. Writing in 1851 to his disciples, Marx extolled the revolutionary “virtues” of generational war: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.”
How do people who pass through this revolutionary curriculum behave? What does it mean to be people Marx would describe as “fit … for the exercise of political power?” And what would America look like a generation from now – if not sooner – as a result of being immersed in “continual warfare?” One appropriate answer could be found in examining the people who embodied the revolution Marx and his heirs inflicted on Russia – the agents of the Soviet Cheka secret police, the chief instrument of Soviet terror.
The ruling ethic of Lenin’s regime, recall, is that the fundamental political question is not defined by the Golden Rule, but rather “who does what to whom” – and the Cheka, being the enforcement arm of the “Who,” saw no reason to restrain itself in plundering, torturing, and slaughtering those unfortunate enough to be part of the “Whom.”
“This organization is rotten to the core,” observed Bolshevik official Serafina Gopner in a March 22, 1919 letter to Lenin. Those who enlisted to be the “sword and shield” of the revolution were, almost without exception, “common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like. They steal, loot, rape … practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money.” (7)
“The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately,” reported a Bolshevik regional secretary in Yaroslavl on September 26th of the same year. “Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors.”
A dispatch to Moscow dated October 16th informed Feliks Dzherzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that “Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance.”
If those reports from a century ago have a strongly contemporary flavor, this is not entirely coincidental. If we could peel away the veneer of “respectability” from those who rule us, we would be rewarded with a spectacle at least as squalid as the ones described above. More ominous still is the fact that the degenerate elite presuming to rule us has effectively eradicated every significant institutional, legal, and social impediment to the exercise of total power. And they are filling the enforcement apparatus with people who subscribe to the nihilist’s credo “Respect yourself and no one else” – the hip-hop culture’s updating of Lenin’s “who/whom” formula.”
Upon hearing of the alleged connections between Vincent Foster, the NSA, and its subsidiary Systematics–since renamed ALLTEL Information Services (4001 N. Rodney Parham Rd.,
Little Rock, Arkansas 72212-2496, phone 501/220-5100)– ALLTEL Corp. (1 Allied Dr., Little Rock, Arkansas 72202, phone 501/661-8000) hired a San Francisco libel attorney named Charles O. Morgan (450 Sansome Street, 13th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94111-3382, phone 415/392-2037) to threaten
journalists who made such allegations.
ALLTEL feared the economic consequences of the charges made against its private subsidiary: “Banking and financial institutions are clients of ALLTEL. The irresponsible and false statements . . . have and will cause my client substantial damage”
(letter from Charles O. Morgan to Agora Inc., March 28, 1995).
Published news articles in the *American Banker* and elsewhere show that Systematics’ (ALLTEL Information Serivces’) customers have included Home Bank, Manufactuers Hanover (now merged with Chemical),
Vboss, Southwestern Bell, various overseas military bases, City National, California Federal Bank, Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, Guaranty Federal Savings Bank, River Forest Bankcorp, First Busey Corp, Decatur Federal Savings and Loan, Republic National Bank of New York, Anchor Savings Bank, Integra
Financial Corp, Banc One, Nations Bank, Citicorp, Vermont National Bank, CNB Bancshares, Liberty Bancorp of Oklahoma City, First Union, First National Bank of Maryland, Amcore Financial, Horizon, Oxford
First Corp, Navy Federal Credit Union, People’s National Bank, Drung Thai Bank Ltd., Bank of Commerce Berhad, Unisys Corp, Corestates Financial Corp, Novorosiysk Industrial Commercial Ecobank, Royal
Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, United Overseas Bank (Singapore), Soneri Bank Ltd (Pakistan), Banco National Ultramarino SA (Macao), BMJ Financial Corp, Security Bank (Arkansas), Hiberia National Bank, Glendale Federal Bank, First Alabama Bancshares, Union Bank of Manila, First Pacific National Bank, Pine Bluff National Bank, Consolidated Bank (Miami), Citibank of Australia, Savings Bank of the Russian Federation,
Family Bank, Sabine State Bank & Trust, Central Bank, Chemical Bank, Citibank, Moscow Savings Bank, National Home Mortgage Company, Barclays Bank PLC, Keycorp, Bank IV Kansas, Borel of California, Dime Bancorp, and Bellsouth Cellular Corp.
According to John E. Steuri, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman of the Board of Systematics: “Today, we have banking, financial services, cellular telephone and hospital clients in thirty-six (36) countries outside the United States”
(memo from John Steuri to Jim Norman, March 8, 1995, with the
subject listed as “Systematics”).
Attorney Charles O. Morgan sent threatening letters to, among others, Agora Inc., publisher of Strategic Investment (824 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202-4799), to David Fondiller and Jim Norman
of Forbes (62 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011), and to Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Inc. (1125 15th St. N.W., #300, Washington D.C.
20005-2707, phone 202/828-8600).
In denying various allegations, Charles O. Morgan makes personal claims of knowledge that border on the supernatural. For example, Strategic Investment had written in its March 22, 1995, issue: “Several years ago, investigative reporter Danny Cassalario [sic] spent many months investigating the Inslaw case. He told associates that his probe had revealed an astonishing tale of corruption that he intended to reveal in
a story entitled ‘The Octopus.’ He was days away from completing his story when he was found dead, allegedly a ’suicide.’ ”
In his March 28, 1995, letter to Agora, Inc., Charles O. Morgan makes the blanket assertion:
“Systematics was not in any way involved in any investigation by Danny Cassalario [sic]” (page 2).
How could Charles O. Morgan possibly know what topics Danny Casolaro, a private journalist, was investigating at the time of Casolaro’s death?
Was Charles O. Morgan in close communication with Danny Casolaro at the time of Casolaro’s death?
Did Charles O. Morgan examine Casolaro’s papers and notes following Casolaro’s death, to determine if there were any references to Systematics?
Or did Charles O. Morgan rely on statements by the FBI/Justice Department regarding the topic of Casolaro’s investigations?
If so, he was relying on a biased source, for according to the “Executive Summary” of a document supplied by Inslaw to each member of the House Judiciary Committee:
The Office of Special Investigations’ (OSI’s) “publicly- declared mission is to locate and deport Nazi war criminals. The Nazi war criminal program is, however, a front for the Justice Department’s own covert intelligence service, according to disclosures recently made to INSLAW by several senior Justice Department career officials. ….
“According to written statements of which INSLAW has obtained copies, another undeclared mission of the Justice Department’s covert agents was to insure that investigative journalist Danny Casolaro remained silent about the role of the Justice Department in the INSLAW scandal by murdering him in West
Virginia in August 1991. INSLAW has acquired copies of two relevant written statements furnished to a veteran investigative journalist by a national security operative of the U.S. Government, several months after Casolaro’s death. …”
Finally, did instead Charles O. Morgan simply rely on Sytematics’ assertions that it was not the subject of investigation by Danny Casolaro? If so, why would Systematics make such an assertion? Who would suppose there was a connection between Systematics and the death of Danny Casolaro?
Charles Morgan’s denials suggest to me that an important part of the Kenneth Starr investigation into matters related to Whitewater should focus on the relationship between the death of Danny Casolaro
and the death of Vincent Foster.
And Kenneth Starr should question Charles O. Morgan with respect to his personal knowledge of the topics of Danny Casolaro’s investigation which lead to Casolaro’s death.”
Greenworld Investor has a piece on the debate between Michael Pettis and Jeremy Grantham on where we are in the commodity cycle:
“Two of the most respected market analysts have radically opposite positions on where the commodity cycle is right now. While Michael Pettis thinks that the commodity cycle has peaked and hard commodities will crash by 2015, Grantham thinks there has been a paradigm change in commodities which will keep on increasing in price.
Pettis’s Arguments are based on:
a) First, during the last decade commodity producers were caught by surprise by the surge in demand. Their belated response was to ramp up production dramatically, but since there is a long lead-time between intention and supply, for the next several years we will continue to experience rapid growth in supply.
b) Second, almost all the increase in demand in the past twenty years, which in practice occurred mostly in the past decade, can be explained as the consequence of the incredibly unbalanced growth process in China.
c) Third, and more importantly, as China’s economy re-balances towards a much more sustainable form of growth, this will automatically make Chinese growth much less commodity intensive
d) Surging Chinese hard commodity purchases in the past few years supplied, not just growing domestic needs but also rapidly growing inventory.
Grantham Thesis on Commodities
Global Commodity Parabolic Price Rise Bubble or Real- Is it Really Different This Time
The rise in global commodity prices is fueling inflation everywhere particularly in developing countries where food and energy forms a major percentage of the inflation basket. This has forced countries like India and China to accelerate interest rate hikes to cool down inflation. Rising Food Prices has caused distress in a number of places leading to food riots in Africa and have been said to be a leading cause of the revolutions in the Middle East. Oil Prices continues to increase unabated as dollar decreases with US Money Printing. Commodities are touching new all time peaks as rising global demand, finite resources, money printing by developed countries fuel price hikes. Silver has been increasing in a parabolic manner with other commodities too showing heart-stopping jumps in prices. The rise in global wheat,rice prices has been at a record as well. Almost all commodities have seen sharp prices increase.
Grantham has made a famous call
The rise in commodities is not a cyclical phenomenon but a secular long term one. He says that the rise in commodity prices is different from the past. Note Grantham has done an extensive study of bubbles and is one of the leading minds in the investment community. While every time in the past, the statement “this time is different” has led to a crash, Grantham’s call cannot be taken lightly. He says that the rise in population, shortage of resources, the growing consumption power of massive chunks of prosperous citizens in India and China will lead to a continued surge. Note commodity prices have declined secularly in the last century and since 2000 have managed to erase all their losses to form new peaks. Grantham also says there is a possibility of a massive short term decline which will give a historic opportunity to load on commodities. Jim Rogers is the most famous commodity bull and now Grantham has joined him.”
Russell Peters, an Indo-Canadian stand-up comedian, has won four Grammy awards for his hilarious routines about racial stereotypes, accents, and other politically incorrect topics. In this clip he takes on media stereotypes of Arabs.
The Times of India describes the increased levels of “eve-teasing” and groping in India since liberalization in the 1990s.
White women are more often targeted on the streets, as Hollywood culture ensures that they’re seen as more promiscuous and available. In addition, all white women are often assumed to be “American” and therefore rich, complain some Latin women.
Finally, since white/fair skin is slavishly admired in Asia, white women are also objectified and targeted as symbols of status and economic class. Conversely, black men and women are denigrated.
Such colonial attitudes seem to be worse in north India.
In contrast to demeaning attitudes toward women in the the West, which seem to be most prevalent in areas dominated by urban cosmopolitan males (such as the financial industry) , the harassment of women in neo-liberal India seems to be more in the nature of street crime committed by the semi-educated and the illiterate, under the influence of mass culture.
Among the educated and the professional classes in India, slavishness and obsequiousness toward the West and to whites is is a much more common social ill.
” Foreign women tourists in India often find themselves placed in uncomfortable cultural stereotypes and an increasing number of them have begun attributing this attitude to a colonial throwback.
A decade ago, women comprised only 25% of the total Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India every year. Presently, at 40%, women tourists are still a comparative minority despite the increase. According to a recurring Forbes survey on the world’s friendliest countries for expatriates and tourists, India ranked in one of the last slots for the second year in a row.
India’s not-so-friendly attitude towards tourists in general and female tourists in particular, varies in different regions. While the southern and western parts of the country rank favourably, north India is unanimously the most prejudiced culturally.
Theresa Price, a college student from Britain said, “Most people do tour North India because of the Taj Mahal, but it is steeped in cultural prejudices. The usual problems foreign women face like constant staring and eve-teasing is most rampant here.”
Amid this, the capital, which ranks second only to Mumbai in terms of popularity, emerges as a curious conglomerate. “Delhi is just like any other impressive modern metropolis on the face of it, but there coexists another reality as well. I find it very interesting that despite being such a representative city, a large section of people are still ignorant,” said Agata Ruiz from Argentina.
“White- skinned people are treated as being economically advanced and intrinsically powerful on account of their ‘fair skin’, despite which country they are from. This notion is usually shared by people of lower income groups. Taxi and auto drivers in Delhi just assumed I was American!” said Agata. She however agreed that this ingrained idealization of a stereotypical west is something she has seen in Argentina as well.
“Whenever I go out with my Canadian girlfriend, people think I am her ‘guide’. The shopkeepers at Chandni Chowk treated me like a middleman, as I stopped one from trying to unfairly fleece her, he cursed me for ruining the deal,” said Vikas Arora.
A lot of foreign tourists agreed that local north Indians tried too hard to please them, and this problem was compounded in the case of women. Sharell Cook, an Australian married to an Indian, living here for the last five years observes, “Indian men are more likely to want to try and please me. I find that in my daily dealings with Indian people, the men are likely to ‘adjust’ in my favour, whereas the women won’t. Indian women aren’t as influenced, impressed, or intimidated by me. They want to look after me and mother me.”
“Certain sections of Indian society still see their relationship with white-skinned people as that of master-servant. Putting them on a pedestal creates a distance, and this distance makes Indians feel resentful towards them. They conveniently stereotype us as being rich, powerful, wasteful, amoral and culturally degrading,” said Theresa.
In the same vein, women from the west are branded as morally loose and sexually promiscuous. This notion is at the root of the habitual eve-teasing that foreign women suffer. A lot of women complained about the touching and groping that happened in crowded public places over north India.
Recently, in the wake of rape cases, two(incidentally Asian) British politicians have observed that a section of Asian men think white girls are ‘easy’ and ‘fair game’ and this notion perpetrates the crime. The long list of crimes against foreign women and the flourishing foreign prostitution industry in India are also cases in point.
This implicit racism has another side to it. Dark-skinned people are deemed as undesirable and less economically advanced and civilised. “In North India, people are obsessed with fair skin. That is probably why African women do not face the same problems arising from sexual desirability that their white counterparts do,” said Theresa.
According to Indian Tourism statistics, a large number of Africans visit India every year, the highest number being Nigerians who come to Delhi on a medical visa for cheap medical treatment. “The sight of Africans on the metro is far from uncommon these days. I have heard commuters call them ‘habshi’ which is a derogatory colloquial word for a black person of African origin,” said Vikas.
Derina Kay, a research scholar form Namibia said, “In my experience of living in the capital, Indians have often behaved as if they were socially and economically superior to me. I remember a shopkeeper ignoring me and calling out to other white tourists in Dilli Haat. It was usually assumed I was less cultured and educated.”
She said, “I saw this in Ghana too. There, any non-black is immediately assumed to be a rich foreigner likely to spend more. This may be a developing world problem. But hopefully, over time, as the world becomes more globalised, these divisions will break.”
This notion of a non-paying half of the population omits a fact that the right usually understands - that these sorts of figures are not set in stone.
47% is a figure that represents mobile segments of the population.
That is, the people who are in the non-paying 47% in one year are in the paying 53% in the next.
For instance, included in the non-payers are students, who eventually do pay taxes.
Furthermore, there are plenty of wealthy households that don’t pay taxes.
In fact, if Romney wants to find entitled people who cry victim at the drop of a hat, feel the government owes them bail-outs, contribute nothing and steal whatever isn’t actually nailed down, maybe he should check out some of his colleagues in the financial industry.
Joshua Holland writes:
“More than a fifth of households that pay no federal income taxes are elderly. This is a group that should feel entitled. They paid into Social Security and Medicare during their working years, and are now in retirement. Many are struggling to get by .
There are a good number of rich people among the 47 percent of households that pay no federal income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center, 18,000 households with incomes over $500,000 – and 4,000 households bringing in over $1 million – paid no federal income taxes in 2011.
Because there is no discrete group of Americans who routinely pay no income taxes year in and year out, it’s impossible to say for sure what their partisan loyalties might be, but it’s highly likely that a majority of them are Republicans. Around four out of 10 of those households are divided between demographics that lean towards the Dems – students, the poor – and those that lean toward the Republicans – the elderly, disabled veterans. But a majority of that group – six in 10 – are just lower income working families whose incomes fell below a certain threshhold in a given year. And this is where they live:
The Romney campaign is reportedly going to run with this narrative in the coming weeks. The problem is that it only resonates with a minority of hard-right voters who aren’t up for grabs anyway. Most Americans understand that half the country isn’t indolent and doesn’t see themselves of victims of anything but the depression in which we find ourselves today. And that’s why, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday , only 20 percent of registered voters say that Romney’s sneering remarks make them more likely to vote for him, while 36 percent say they’re turned of by them.”
The delusional nature of Romney’s math is matched by the delusional nature of his philosophy.
He was born with no silver spoon, he claims, except the silver spoon of being born in America.
Well, being born in America is surely an enormous advantage.
“Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house.”
Apparently, Romney thinks that had he been born Hispanic, his life would have been much easier.
Oh boo-hoo.
Last I looked, the financial industry, not noticeably underpaid, was filled with while males who are NOT Hispanic.
And their high incomes seem to have reflected no great competence on their part.
Indeed, the high incomes seem to have gone hand-in-hand with extraordinary levels of incompetence and criminality.
Alphagameplan compares the Iranian and the American approach to female higher education and concludes that the Iranian approach is more sustainable:
“The USA, and most of the West, has taken the approach that encouraging female participation in advanced education will strengthen their economies. Events have thus far failed to confirm those assumptions, and indeed, are increasingly calling them into question. That may be one reason Iran feels emboldened to take the opposite approach:
Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. ‘The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.’ The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran’s theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women.”
According to the mainstream Western assumption, this should weaken Iran’s economy and impoverish its society. So, barring a war that will render any potential comparisons irrelevant, this move by Iran promises to make for an unusually informative societal experiment in comparison with the control group of the USA. If Iran sees non-immigrant-driven population growth along with greater societal wealth and scientific advancement, it will justify the doubts of those who questioned the idea that encouraging women to pursue science degrees instead of husbands and careers instead of children would prove beneficial to society at large.
Of course, the Iranian action presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.
No doubt the Iranian approach will sound abhorrent to many men and women alike. But consider it from a macro perspective. The USA is in well along the process of removing most of its prime female genetics from its gene pool as surely as if it took those women out and shot them before they reached breeding age. Which society’s future would you bet on, the one that is systematically eliminating the genes of its best and brightest women or the one that is intent upon retaining them?”
“Last spring, he represented Anil Kumar, a former senior executive at McKinsey & Company who was a key witness in the insider-trading trial of the former hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.”
What made the case especially horrible, apart from appalling rulings from Judge Rakoff, was that so much of the charge of conspiracy made against Mr. Gupta relied on nothing more than circumstantial evidence and hearsay, in this case, the unreliable hearsay of Mr. Anil Kumar, a senior partner and director at McKinsey and a protege of the luckless Mr. Gupta.
Mr. Anil Kumar is a documented and admitted conspirator and criminal.
If this “reward for cooperation” had been given by anyone outside the government, it would be called what it really is - bribery and perhaps suborning of perjury.
Meanwhile, we’ll never know what kind of bargaining went on between the government and Anil Kumar, because one crucial part of that history, his defense attorney, Robert Morvillo, is dead.
Curiously, Morvillo’s death occurred in December 2011, which is just around the time that Rajat Gupta was demanding to see government files relating to the prosecutor’s deals with cooperating witnesses.
Those files were denied him by Judge Rakoff’s ruling, so the government’s not talking, either.
The ruling and others like it resulted in an erroneous verdict.
Adding to the complete media dereliction in this case, the newspapers have almost uniformly reported this incorrectly, claiming that Gupta only faces twenty years in total.
The truth is he faces 65 years in prison. Given that he is sixty-three years old, that is a life sentence.
In spite of itself, though, the NY Times piece does do one good thing. It gives us a glimpse into the cozy web of connections between judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and corporations that has turned the courts into one of the most corrupt and tyrannical arms of the government:
“Mr. Morvillo was one of a group of lawyers who worked as federal prosecutors in the office in the 1960s under Robert M. Morgenthau’s leadership. He rose to become head of the office’s securities-fraud unit, which Mr. Morgenthau had formed. That unit, which had led to an increase in indictments against corporate executives, in turn created a need for white-collar defense. Later, Mr. Morvillo became chief of the office’s criminal division.
Today, many of the deans of New York’s criminal-defense bar, including Gary P. Naftalis and Charles A. Stillman, served with Mr. Morvillo as assistants under Mr. Morgenthau.”
To make the mix thicker, Judge Rakoff was a student of Morvillo’s:
“This past summer he was representing a defendant in a bribery case before Judge Rakoff, who as a federal prosecutor in the 1970s was supervised by Mr. Morvillo, then chief of the criminal division.”
The Manhattan D.A. also ended up a partner at Morvillo’s firm.
Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, was a partner at Morvillo Abramowitz for five years before his election in 2009.
Talk about a revolving door.
So Judge Rakoff, the presiding judge at the Galleon group trial, is an old friend and junior colleague of the defense attorney, Morvillo, whose firm is a cozy nest for ex-prosecutorial types. The judge is also an old friend and colleague of Rajat Gupta’s defense attorney, Gary Naftalis.
Naftalis, despite his stiff fees and reputation, actually failed to get even Judge Rakoff’s most ridiculous rulings overturned.
Robert Morvillo has a reputation, hinted at in the NY Times piece, as some kind of good guy.
But, if you read between the lines, another picture emerges.
What you see is a guy who, when he was working for government prosecutors, begins a nifty racket. He starts going after the biggest corporate scalps.
The NY Times frames can frame this as a concern for equal justice.
But anyone familiar with the games prosecutors play knows that the are seamier reasons to pursue high-profile cases - bigger targets add up to media clout for the prosecutor’s office, which adds up to bigger budgets, bigger salaries, and corporate or political office for an ambitious prosecutor.
“Ambitious prosecutor” would describe Rajat Gupta’s nemesis, Preet Bharara, the Indian-American (Sikh) prosecutor who took over the Galleon case, after B. J. Kang had laid all the ground work and was actually knocking on the door of the money0men who needed to be fingered - like mafia hedge-fund honcho, Steven Cohen.
The Cohen investigation mysteriously vanished off the table sometime in 2010, Kang vanished with it, and Batman Bharara shows up in full boot-strapping desi-wonderboy mode, going great guns after a relatively trivial expert-network run by dark-skinned yuppies yearning to play in the big-league with gora crooks.
This had zilch to do with the financial crisis, as even the gora crooks have admitted.
Thanks to Bharara, a product of the New Jersey political machine, the prosecution of a whole bunch of South Asians, in lieu of the mostly Euro-Semitic criminals who actually scammed the markets, didn’t raise the suspicions it would have otherwise.
That’s how the game is played and knowing that gives us some insight into Mr. Morvillo and his ilk.
In essence, what Robert Morvillo did while a prosecutor was to create a market for highly-paid criminal defense attorneys. He did this by going after senior managers with a vengeance.
Then, when he left the government, he fulfilled that need…earning big bucks in the process.
Perhaps he was a good guy, as the Times suggests.
But, from what is in the Times piece, he doesn’t seem to have saved any corporate scalps in need of it.
He didn’t help Martha Stewart.
If anyone deserved to have got off for ridiculous over-prosecution it was Martha Stewart. But Morvillo lost her case.
Yet, he managed to save Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, even though, if there was anyone who deserved not to get off, it was Greenberg, whose decades-long shady dealings at AIG and CIA-related Starr are the stuff of legend among 9-11 researchers.
The provocative (some would use much harsher terms) Christian libertarian writer Vox Day pokes a hole in the venerable libertarian mantra - free-trade uber alles:
“China and Japan have only been trading since diplomatic ties were normalized in 1972; China became Japan’s largest trading partner in 2004. A war between two of the world’s largest economies would permanently shatter the oft-heard argument that trade eliminates the possibility of war. It’s an argument that should always have been dubious, however, as England’s many wars against the various principalities in India and the USA’s Middle East wars have all followed the inception of large-scale trade with the region.
Once more, we see that free trade delivers precisely the opposite of what it promises. And, as Generational Dynamics adroitly points out, trade actually expands the range of warfare as well as providing an economic weapon that can be wielded against the trading partner. Even when trade is not a cause of the war, it provides a means of fighting it.
Lest anyone think I am setting up a strawman here, consider this article by a free trade advocate at the Mises Institute: “The Classical Liberals of the nineteenth century were certain that the end of the old Mercantilist system–with its government control of trade and commerce, its bounties (subsidies) and prohibitions on exports and imports–would open wide vistas for improving the material conditions of man through the internationalization of the system of division of labor. They also believed that the elimination of barriers to trade and the free intercourse among men would help to significantly reduce if not end the causes of war among nations.”
The article posted below should be read for the light it throws on the morals, manners, and breeding of some of New York’s most eminent and public financiers.
“His father was a partner at the Los Angeles law firm of Irell & Manella LLP and general counsel for Williams-Sonoma. His mother is a historian. Loeb’s great-aunt, Ruth Handler, created the Barbie doll and co-founded Mattel Inc.[4]“
I do not know of a single financier born and bred in Asia who has ever engaged in this sort of thing.
Astute readers will note the close parallels between the type of invective used by this well-known, indeed, adulated financier, and the type used by the denizen of the underworld who has favored me with his obsession.
Note the nature of the victims - female, Gentile, working for/advocating positions antithetical to the interests of the colluding short-sellers.
Note the nature of the invective - scatological (queefs, farts, shit) and sexual (prostitutes,whores, bimbos, pimps); calculated to cause intense emotional and reputational injury by sheer association, without offering either reason or evidence, yet evading legal liability, under the West’s servile definition of freedom.
Notice how American “libertarians” (aka licensitarians), who find burqas objectionable, not only never voice any objection to this kind of barbarous public attack, they post the self-serving rants of their perpetrators, with obvious pride in the association.
Such “liberty” shows itself to be nothing more than servility to the powerful and the malicious.
The very scurrility of the attacks assures this, since most ordinary people, especially women, cannot/will not counter with invective in kind, both from moral and prudential reasons.
“In late 2005, I spent over four hours interviewing Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne as part of a podcast series on entrepreneurship I created.
After I published the audio of the interview, somebody posted a link to it on the Yahoo Finance message board dedicated to Overstock.com.
Seeking the origin of the resulting surge in downloads led to my first stock message board visit.
It was really strange.
What first struck me was the flurry of responses to the original posts in which users with foul mouths and bad attitudes warned that the linked mp3s contained computer viruses.
Of course, no mp3 has ever carried a virus, as I’m fairly certain the posters knew.
These were followed up by all manner of lies meant to discourage others from listening to any of the three Byrne interviews I would eventually publish.
[Lila: And that is evidently the reason for Mr. Ryals' verbal assaults against me and others. They are intended to thoroughly confuse and intimidate.]
Worse, they posted all manner of lies about Patrick Byrne personally – something I was in a unique position to recognize having just interviewed him at length.
Intrigued, I started examining the posting histories of the most prolific sources of this disinformation, trying to identify patterns that might in turn reveal their underlying motives and, often enough, their real identities……..
Consider the following notable example.
I’ve previously written about evidence received demonstrating that hedge fund Third Point, LLC contracted with convicted stock fraudster Michelle McDonough, whose duties included coordinating the efforts of message board bashers and inducing certain captured journalists to report negatively on targeted companies.
I’ve also written about Third Point founder Daniel Loeb’s well-known history of posting on the Yahoo and Silicon Investor stock message boards under the alias Mr. Pink.
Before getting to the rest of the story, here’s some background.
About the same time I first visited Yahoo Finance, a company called SFBC International (now PharmaNet Development Group) came under a blistering attack by Daniel Loeb, who very publicly announced Third Point’s sizeable short interest in the company.
SFBC got hit from all sides, and its share price withered.
In particular, there was a deluge of libelous (though tame compared to others I’ve seen) posts to Yahoo’s SBFC message board. Most notable were the attacks leveled against then-SFBC Chairwoman and President Lisa Krinsky.
In order to discover the identities of the ten Does, Yahoo was served with a subpoena.
In accordance with policy, Yahoo alerted the posters, giving them two weeks in which to contest the subpoena – an expensive proposition few bashers have the financial ability to pursue.
And indeed, none of the ten Does opted to put up a fight.
With one exception: Doe number 6, known on Yahoo Finance as Senor_Pinche_Wey (which is a slang Spanish term that is as obscene as you can imagine).
This decision – handed down in February of this year – essentially affirms the First Amendment rights of message board bashers to say whatever they want about the officers of public companies. (An excellent analysis of the decision can be viewed here.)
In their decision, the Court noted:
We likewise conclude that the language of Doe 6’s posts, together with the surrounding circumstances — including the recent public attention to SFBC’s practices and the entire “SFCC” message-board discussion over a two-month period — compels the conclusion that the statements of which plaintiff complains are not actionable. Rather, they fall into the category of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.
Interesting.
Ready for the other shoe to drop?
I’ve learned, through multiple sources, that the immature speaker in this case, Doe-6 (aka Senor_Pinche_Wey) was none other than Daniel Loeb himself.
As a matter of fact, Senor_Pinche_Wey is one of many abusive message board identities used by Loeb to harass officers of companies Third Point was shorting, often illegally.
On August 12, 2005, Patrick Byrne first publicly accused several hedge funds of working in coordination to illegally manipulate the share price of Overstock.com and many other small, public companies. Within 48 hours, armies of bashers arrived for the first time on the Overstock.com stock message boards across the web, all working off of a the same obvious set of talking points. Among the points these bashers took the greatest care to make, time and again: that Byrne was crazy for thinking that any two hedge funds would ever work together when shorting.
In case there are any doubts left regarding Byrne’s claims, I invite you to look at this message board exchange, between Senor_Pinche_Wey, LaseriumQueen, bobbingbargains, disgustedinvestor, kidstockjoec, jidoo, and Polytechnic_Trader.
What makes it so interesting is that at least 72% of the participants are hedge fund managers shorting the company they’re smearing.
Specifically, Senor_Pinche_Wey belongs to Daniel Loeb, while LaseriumQueen, bobbingbargains, disgustedinvestor, and kidstockjoec all belong to Robert Chapman, founder of hedge fund Chapman Capital.
Polytechnic_Trader and jidoo may or may not belong to Loeb or Chapman…I don’t know either way.
I do know that Chapman also posts under the aliases tautologicaltrader, ghaulty_lodgick, notably_absent, and herniatedgorilla – all of which can be seen, time after time, posting things I’m quite certain Chapman would not dare say in person.
Do hedge funds coordinate their attacks?
Yes.
And as you’ll read in a soon-to-be-published-post, message board bashing is only the beginning.”
[Lila: Based on my experience, I'd say that after the bashing, comes investigation, surveillance/monitoring, threats, and even physical stalking. In short, criminal behavior by criminals. What a shock.]
“A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.
Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
- “False Flag” by Mark Perry, Foreign Policy, 13 January 2012
When we looked back at all the things that had happened we felt that two things were unclear. First, if they are from NATO, why did they not meet with us in Afghanistan where they have bases and where they can contact us in a much more easy and secure manner. The second issue was that the first time they informed us that NATO forces wanted to meet with us we thought they were going to speak about eastern parts of Iran, because NATO forces are stationed in Afghanistan. But they insisted that we should transfer our operations from the eastern border region to the capital. We thought that this was very strange. When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover — or Israelis.
- Abdolmalek Rigi (1983 – 2010), founder of Jundallah in interview with Press TV (Iran)
Israeli Mossad agents posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistani terror group to carry out assassinations and attacks against the regime in Iran, Foreign Policy revealed on Friday, quoting U.S. intelligence memos. Foreign Policy’s Mark Perry reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government, and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.
According to a currently serving U.S. intelligence officer, Perry reports, when Bush was briefed on the information he “went absolutely ballistic.”
Perry quotes a number of American intelligence officials and claims that the Mossad agents used American dollars and U.S. passports to pose as CIA spies to try to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization that has carried out a series of attacks in Iran and assassinations of government officials.
According to the report, Israel’s recruitment attempts took place mostly in London, right under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials. “It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”
“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told Perry. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”
The intelligence officer said that the Bush administration continued to deal with the affair until the end of his term. He noted that Israel’s operation jeopardized the U.S. administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was under immense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah.
According to the intelligence officer, a senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with Israel, but ultimately the U.S. did nothing.
“Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us,” Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. “If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.”
The following video by Russia Today features a 2010 interview with Webster Tarpley about the Iranian capture of Abdolmalek Rigi, the founder and former commander-in-chief of the terrorist group Jundallah. As one might expect, Tarpley does not even mention Israel or Israelis as he blames the CIA and NATO for being behind the terror attacks of Jundallah (basing his claims on Seymour Hersh and ABC News, no less). This is typical Tarpley, who protects the Zionist state by consistently ignoring evidence of Israeli involvement in acts of false-flag terrorism - like 9/11. To understand what’s behind Tarpley’s pro-Israel bias, see my article “Webster Tarpley’s Disinfo” from January 2010.”
And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder:
One of the four beasts saying: “Come and see.” And I saw.
And behold, a white horse.
There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names.
An’ he decides who to free and who to blame.
Everybody won’t be treated all the same.
There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down.
When the man comes around.
The hairs on your arm will stand up.
At the terror in each sip and in each sup.
For you partake of that last offered cup,
Or disappear into the potter’s ground.
When the man comes around.
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin’.
Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin’, voices cryin’.
Some are born an’ some are dyin’.
It’s Alpha’s and Omega’s Kingdom come.
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom.
Then the father hen will call his chickens home.
The wise men will bow down before the throne.
And at his feet they’ll cast their golden crown.
When the man comes around.
Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still.
Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still.
Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.
Listen to the words long written down, When the man comes around.
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin’.
Multitudes are marchin’ to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin’, voices cryin’.
Some are born an’ some are dyin’.
It’s Alpha’s and Omega’s Kingdom come.
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
In measured hundredweight and penny pound.
When the man comes around.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts,
And I looked and behold: a pale horse.
And his name, that sat on him, was Death.
And Hell followed with him.
“There was until Wednesday a Facebook page (since deleted) belonging to a “Sam Bassel,” that described the account owner as a “movie-maker” in Hollywood, California. The first activity on the account is dated September 7, and is a comment in Arabic on a Facebook post about Terry Jones:
A crude Google Chrome translation of the text reads:
Several Facebook friends of “Bassel” appear to be figures within the Coptic Christian community, including Abba Seraphim El-Suriani, Head of the British Orthodox Church within the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.
Another post on the page of “Bassel” leads to an essay supposedly written by Mohamed Yousry, the former translator for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egpytian cleric serving a life sentence in the U.S. after being convited in 1996 of plotting terrorist attacks. Yousry himself was later convicted in 2006 of providing material support to terrorism and served prison time. He was released in April 2011. “
“I asked him who he thought Sam Bacile was. He said that there are about 15 people associated with the making of the film, “Nobody is anything but an active American citizen. They’re from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, they’re some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but the vast majority are Evangelical.”
What are we to make of Steve Klein’s assertions? I’m taking everything about this strange and horrible episode with a grain of salt, though I will say that I haven’t seen any proof yet that Sam Bacile is an actual Israeli Jew, or that the name is anything other than a pseudonym. More to come, undoubtedly.”
It seems that all the 15 people involved in the making of the inflammatory anti-Islamic movie (”The Innocence of Muslims”) were American citizens and most were Evangelical Christians. Some were Coptics.
It seems that the $5 million that allegedly went into the making of the film produced an amateurish work of questionable values shown for a day at L.A.’s Vine theater.
It seems that Hollywood is a bit puzzled about who Sam Bacile is. He isn’t a known name.
Bacile has virtually no footprint in the Hollywood community. The writer-director-producer has no agent listed on the IMDBPro website and no credits on any film or TV production.
Steve Klein, a “consultant” on the film, describes himself as a Vietnam veteran, counter-terrorism expert and board member of an ultra-conservative group, Courageous Christians United. In 2010, he self-published a book, Is Islam compatible with the Constitution?, which assails Islam’s treatment of women.
Bacile was also linked to Morris Sadik, an Egyptian Coptic Christian based in California who runs a small virulently Islamophobic group called the National American Coptic Assembly. He promoted a clip of the film last week.”
Daily Kos has lots more about consultant Steve Klein and his extremist belief that California is dotted with Muslim Brotherhood cells (or Al Qaeda cells, in another version of the story) waiting to explode; who led a hunter-killer team as a Marine in Vietnam, has minuteman ties, and engages in armed confrontations near abortion clinics and Mormon churches.
In an even stranger twist, NPR’s Sarah Abdurrahman noticed that every specific reference to Muhammad or Islam in the movie’s trailer appears to be dubbed over what the actors actually said. Without the lines that insult Islam, the trailer “reads like some cheesy Arabian Nights story,” Abdurrahman writes. In a statement given to CNN, the cast and crew of the film said they were “grossly misled” about the movie’s purpose and said they feel “taken advantage of.” One of the film’s actors told Gawker that the cast was told they were acting in a movie called “Dessert Warriors,” and had no idea it would be altered to have an anti-Islam message. She said the film’s director, whom she now plans to sue, said he was Egyptian.
“Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he was manager for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Mohammed and was implicated in inflaming mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.
Nakoula denied he directed the film and said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Sam Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where AP found Nakoula. Federal court papers said Nakoula’s aliases included Nicola Bacily, Erwin Salameh and others.
Nakoula told the AP that he was a Coptic Christian and said the film’s director supported the concerns of Christian Copts about their treatment by Muslims.
Nakoula denied he had posed as Bacile. During a conversation outside his home, he offered his driver’s license to show his identity but kept his thumb over his middle name, Basseley. Records checks by the AP subsequently found it and other connections to the Bacile persona.”
Nakoula isn’t some petty wrong-doer either:
“Nakoula, who talked guardedly about his role, pleaded no contest in 2010 to federal bank fraud charges in California and was ordered to pay more than $790,000 in restitution. He was also sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and ordered not to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer.”
And this:
“Nobody is anything but an active American citizen,” Klein told the Atlantic. “They’re from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, there are some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but the vast majority are evangelical.”
Klein told the AP that he vowed to help make the movie but warned the filmmaker that “you’re going to be the next Theo van Gogh.” Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after making a film that was perceived as insulting to Islam.
Question: If you make a film with the foreknowledge that it might result in someone being killed, is that an act of incitation?
The NPR piece (above) also tells us that after first considering the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, as an act of mob violence, US authorities are now looking into whether it was a terrorist attack intended to coincide with 9-11.
I would advise them first to check if this was a staged US-Israeli false-flag intended to justify war and end foreign aid to Muslim countries ( an issue coming up next week).
Note: I think the government should not be aiding any country, Arab or anything else.
Ten things that will transform the whole situation without requiring you to make up you mind on any of the binaries being thrown your way - Republican/Democrat, Left/Right, Romney/Obama, Gold/Paper, or anything else:
1. Withdraw your money from the big banks (multinational banks, especially those tied to the financial crisis).
This can’t be done suddenly. You’ll need a lot of research. And you may have to park your money in one of them for a while, until you’ve decided. So be it. But start doing it and don’t tell anyone when you’ve done it.
Invest it in real things, in businesses, in tangibles, collectibles, metals, land, and property, after careful research. Only you know what’s the right mix, but it should produce both safety and income for you.
Get out of debt either by paying it off, restructuring, or begging forgiveness. Save money or borrow from friends or community banks or groups. Better yet, pay as you go.
2. Get the best encryption you can afford and use it for everything. It won’t always work. Your enemies will crack it; it will be buggy and slow. But live with it. Eventually, it will become second nature. The Internet is not a lovely playground. It’s teeming with all kinds of threats and dangers. Even with encryption, try to limit posting on forums. Someone, somewhere is always targeting your computer.
3. Stop watching all mainstream TV and cancel your print subscriptions. This will bankrupt the major media and their owners. If you can add to that all mainstream Hollywood movies, you are well on the way to warrior status. You will have foiled the main avenue by which intelligence prepares the public mind for its capers. Become a pop culture idiot. Brittany who?
4. Minimize shopping at major stores like Walmart. I know. It’s hard. But believe it or not, there are some better deals in smaller shops. Try them. Avoid rebates and programs that need your information. Or set up fake accounts, if you can. Try anonymous cards, nominee accounts and anything else to foil ID thieves and snoops.
Loose the consumer attitude. Make your own stuff, recycle, reuse, make do, buy second-hand, avoid the society of consumption addicts. Bargain for everything. Make companies earn your dollar.
Want to change corporations? Become their savviest, cheapest, most value-oriented customer. They will respect you. Heap contempt on people who do not live within their means. Take them under your wing and show them how. If they don’t listen, don’t pony up when they come back to you crawling. Give them a loan only if they renounce their evil ways. Even then, get your money back. Helping a friend and subsidizing his bad habits are two different things. When people want to trample on something, give them a doormat and keep your boundaries.
5. Disbelieve any major story in the media, reflexively. Practice saying, “It’s a psyop” to anything that comes up. You will be right about 85% of the time. And the remaining times you’re wrong, someone will be forced to actually dig to prove it. So much the better.
6. Refuse to endorse any personality cult whatsoever. Whether it’s for Obama or anyone else. Even politicians with “better” sounding credentials. The NWO wasn’t born yesterday. It’s had decades to decide which person to put into which slot at which time.
It has nothing to do with the individual merits of the person. The system is more powerful than any one person’s attempts to work within it. It will crush him, take your time and money, and destroy any real change.
Avoid people who promote personality cults. They are either fanatics who can make anything fit their ideology, genuinely naive, not the brightest bulbs, or shills. That doesn’t make for long term happiness in their company.
Remember what Yeats said. The worst are full of a passionate intensity.
People who say “I don’t know” or ” I was wrong” or “I changed my mind” are greatly in short supply. Join their ranks.
Practice not having an opinion and just watching other people having them. Then shrug and tell yourself something like “It’s all part of the great web.” Go for a walk.
7. Refuse to get involved in any cointelpro-type slandering of people. It’s perfectly correct to criticize and call out people, especially those proposing political programs or campaigning on them or harassing you.
But gross invective, malice out of nowhere, obvious mischaracterization of words/arguments, accusations without evidence are all signs of an agenda.
Life is too short to figure out all the agendas out there. Stay on top of the ones that hurt you personally, but stay clear of the rest.
Don’t make more enemies than you need to. They’ll add up on their own anyway, if you’re doing what you need to do and saying what you have to. So be it.
8. Develop religious faith or belief in the universe and its essential goodness. Don’t believe, however, in the essential goodness of men. Those are two different things, often confused.
Be prepared for the very worst from your fellow man, but expect nothing but support from the universe. In both, you will never be disappointed.
9. Don’t be transparent. It’s giving ammunition to your enemies and material to IP thieves. Let them work for it. Rehash old ideas, but keep your best ideas and thoughts to yourself. There is no law you have to share ideas with people who don’t credit you or share with you. Name and shame, if needed.
In fact, by defending yourself, you put others on guard that there are such things as rights. The internet is teeming with rights violators, who are never called out, because this is considered “free speech.”
It’s not.
It’s intellectual fraud and violence, which is the source of physical fraud and violence. The two go together like dosai and chutney.
Anyone arguing otherwise is simply wasting their time and yours. Avoid them.
10. Don’t reinvent the wheel. There’s no great complex idea needing to be discovered to change the world.
The prophets have already come and we killed every one of them.
We don’t need any more prophets. We need people working on at least one thing wrong about themselves.
No need to tell anyone what that is. Just work on it. And keep your mouth shut about it.
Stick with the good old ideas. The essence of the old ideas was - don’t do to other people what you don’t want done to yourself.
That works out to - don’t lie and steal and murder and screw around.
Remember there really is a god and he’s (she’s) the final judge, not human beings.
“In 1996 a new channel came to life. Qatar launched al-Jazeera and hired most of those who were dumped by BBC. This time they were assured that nothing would stop the new station, mainly because there were no limits, no red lines, and an unlimited budget. In the Arab countries, where people are used to listening on a daily basis to speeches by their leaders or members of ruling families, the new channel introduced counter-fire talk shows and documentaries from hotspots with an emphasis on controversial issues. For the first time, people saw opposition figures from around the Arab world saying in Arabic what they had only dared to say before on western channels in English or French.
Over the past 16 years al-Jazeera has emerged as the most credible news source in the region, though it was also joined by other channels such as al-Arabiya, Iran’s Alalam, the American al-Hurra, Russia’s RT and others.
The new Arab TV channels seemed to be flourishing and gaining credibility until the Arab spring came along and they began providing daily coverage of the revolutions. From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, people expected TV stations to embrace their dreams and defend their causes, but it seems that major networks decided to adopt some revolutions and dump others.
One example was the way they dealt with the uprising in Bahrain. It was clear that Gulf-financed stations were more interested in regional security than Bahrainis’ dreams of democracy and freedom and their revolt against tyranny.
Meanwhile, mainstream Arab channels gave the Syrian revolution a large portion of airtime, but things took a different path when they started interfering with the coverage. I was one of those who experienced it when al-Jazeera, the channel I used to work for, refused to air footage of gunmen fighting the Syrian regime on the borders between Lebanon and Syria. I saw tens of gunmen crossing the borders in May last year – clear evidence that the Syrian revolution was becoming militarised. This didn’t fit the required narrative of a clean and peaceful uprising, and so my seniors asked me to forget about gunmen.
It was clear to me, though, that these instructions were not coming from al-Jazeera itself: that the decision was a political one taken by people outside the TV centre – the same people who asked the channel to cover up the situation in Bahrain. I felt that my dream of working for a main news channel in the region was becoming a nightmare. The principles I had learned during 10 years of journalism were being disrespected by a government that – whatever the editorial guideines might say – believed it owned a bunch of journalists who should do whatever they were asked.
Today, Arab media is divided. Media outlets have become like parties; politics dominates the business and on both sides of the landscape and people can’t really depend on one channel to get their full news digest. It is as if the audience have to do journalists’ homework by cross-checking sources and watching two sides of a conflict to get one piece of news.
The problem isn’t who is telling lies and who is accurate. Media organisations are giving the part of the story that serves the agenda of their financier, so it’s clear that only part of the truth is exposed while the other part is buried. What is obvious is that the investment in credibility during the past two decades has been in vain. The elite are once again dealing with Arab news channels the way they used to do with Arab state media.
Once again, people have started relying more on western media to know what’s going on. That is reflected in the number of viewers the BBC Arabic TV channel gained during the past year – reportedly more than 10m while leading Arab channels have been losing viewers.
Governments who own media organisations in the Middle East, and impose their agendas, are pushing them towards journalistic suicide. They are taking the Arab media landscape back to the early 1990s rather than moving it forward.”
AsSalaam Alekum. Greetings from Pakistan. On this eleventh anniversary of 9/11, I find myself pensively brooding over my own journey in life since that dastardly day in infamy. With my children now grown up and pursuing their professional lives in the United States, I have moved to Pakistan to
once again re-attempt to re-start my life in Islamabad after a hiatus of more than three decades. My adult life mostly being spent in the Boston area studying engineering, and in Silicon Valley, California, building or contributing to America’s great military-industrial and academic complex as
an engineer, tax-payer, and finally as parent.
From that lofty perch of “Mr. Clean hands”, I imagine it is easy to opine the following commentary as an expat. returning home to pitiful surroundings, and for which one has contributed nothing towards its
amelioration. Permit me give it a try.
Life here in Islamabad is very humorous, to say the least. For, a sense of humor is surely what it takes to survive its daily travails: the daily 6 to 8 hours of load-shedding of electricity during the hot summer which has only now abated somewhat; no water in the taps unless one is willing to pay
1500 rupees (about US $15) for a private water tanker service which appears to be financially benefitting the same governmental agency staff responsible for officially supplying tap water and for which they also bill you quarterly whether or not any water trickles out of the faucet (the scam
in fact appears to me to be a thinly veiled way to privatize all water supply by way of extortion and other pretexts of inefficiency, while drinking water has already been effectively privatized, my monthly bill being an additional 2000 rupees on the average, paid to Nestle); frequent armed police check-points on city streets as if Pakistan has moved to Palestine; long lines of taxis and small cars in front of gas stations which form every Wednesday evening because CNG (Compressed Natural Gas
which is now priced almost at parity with petrol) is not available Thursday through Saturday; continuous demoralizing news and commentary floods the 500 news channels which make the plebeian want to long for the *Messiah *and the *Mehdi;* just to mention a few items off the top of my head which must induce a great deal of humor in daily existence in order to bear it. That humor naturally leads one to seeking refuge in religion, and consequently what passes as spiritualism, meaning, a resignation to fate while *waiting for Allah*, is rapidly rising to its zenith here. The mosques are full, and there are several belonging to different sects, in almost every street. In my street alone, I have counted four, and another two or three in the next street over. I don’t need an alarm clock here because I get five wake-up calls a day in quadraphonic surround sound.
And Yet, there are also petrol-guzzling Mercedes and BMWs roaming the streets of Islamabad without a care; fancy car dealerships, shops, boutiques, and restaurants which would make the upscale hangout of *Santana Row* in San Jose California in need of a face-lift; and the elite are
living as if they have a special tunnel that daily takes them straight from their posh homes in the outskirts into *Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard,*by-passing all the misery behind the
*Iron Wall* and totally oblivious of it.
Most of my long-time friends are drawing handsome compensation packages as vaunted academics, or corporate widgets and CEOs selling cell-phones to *field niggers* or providing software services to *the white man*, or as poster-child of various governmental bodies suitably anointed with lofty
titles. Higher education being the sassiest gravy-train in the civilian sector as it evidently requires the least amount of talent and scruples to really make a killing under the strong leadership of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission. I had previously written about it in the scandalous *Plagiarism
Case*I
had accidentally uncovered. It was evidently as dead on arrival at the *supreme court of
Pakistan*as it was among the distinguished academics of Pakistan. Diploma
mills abound in this country as if trying to compete with America’s two thousand colleges and universities in sheer numbers – numbers evidently being the hallmark of both learnedness as well as piety here.
Sheer numbers, whether it be the number of servants employed in a house (often exceeding the number of family occupants in the elite homes of Islamabad by a factor of two or three), or the number of papers published (often exceeding the highest acclaimed Nobel laureate’s in the respective
field by a factor of at least ten), or the numbers of *hajj* performed (don’t even ask), or the number of gun-totting security guards manning the front gate – all count for status here. Unfortunately, I too have one thin scare-crow sitting at my gate – but one is not a number that matters in the
race to nowhere here. Some with their dual citizenship, and the *white man’s * Passport of any color, and others eagerly trying to acquire theirs, a comfortable life-style is the carefree lot of a handful who seem to own most everything here. I am not even speaking of *Military Inc.*, who evidently own most of the wealth and real-estate of Pakistan. I am only speaking of civvies I know of.
I seem to have sadly escaped all the lofty charactership which the Pakistani society evidently cultivates among the genius of our peoples, having contributed directly into the *white man’s* military-industrial complex for the highest level of corruption which begets all others – intellectual corruption. Instead of working for the benefit of my own peoples in a labor of love as only a handful of my friends have endeavored, I have helped – like the millions of other Silicon Valley engineers –
buildup the *white man’s ability to destroy* us. So I can hardly throw stones at others
who are merely trying to do well for themselves – with the only means they know how.
The *house niggers* over here however, are a different species altogether. They are sadly funny in way. They have taken over Pakistan across the full spectrum of social intercourse – from the military to the economy to the media to the elected to the bureaucrat to the mullah to the judge to the
professor to the so called NGOs largely populated with ex-military and secular humanists with foreign degrees – in all their Hegelian Dialectic variations. I dare to think that the sex prostitutes working the streets and nearly ubiquitous, are probably the most honest and hardworking of all professionals here. I don’t know any yet, but I suspect I may rather prefer their company.
The amount of bullshit which passes for great wisdom and profound knowledge over here is simply astounding. Everyone is a saint and a scholar. “Experts” abound. I am frequently informed how honest they each are, *“not a haram morsel has been fed to my children”* is the common refrain as the
pious bow in prayer five times daily in their million dollar homes.
The trend of self-deception arguably tops the United States. The bullshit there at least stands on the giant foundations of a super-power who needs a compliant public. Here we don’t even need foundations to build tall totem poles to get a compliant public. Hey, we are ahead of the US in something!”
“Thousands of foreign Arabs have sent requests to Israeli government agencies … offering to serve … Mossad.
“Israel’s Foreign Ministry told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper that it is receiving requests even from ‘members of Arab parliaments, members of political movements and other important political figures.’”
C. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera was set up by two French-Israelis, David and Jean Frydman.
D. The current ruler of Qatar was reportedly put into power with the help of the CIA and MI6.
E. Qatar has a giant air base used by the USA. According to a former US intelligence contractor: the main source of support for the Libyan rebels came from Q-SOC, the Qatari special forces.
Q-SOC trained the rebels.
The Qataris were the first foreign military on the ground providing military training.
Qatar provided air support.
The Qatari military are trained by British and French forces.
Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV played its part in helping the CIA and its friends topple the regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt.
Now Al-Jazeera is helping the CIA and its friends against Syria.
Let’s look at some history:
Al-Jazeera has recruited a number of former BBC journalists; BBC journalists are believed to have connections to MI6 and its friends.
Al-Jazeera also has links to the CIA’s Voice of America. (televised.)
And, Al-Jazeera has links to the Muslim Brotherhood which has long worked for MI6 and the CIA.
Thierry Meyssan, at Voltaire Network, on 26 September 2011, tells us more about Qatar’s Al-Jazeera.
1. Al-Jazeera was conceived by two French-Israeli personalities, the David and Jean Frydman brothers.
2. BBC journalists were recruited to launch Al-Jazeera.
3. The new emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, had toppled his father with the help of London and Washington.
4.Sheikh Hamad authorized the Israeli Ministry of Commerce to open an office in Doha.
Mahmoud Jibril, the new boss of Libya. He is also the boss of Jtrack. And allegedly he is a CIA asset.
5.Sheikh Hamad brought in a firm called JTrack to help al-Jazeera.
“From Morocco to Singapore, JTrack has trained most of the political leaders backed by the United States and Israel, often mere heredity puppets…”
6. Al-Jazeera played its part in the Arab Spring.
“In Egypt the uprising was harnessed in the interest of a single element of the opposition: the Muslim Brotherhood…”
7.The boss of JTrack is Mahmoud Jibril.
As the the number two man in the Libyan government, Jibril organised the deregulation of Libya’s socialist economy and the privatization of its public enterprises.
8. Jibril has personal relationships with almost all the Arab and Southeast Asian leaders.
Jibril has created trading companies, including one dealing with Malaysian and Australian timber in partnership with his French friend, Bernard-Henri Levy.
9. Jibril has studied in the USA and he is a member of the the Muslim Brotherhood.
10. With Jibril as prime minister of the rebel government of Libya, “the height of duplicity was reached when a replica of the Green Square and Bab-el-Azizia was built in the studios of Al-Jazeera in Doha, where footage of false images was shot portraying pro-US ‘insurgents’ entering Tripoli.”
Al-Jazeera and Sky News broadcasted these fake images.
WHAT THEY SAY
"First-class hell-raising," JIM BOVARD
"She gets it," ECONOMIC POLICY JOURNAL
"Thank you for all you do," PATRICK BYRNE
"I recommend you to everyone I know," ANNE WILLIAMSON
"A genuine libertarian," SUHAYL SAADI
Ready for the other shoe to drop?
Recent Comments