Are Jews the new WASPs?

In this powerful piece, The Myth of American Meritocracy, Ron Unz demolishes the notion that American universities are meritocratic .

He shows that Jews are heavily over-represented at universities, relative to their performance, while Asians are effectively subjected to quotas.

Indeed, in modern America, Asians (whether Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans or Chinese) are the new “Jews,” he argues:

As noted earlier, America’s Asian population has been growing rapidly over the last couple of decades, so the substantial decline in reported Ivy League Asian enrollment has actually constituted a huge drop relative to their fraction of the population. Meanwhile, the population of American Jews has been approximately constant in numbers, and aging along with the rest of the white population, leading to a sharp decline in the national proportion of college-age Jews, falling from 2.6 percent in 1972 and 2.2 percent in 1992 to just 1.8 percent in 2012. Nevertheless, total Jewish enrollment at elite universities has held constant or actually increased, indicating a large rise in relative Jewish admissions…….”

With meticulously compiled statistics of ethnic performance levels across the country, Unz proves that Jewish over-representation is not a result of the higher IQs that  intelligence tests have attributed to them. 

Instead, it goes along with substantial Jewish under-performance, relative to Asians and to Jewish past performance.

For example, consider California, second only to New York in the total number of its Jews, and with its Jewish percentage far above the national average. Over the last couple of years, blogger Steve Sailer and some of his commenters have examined the complete 2010 and 2012 NMS semifinalist lists of the 2000 or so top-scoring California high school seniors for ethnicity, and discovered that as few as 4–5 percent of the names seem to be Jewish, a figure not so dramatically different than the state’s 3.3 percent Jewish population, and an estimate which I have personally confirmed.54

Meanwhile, the state’s 13 percent Asians account for over 57 percent of the top performing students. Thus, it appears that California Asians are perhaps three times as likely as Jews to do extremely well on academic tests, and this result remains unchanged if we adjust for the age distributions of the two populations.

One means of corroborating these surprising results is to consider the ratios of particularly distinctive ethnic names, and Sailer reported such exact findings made by one of his Jewish readers. For example, across the 2000-odd top scoring California students in 2010, there was just a single NMS semifinalist named Cohen, and also one each for Levy, Kaplan, and a last name beginning with “Gold.” Meanwhile, there were 49 Wangs and 36 Kims, plus a vast number of other highly distinctive Asian names. But according to Census data, the combined number of American Cohens and Levys together outnumber the Wangs almost two-to-one, and the same is true for the four most common names beginning with “Gold.” Put another way, California contains nearly one-fifth of all American Jews, hence almost 60,000 Cohens, Kaplans, Levys, Goldens, Goldsteins, Goldbergs, Goldmans, and Golds, and this population produced only 4 NMS semifinalists, a ratio almost identical to that produced by our general last name estimates. The 2012 California NMS semifinalist lists yield approximately the same ratios.”

Lila: The same pattern continues across the USA, even in New York, where Jews are highly concentrated and enjoy a higher economic status than any other group.

Even in New York, Asians outperformed the Jews. In some states, there were four and five times the number of high-scoring Asians as Jews:

 Across six years of Florida results, Asian students are more than twice as likely to be high scorers compared to their Jewish classmates, with the disparity being nearly as great in Pennsylvania. The relative advantage of Asians is a huge factor of 5.0 in Michigan and 4.1 in Ohio, while in Illinois Asians still do 150 percent as well as Jews. …”

Lila: Furthermore, Unz claims that this pattern holds true across the country, even though the school tests themselves favor both Jews and the general population of whites and go against Asian strengths:

Earlier we had noted that the tests used to select NMS semifinalists actually tilted substantially against Asian students by double-weighting verbal skills and excluding visuospatial ability, but in the case of Jews this same testing-bias has exactly the opposite impact. Jewish ability tends to be exceptionally strong in its verbal component and mediocre at best in the visuospatial,57 so the NMS semifinalist selection methodology would seem ideally designed to absolutely maximize the number of high-scoring Jews compared to other whites or (especially) East Asians. Thus, the number of high-ability Jews we are finding should be regarded as an extreme upper bound to a more neutrally-derived total.”

Lila: Given that and given the greater percentage of Asians in the population than Jews, the inescapable conclusion is that American colleges (except for a handful of meritocracies) universally and egregiously discriminate against Asians and practice affirmative action in favor of Jews, even while the media and public believe that it is foreigners and dark-skinned people who benefit from affirmative action the most.

But suppose these estimates are correct, and Asians overall are indeed twice as likely as Jews to rank among America’s highest performing students. We must also consider that America’s Asian population is far larger in size, representing roughly 5 percent of college-age students, compared to just 1.8 percent for Jews. Therefore, assuming an admissions system based on strictest objective meritocracy, we would expect our elite academic institutions to contain nearly five Asians for every Jew; but instead, the Jews are far more numerous, in some important cases by almost a factor of two. This raises obvious suspicions about the fairness of the Ivy League admissions process.”

Lila: In the more meritocratic schools – Cal Tech, the University of Berkeley, and MIT, the real picture emerges, with Asians dominating, while Jews command a small presence much more in keeping with their actual performance:

…. Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger.”

And at the fiercely competitive University of Berkeley, the same numbers hold good:

The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high.”

And at meritocratic MIT:

But today, MIT’s enrollment is just 9 percent Jewish, a figure lower than that anywhere in the Ivy League, while Asians are nearly three times as numerous, despite the school being located in one of the most heavily Jewish parts of the country.”

Black girl beats up white girl on viral video

A 13-year-old black girl beat up a 10-year-old white girl riding a scooter on a Cleveland side-walk on June 14.

It was an apparently unprovoked assault during which the attacker called the victim, Danielle Fair,  a racial slur,”cracker,” according to an on-looker.

The whole incident was caught on cell-phone camera and posted on Youtube, where it’s gone viral.

The police are treating the attack as a possible hate crime.

I want to be a bit cautious, though, because I notice a few things that are odd:

1. On camera, the black girl waits for the younger girl to come riding along. It is a planned, unprovoked assault on a stranger.

2. The cell-phone camera was rolling before the assault. Either someone knew in advance what was going to happen, or there is more going on here than meets the eye.

3.  The victim told the media (WOIO) that she felt “bullied.”

That language sounds rather stilted to me, from a ten-year-old.

The “anti-bullying” campaign is in full swing globally, promoted to the hilt by the power-elite, as a way to get young people fully involved in snitching on their peers, elders, and family members.

Check out the Bully Police page.

The anti-bullying campaign is driven by the militant gay lobby.

Recall that even in the Trayvon Martin case, the black teen who was killed was demonized as a thug and anti-gay.

How better to get white Christians to embrace the militantly anti-Christian anti-bullying campaign than to tie it to white racial fears of blacks?

In 2011, there were rumors about a an intel/government program of  inciting racial strife.

The assumption and fear was that the intelligence agencies might create spurious  “white- on-black” hate-crimes. (See here).

But there’s no reason why they might not incite people the  other way around too.

[I am not suggesting that these crimes are spurious. I am saying they might well be organized and incited.]

The intelligence agencies have a long history of provoking race riots.

There have been a spate of attacks that fall under the rubric of the  “knock-out” game, in which black youths are said to deliberately target white victims for no reason.

This might actually be the case, but from what I have seen of some of the cases so far, including the beating up of Matthew Owens, there is very much more going on.

In the Owens case, there was a three -year feud between the neighborhood black teens and Owens, in which Owens had previously brandished knives at them. He also had an extensive criminal record.

This does not excuse the attack, but it does mean that we need to look carefully to see if an attack really fits a “black-on-white race-war” narrative or whether, for whatever reason, the media is fanning the flames of racial hatred (as in this depiction of slavery) on both sides, black and white.

If the forces behind  “managed revolution” can pay impoverished Ukrainian girls to use their naked bodies as weapons in a culture war abroad, why wouldn’t they pay impoverished ghetto youth to use their fists in a race war at home?

 

The Guardian Stages Surveillance Theater

Image Credit: Saving the republic

The Guardian is running a piece by Trevor Timm, of the Greenwald-Poitras-Snowden- associated Freedom of the Press foundation. (H/T to Scott Lazarowitz, LRC)

It’s about Stingray, a technology that lets the government locate and track you via cell-phone tower signals.

Timm  is correct to point out the privacy implications of the NSA’s meta-data collection, which has filtered down to local police departments.

Meta-data is data about communications that doesn’t include the actual content.

It’s the date, the address (from and to), the length of time, the location.

Very rich, if collected continuously.

All very well, but, as even Timm does admit in the Guardian, this technology has been around for a couple of years.

Yet, last year, in a piece at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Timm wrote:

A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool, commonly referred to as a “Stingray,” being used by the FBI in cases around the country.”

Secretive and new? Really?

The Louisville Law Review says the Feds used the Stingray from 2006 on.

[The Stingray is really a brand that refers to a family of technologies, says the Review.]

Local police departments were using the Stingray as early as 2007 (seven years ago).

“Oakland’s Targeted Enforcement Task Force made 21 ”Electronic Surveillance [StingRay] arrests” in 2007, 19 in 2008, and 19 in 2009 for charges including robbery, kidnapping, attempted murder and homicide. Further records show employees receiving up to 40 hours in training on the technology.”

This was discussed in the major media, at least as far back as 2011.

At the cyber- security blog, Schneier on Security, a commenter in January 2013, called the Stingray “very old technology.”

And the Stingray is now old and very expensive technology, I’d actually be more woried by the likes of pocket picocells that hackers cobble together from COTS equipment for less than 200USD. “

A spy technology for under 200 bucks?

I’d be more worried by picocells too.

So, why isn’t the Guardian?

Or the EFF?

Or the Freedom of the Press Foundation?

Palin, the Prophetess? (Updated) – Part One

Image Credit: Townhall.com reposted at FreeRepublic.com

PALIN, THE PROPHETESS?

Conservatives have been pointing out that Sarah Palin was derided for predicting in 2008 that an Obama presidency might set the stage for a Russian invasion of the Ukraine:

Speaking Tuesday at a rally in a Reno, Nevada, Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin had a little fun with her counterpart on the Democratic ticket, thanking Joe Biden for warning Barack Obama’s supporters to “gird your loins” for an international crisis if the Illinois senator wins.

Palin helpfully offered four scenarios for such a crisis, one of which was this strange one:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.”

On the other hand,  prophecy might have nothing to do with it.

Palin was not just the running-mate of John McCain in the 2008 elections,  she is his close friend.

MCCAIN HELPED PROVOKE THE UKRAINE CRISIS

This is interesting, since Palin is identified with the more conservative base of the Republican party, while McCain is often praised by Democrats, which makes him either a thoughtful moderate or an undependable RINO (Republican in Name Only), depending on where you stand.

The second interesting angle is that John McCain was one of the chief rabble-rousers on the ground in the Ukraine in December 2013:

Senator John McCain on Sunday told thousands of Ukrainian protesters camped on Kiev’s main square that Ukraine’s destiny lay in Europe and that it would make Europe better”

Numbers of observers like this one have shown up the Western media for its black-out of the real Ukraine story.

MCCAIN’S CONNECTION TO THE MAFIA

(Added, June 16, 2014. H/T to Charles Burris, LRC blog for reminding me)

THE STAGE-MANAGEMENT OF HISTORY

Alternative blogs have called attention to the considerable evidence that the Ukraine situation was engineered, an instance of the much-flogged Hegelian Dialectic by which the Western governments and allied corporations draw greater and greater power to themselves:


Thesis (Proposition)

[A problem is created, encouraged, or exacerbated by the powers-that-be]

It is opposed by an

Antithesis (Counter-proposition) 

[This the reaction by the population, victims, or public opinion, to the problem. It demands a solution or a resolution.]

The conflict is resolved by the

Synthesis

[In turn this becomes a new thesis and the basis of the next triad of conflict.]


  1. The  solution is presented as a novel remedy to the population, but it is pre-planned. It is the intended goal of the powers-that-be.
  2. The new problems that lie in the solution are carefully hidden from the public until the next triad is activated. Then they become the basis for further conflict, which demands more solutions.
  3. The succeeding conflicts lead to greater and greater control by the powers-that-be.
  4. This control can be governmental or extra-governmental.

 

PALIN, THE PROPAGANDIST?

Seen in this light, Putin’s annexation of the Ukraine could be an intended consequence of the provocations staged by the CIA, with politicians like McCain, Nuland, and Kerry to lend them clout.

Palin, as a close friend of McCain’s, might have been privy to the plan, or, at least, to parts of it.

And her “prediction” of 2008 could simply be an accidental slip, exposing something she’d heard.

More likely, it’s an intentional leak to the public, with the intention of creating retrospective gravitas for Palin herself, as well as embarrassment for Obama.

One can of course take the speculation even further. Obama himself might have been selected to play this role in the weakening of the American empire…..

The NY Times’ Propaganda Campaign over Ukraine

Walter Uhler, an independent scholar, has written an exhaustive analysis of the New York Times’ mendacity in its Ukraine coverage.

Here is a short excerpt from Part II:

In contrast to the incompetent or dishonest on-the-spot reporting by the Times, the “White Book,” gathered evidence months after the events and found that “among the participants of the Euromaidan” were “large and permanent groups of militants, numbering several thousand people, who organized the attacks…”

These groups had “military and official body armor…helmets, shields, knee and elbow pads, masks, respirators, [and] gas masks.” They had fire arms and cold arms, radio communication equipment and stun grenades. They dismantled stones, to be thrown at police, from bridges and pavements. And they manufactured Molotov cocktails and other explosive devices. (White Book, p. 37)

Unfortunately, the “White Book” fails to specify precisely when such weapons were used. I suspect that the most deadly weapons were not introduced until mid-January 2014.

These groups were “constantly present,” unlike most of the protesters, and were most active in initiating violence. According to the “White Book,” on December 1 some “protesters” attempted “to break through the Interior Ministry troops and police officer cordon on Bankovaya street in Kiev,” in order to assault the Presidential Administration of Ukraine. (Imagine an attempt to assault our White House.)

In addition, “supporters of Pravyi Sektor entrenched themselves on the fifth floor of the House of Trade Unions. Party activists in AUU Svoboda actually took control of the Kiev City State Administration building.” (p. 9-10)

The see-no-evil Times did not even mention Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor) until 1 February 2014 and paid no serious attention to the group until 16 February. Imagine that! The Times was self-righteously pontificating about events at Maidan – from late November to mid-February — without having a clue about Right Sector violence. In fact, the incompetent or dishonest Times would not take the threat posed by Right Sector seriously, until it began to menace the very provisional government (the coup regime) that it had just brought to power.

As early as 3 December 2013, John Allen Gay (writing in The National Interest) complained that “Western coverage of the protests has ignored or downplayed the role of the crypto-fascist All-Ukrainian Union party, ‘Svoboda.’” “Svoboda’s leaders have associated themselves with the protest’s most radical action, the occupation and barricading of the Kyiv City Hall.” On December 8, a group of extremists, led by Svoboda, demolished the Lenin statue on Shevchenko Boulevard.

Yet, it wasn’t until 16 December 2013, when the Times finally got around to Svoboda. In an article titled “Unease as an Opposition Party Stands Out in Ukraine’s Protest,” Andrew E. Kramer noted that Svoboda “traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, which was loosely allied with Nazi Germany.” Until 2004 it was known as the Social-Nationalist Party – a word flip away from the National socialism of the Nazis — and that same year its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, was expelled by the Ukrainian Parliament, due to his speech that extolled “World War II-era partisans bravely fighting Germans, Russians, Jews and ‘other scum.’”

Mr. Kramer noted that “unabashed neo-Nazis still populate its ranks” and that its black and red banner, which was viewed to be a racist symbol and thus banned at soccer matches by FIFA, is ubiquitous at Independence Square.

Having been bussed into Kiev for weeks, “the activists make up much of the street muscle on the square.” “As the protests have unfolded, the party’s role has grown.”

Although Svoboda took full control of City Hall in mid-December, Mr. Kramer reported that “Western diplomats say they respect Mr. Tyagnibok for keeping control of the unruly nationalist wing on the streets.” Indeed, minimizing the role played by right-wing violence fit neatly with the theme that a popular (and thus legitimate) revolution was occurring at Maidan, not an ugly coup spearheaded by nasty people. The theme of popular revolution allowed Western writers, pundits and politicians to overlook who, precisely, was throwing those Molotov cocktails at police and buildings.

But, if incompetence or dishonesty explains why the Times failed to highlight these particular “bad guys,” what explains the similarly egregious failure by Russia’s reporters? Let’s be clear: What the “White Book” reported after the fact was not what the Russian press was reporting on the spot.

The Russian press took its cue from President Putin. For example, on December 4, Russia Direct quoted Mr. Putin’s assertion that “the anti-government protests in Ukraine were organized and planned by the West as an attempt to overthrow the country’s legitimate government.”

Read the rest of Part II here:

“The New York Times Disinformation Campaign over Ukraine: Part II: The Propaganda War over Ukraine

(Dissident Voice, June 12, 2o14)

Read Part I here:

The Propaganda War Over Ukraine:  The New York Times versus Russia’s White Book: Part One

(Dissident Voice, May 9, 2014)

“Mobs” Ist Edition was 2007, not 2009

I just saw this on Amazon, in a Google search of
“Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” (Bonner & Rajiva, Wiley, 2007)

Product Details

The 2007 publication date is what ought to be in the catalog, because that is when the first edition, the hardcover, came out.

There are six English language editions, besides foreign-language versions:

1. Hard-cover,  1st edition, August 31,  2007

2. Unknown binding, 2007 (Not sure what this is)

3.  Audible book, October 30, 2007

4. Pre–loaded digital audio, Sept. 1 2008

5.  Kindle,  May 18, 2009

6. Paper-back,  September 8, 2009

By 2009, there  were already five editions.

Yet the sixth version of “Mobs” is listed as the first edition.

And then this first edition is dated at 2009, not 2007.

Technical glitch? Careless mistake?

Or does someone want to revise the date of publication?

Inquiring minds want to know…..

 

 

Knoxious Hypocrisy

You can do whatever you want sexually,  on camera, for money, and thrust it crudely and incessantly into the public eye….you can even enact rape, violence, humiliation, and sadism toward other human beings and call it a job.

But don’t you dare voice your opinions about such things freely in Mistress Belle Knox’s  America.

On Ms. Knox’s Twitter feed, she “nudges” the serfs not to use the English language in ways that offend Her Royal  Twitterness:

Photo: I love this campaign! http://www.buzzfeed.com/danielk74/17-duke-students-speak-out-against-homophobic-tra-o7hn?s=mobile

If you suspect, as I do, that Knox is an intelligence-created mind-control operation… here’s some evidence:

1. She’s regurgitating, word-for-word, the CIA’s whole gender agenda on her Twitter feed – Part of that is to eliminate any words that arise from real human experience and feeling and substitute for them politically correct language.

2. She’s staging “conflict” with Pakistan’s Twitter, an obvious piece of theater intended to reinforce the meme that Islam’s traditional sexual values are anathema to the West.

Preet Bharara: Super Self-Promoter

Preet Bharara - Publicity Hound or Super Prosecutor?

Source: SearchIndia.com

Notice that the total number of press releases by Cyrus Vance, the DA for the prestigious Manhattan region, was less than half the number Bharara put out during the same 16- month period.

This record adds further evidence to my contention from day one that Bharara, a publicity hound, beholden to Chuck Schumer and the whole caboodle of financiers behind the Democrat party machine and married into the establishment, was brought in as part of a corrupt “fix.”

While the post I linked above makes a big deal about the criminal wrong-doing of Bharara’s Indian targets ( Rajat Gupta et al.), I’ve argued extensively that what Gupta was convicted for (wrongly, in my opinion) was very minor, relative to the scale of wrong-doing of the people who testified against him, including the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Bharara’s subsequent actions in the Khobragade “fake slave nanny” case confirm his bias.

Thus, research into Bharara’s family ties, his political motivations, and possible links to separatist Sikh elements or Pakistani/Israeli intelligence elements is fully warranted, no matter what the result.

Galileo Goes To Jail and Other Myths……

“Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion,” Ronald L. Numbers, Harvard University Press, Dec. 8, 2010

Review

An illuminating study of the relationship between science and religion…This book features the contributions of a team of 25 scholars that includes agnostics, atheists, and Christians. Their collective objective is to dispel the “hoary myths” of the supposedly bellicose relationship between religion and science. Readers will be fascinated by the evidence that for advocating Copernicanism, Galileo was not imprisoned (as commonly thought) but interrogated–albeit under the threat of torture–and set up in an apartment. Other misconceptions concern the connection between Darwinian thought and Nazi biology, Einstein’s belief in God, and Islam’s alleged hostility toward scientific enquiry. (C. Brian Smith Library Journal 2009-03-02)

 

Slandering Christianity: The “flat earth” lie

Veritas.ucsb.org debunks the secular lie that the Medieval period was a dark age in which Christians believed the earth was flat:

A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat–especially medieval Christians.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat…….

A few–at least two and at most five–early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and why did this nonsense emerge?…………

No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat.

The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834). The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history………..

But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth?

The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.”

And why did these historians spread propaganda against Christianity?

It was in order to shore up the arguments of Darwinists  (with whom Darwin himself would have disagreed) against Christians.

It was to make Christians look stupid and opposed to science.

It was to falsely equate a non-existent “Christian” belief in a flat earth with anti- Darwinism so as to shame educated Christians into subscribing to the dogma of evolution, without fully grasping the import of what they were doing.

It was subversion of religion by stealth.

 

Official dissent: Teaching the serfs how to obey

Oh Tarzie at the Rancid Honey-Trap, points out what still isn’t clear to many people:

People don’t get on the major media unless  their “dissent” is useful to the powers-that-be.

If  they really threatened the power-structure, they wouldn’t be anywhere on the networks.

A cone of silence would descend. They would suddenly find themselves in some fringe area of the net, ignored by the right people and overlooked by the rest.

Read what happened when liberal commentator Chris Hayes timidly criticized the overuse of the word, “hero.” He correctly noted that it  encouraged  jingoism and militarism…and then he swiftly recanted:

Let me spell it out: Someone in some high place finds Hayes useful. If and when he’s no longer useful, he’ll be purged. There was a very public reminder to this effect in May when, on a Memorial Day program, Hayes expressed ambivalence about the word “hero”, because it is “so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”

Even though Hayes offered this tepid remark in a segment rich with militarist schmaltz, right wing pundits and veterans groups pounced. The next day, Hayes issued a revolting apology which went above and beyond the normal requirements of atonement, complete with the far right-wing suggestion that civilians can’t really speak with authority on military matters……”

Lila:

Hayes’ apology was completely uncalled for, for two reasons:

One. The military is intended, constitutionally, to be under the civilian command.
Two. Civilians have often been more militaristic than the military.

So why did Hayes grovel?

Tarzie explains:

“Public capitulation rituals of this kind aren’t just a part of heat vampire liberalism; they are, in fact, its very essence. This is basically what DeBoer’s Marx/Daschle formulation describes: a clear eyed, even radical, assessment of all that’s wrong in the world coexisting with acquiescence in oligarch-approved methods for putting things right, no matter how often and resoundingly these methods fail.

So constituted, heat vampire liberals act as role models for the rest of us, reconciling things that aren’t logically reconcilable, successfully wrestling themselves into compliance with status quo fundamentals while bemoaning the particulars.”

That’s why it’s imperative to call out “official dissenters.”
I know it looks churlish: Aren’t there much worthier targets than Mr. Hayes, who makes so many apt criticisms of  war and the police-state?

No, no, a thousand times no.

There’s no hope at all of real public outrage so long as  “domesticated outrage” flourishes without embarrassment.
Hayes and Greenwald and Snowden and Assange and the rest   aren’t simply co-opted. They are actively “instructing” the rest of us in compliance. They are conscious conduits for the “second-level” brain-washing that faces anyone who extricates himself from  the”first-level” brainwashing of the masses.

Conservatives cozy with the establishment

The infiltration of conservative and paleo- libertarian circles by progressives continues apace, writes the paleo-libertarian blogger at MoreRight.net:

Why does a self-admitted liberal have a regular column at a website called The American Conservative, founded by Pat Buchanan, and his column is passed off as a conservative voice?”

It should make anyone wonder about several conservative pundits. Some of them seem to be more interested in their media presence than in supporting traditionalist positions.

Whether they are simply naive or actively working to undermine social conservatism is the question.

MoreRight.net continues:

” If you dig into the archives of this magazine, you see the same refrain again and again:

And what issue is more important than life? As a practical matter, conservatives would probably do better with voters by becoming less rigid on social issues where Americans are becoming more liberal. But they also stand to gain by doubling down on the issue that should matter most.

Translation: we ought to give up on social conservatism because no one will vote for it, let’s just focus on stopping abortion and forget the rest.”

The blogger gets a part of the picture right, although I think there are other reasons for someone to focus on abortion, as recently I have begun to.

He then points out evidence of conservative pandering:

“What else? Articles written by the left-libertarians from the Cato Institute, fawning over Jim Morrison (who was found dead in a bathtub from a heroin overdose), bizarre apologetics for Communist folk musician Pete Seeger, and other one-off oddball articles.”

Lila Rajiva:

I can point out even greater pandering and compromise on paleo-libertarian sites:

  • Using the same scatological and vulgar personal attacks that the left favors
  • Constantly mocking conservatives, right-wingers, and  Republicans (admittedly these aren’t all the same thing), without anywhere near equal time for their opposite numbers, thus doing the left’s work for it
  • Promoting  disinformation sources, such as  Robert Morrow and John Loftus.

MoreRight than traces some  direct links between traditionalists and neo-reactionaries with progressives.

Last year, I  came to the conclusion that Neo-reaction (also called the Dark Enlightenment)  was some kind of leftist/government ploy, but given the anti-Catholic slant of the term “Cathedral,” I also have to wonder why this blogger uses it.

Deep waters indeed….

Imagine the reaction if one were to term the establishment the “Synagogue” or the “Temple”?

Of course, it shouldn’t be fear of reprisal that stops someone from using either of those terms.  It should be the clear evidence that the establishment uses all sides of the debate against each other, Catholic and Jewish among them.

The people who are supposed to be standing up for traditionalists in the “new media” sphere are not-so-subtly stabbing them in the back, not just in their associations, but in their heartfelt beliefs.

In the DC/NYC new media milieu, credibility emanates directly from the center of the Cathedral, that is, The New York Times. Everyone is angling for a spot at the trough, including so-called “traditionalist” conservatives.

Lila:  I was cited by the New York Times a couple of times, a while back. I daresay could have cultivated that route had I the stomach for dissimulation needed for it. Frankly, I don’t.

[Josh] Barro is part of the “media/liberal thought elite,” which includes other mediocrities and Cathedral mouthpieces such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anil Dash, Dave Weigel, Matt Yglesias, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and so on.

What of the connection with “paleo”-conservatives? Jonathan Coppage, associate editor of The American Conservative, is friendly with Barro. They’re both connected to Forbes writer and former Business Insider analyst Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who acts clueless about the decline, calls himself a “former reactionary who now embraces the Enlightenment,” and tells us about how great economic and social equality are. They’re connected to Michael B. Dougherty, another “surf the decline” conservative who openly mocks reactionary politics and argues in favor of “pragmatic” policies such as embracing immigration amnesty.

All these guys are very friendly with left-libertarians like Jason Kuznicki, Cathy Reisenwitz, and Josiah Neeley, who are doing their best to turn movement libertarianism into a subdivision of Frankfurt School progressivism. They’re in turn connected to witch hunters for liberal purity such as Julian Sanchez, also at Cato, and open borders enthusiasts such as Bryan Caplan (Cato), Eli Dourado (Mercatus), and Dylan Matthews (Vox). The relationship between so-called “paleoconservatives” and these left-libertarians and progressives is far too close for comfort.”

 

Website corrects error in post of 2011 piece

Shoah.org,  a site supporting the Palestinian cause, reprinted  a piece I posted at Veterans Today in 2011, the deleted chapter from my first book.

It uses language and holds positions that I do not, although of course I endorse its support for the Palestinians and its exposes of extreme Zionism.

Unfortunately, someone has added several lines to the original piece, to make me endorse a certain interpretation of the events of 9-11, bolstered by the context of the site, Shoah.org.

It’s a delicate matter, because in a time of repression of serious dissent and forceful speech, I don’t want to distance myself to make myself  “look good” at someone else’s expense.

But my positions are different and it’s just as wrong to allow distortions of my position to replicate themselves, whether intentionally or not.

I hadn’t seen the post before and just noticed it when I clicked on one of the images popping up on top of a Google search of my name.

I wrote to the editors to correct it and they seem to have, which was very nice of them.

I much appreciate the courtesy.

Here’s my comment, which they didn’t publish:

http://www.shoah.org.uk/2011/01/01/spy-machine-lie-machine-how-we-were-brainwashed-into-the-war-on-terror/comment-page-1/#comment-295186
Lila Rajiva says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 18, 2014 at 5:31 pm

Hi,

I notice that you have published a piece of mine and altered my writing, without my permission.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/31/spy-machine-lie-machine-how-we-were-brainwashed-into-the-war-on-terror/

I did not write these lines:

“I am posting them here at Veterans Today to be read in conjunction with Jonathan Azaziah’s “9-11: Israel’s Grand Deception.”

They have been inserted by someone at your site, perhaps accidentally, as you can see from the original link.

To clarify, I stopped posting at Veterans Today, because I did not agree with the writing of several of the people posting there, including some whom I consider war-criminals, as I have stated on my blog.

I also do not equate Kashmir as an issue with Palestine, nor am I in favor of general economic sanctions against Israel, as I have also repeatedly stated on my blog, since I am against general economic sanctions against any nation.

Targeted boycotts are a different matter.

I appreciate your sympathy for the Palestinians and criticisms of extreme Zionism, but I believe that you are unwittingly misrepresenting my position by adding those lines.

I would much appreciate a correction and removal of those lines.

Thank you very much.

Lila Rajiva

 

 

Godfather of Abortion Inc. Converted to Pro-Life

At Catholic Education.org, the godfather of American abortion, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, confesses he’s had a change of heart:

“I am personally responsible for 75,000 abortions. This legitimizes my credentials to speak to you with some authority on the issue. I was one of the founders of the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws in the U.S. in 1968.

A truthful poll of opinion then would have found that most Americans were against permissive abortion. Yet within five years we had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth.

How did we do this? It is important to understand the tactics involved because these tactics have been used throughout the western world with one permutation or another, in order to change abortion law

The First Key Tactic was to capture the media

We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public.

The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

[Lila: Again, concealed from the public is the fact that the US has an abortion policy far more radical than many socialist countries, like India, where late-term abortions would be considered murder. Here, they are perfectly legal, and, as the Kermit Gosnell story shows, they are far more prevalent than the media admits.

Moreover, the Emily Letts  abortion snuff video shows that abortion is used instead of contraception or responsible prevention.

Indeed, the video was most likely disseminated to normalize and promote the practice of abortion as contraception. There is no doubt in my mind that the intention is not to sever and destroy the “stigma of abortion,” as the media claimed, but to sear and cauterize the mother’s conscience, to cut the umbilical cord of maternal affection, to pervert the energetic bond between mother and child.

In that sense, and in many others, the video was filled with “occult” religious clues, but it was the religion of black witchcraft, not Christianity or Judaism.]

The Second Key Tactic was to Play the Catholic Card

We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its “socially backward ideas” and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform.”

And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favour of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions.

[Lila: A key element in this strategy was to infiltrate and subvert the Catholic church from within. Thus, the church was first demonized for excluding gays; then when the gays in the church contributed to the pedophilic abuse, the blame was shifted onto celibacy and Catholic teaching on celibacy, rather than onto the proclivities of the priests.

Celibacy was thus associated with a so-called pedophilic hierarchy of conservative males, thus discrediting it.]

The Third Key Tactic was the Denigration and Suppression of all Scientific Evidence that Life Begins at Conception

I am often asked what made me change my mind. How did I change from prominent abortionist to pro-life advocate? In 1973, I became director of obstetrics of a large hospital in New York City and had to set up a perinatal research unit, just at the start of a great new technology which we now use every day to study the fetus in the womb. A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy.

Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions?

Simple arithmetic: at $300.00 a time 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.

[Lila: Actually, because of the trade in organs and fetal tissue, abortion is probably far more lucrative than that.  Kermit Gosnell apparently made something like $1500, not $300, from each abortion performed. That means roughly five times the figure above, or over $2 billion. This is just an extrapolation from media figures, of course.

The largest advocate of family planning services and the biggest provider of them, Planned Parenthood, relies largely on providing abortion to the public, not “other family services”:

“According to Planned Parenthood’s own apologist, Media Matters, its “total revenue from abortion services was approximately $164,154,000,” a year. Accordingly, over 51 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinic income comes from abortion.

In addition to its $320.1 million in clinic income and $223.8 million in private donations, Planned Parenthood receives $487.4 million dollars a year from taxpayers.

Lila (continued): The liberal-left darling, Planned Parenthood, dispenses abortion pills in addition to abortion procedures, making the outfit the killer of over 300,000 children every year.

It is not coincidental that those children are mostly black, brown, and from the underclass, given that the mother of family-planning, Margaret Sanger, was a devoted eugenicist who wanted to control the birth-rate of the population and weed out “undesirables.”

Bernard Nathanson (cont):

It is clear that permissive abortion is purposeful destruction of what is undeniably human life. It is an impermissible act of deadly violence. One must concede that unplanned pregnancy is a wrenchingly difficult dilemma. But to look for its solution in a deliberate act of destruction is to trash the vast resourcefulness of human ingenuity, and to surrender the public weal to the classic utilitarian answer to social problems.”

As a scientist I know, not believe,  that human life begins at conception. Although I am not a formal religionist, I believe with all my heart that there is a divinity of existence which commands us to declare a final and irreversible halt to this infinitely sad and shameful crime against humanity.”

The insanity of public debate in America

Consider the following,:

1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.

These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.

2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.

Leading “libertarian” activists  say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public.  This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.

No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.

Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.

The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.

No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.

Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.

3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.

I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.

With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide)  is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).

4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.

5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.

They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.

But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.

The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art”  that inflames the public, even where major violence could result  as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.

Mommy dearest makes snuff-movie, calls critics “haters”

UPDATE:

Please note that this piece is not intended to bash or mock women who have undergone abortions. That is a matter between a woman and her conscience, at least under current law.

The post is intended to deride an abortion-activist who turns a  matter that at all other times she claims is private into a public spectacle, even while branding critics as pure evil, for simply telling her what they think about it.

ORIGINAL POST

Yet another gloriously “humanitarian” feminist, not content with aborting her child,  goes viral with the deed so she can blot out her guilt.….

The malign mommy didn’t really film her first trimester abortion in gory detail, because that would put a crimp in her “you-go-girl” story.

She just filmed herself – the heroine of the episode.

A genuine aborti-flick would have shown the unpleasant reality behind the flattering fiction.

And, of course, this brand of feminism is all about spinning flattering fiction…. and erasing unflattering reality.

Mommy dearest writes:

“A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth. There is no cutting, and risk of infertility is less than 1 percent. Yet women come into the clinic all the time terrified that they are going to be cut open, convinced that they won’t be able to have kids after the abortion. The misinformation is amazing, but think about it: They are still willing to sacrifice these things because they know that they can’t carry the child at this moment.

[Lila: To an objective observer, this “sacrifice” is nothing of the sort. It is sheer recklessness.]

“There are three options for a first-trimester abortion: medical abortion, which is the pill; a surgical abortion with IV sedation, where you’re asleep through the whole thing; and a surgical abortion with local anesthesia during which you’re awake. Women are most terrified of being awake.

[Lila: Indeed.]

“I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary — and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story. It’s my story.

Everyone at the clinic was really supportive of filming it.”

[Lila:  Mass man is at his core a voyeur, a bored busy-body.  He seems never happier than when playing peeping- tom at your expense, or sharing more than you want to know, at his own.]

“At first they wanted to sit down and talk about the real consequences of this. There are a lot of politics involved. We knew we could have hundreds of protesters at our door; we could have bomb threats. Working at an abortion clinic, every once in awhile it feels like you’re working in a war zone.

[Lila:  Her self -dramatization takes away the focus from the real victims, her unborn baby.]

“But I said, “Bring it,” and they were on board.

I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth. I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.

[Lila: If this were metaphysics, it would be excellent. As abortion documentary, it’s nothing more than delusion.]

“The first night I posted the video to my Facebook page, I couldn’t sleep. I went out with friends, and I was so paranoid people were looking at me a certain way because they saw my video. The intimacy of it made me nervous, even though I really wanted people to see it.

[Lila: Can anyone any more wonder why the population doesn’t object to its medical records being pawed through by the government? People simply have no sense of privacy. If the love of private life is the mark of the civilized man, then we must confront the truth that we are no longer civilized.]

“Then I looked at my Facebook wall. I was expecting this tsunami of hateful, scary things, but everyone was so breathtakingly supportive. People who I have never talked to started writing their own abortion stories.

[Lila: Bad taste, thy name is “sisterhood.”]

“I had one woman who messaged me saying she’d had an abortion that week and she was plagued with guilt. Her boyfriend called her a killer, but she said she was recovering well and appreciated the video. Another woman told me she’d had a miscarriage and that because of my video she felt like she could talk to me about it. Just all of these things started pouring out of women.

There were hateful responses, of course, which was the hardest part of this whole thing. When I put it up on YouTube, pro-lifers put it on their newscasts. And so I got, “You’re a Nazi,” “You deserve to die,” “You killed your baby.” Just so much blind hatred without knowing who I am or what I’m about.

[Lila: This so-called  “hatred” is far from blind. It’s the wide-awake anger of the sentient and the just, appalled by her self-absorption and indifference to what is, finally, a killing.

It is both natural and good to hate something hate-worthy, like  irresponsible killing.]

“Still, every time I watch the video, I love it. I love how positive it is. I think that there are just no positive abortion stories on video for everyone to see. But mine is.

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

[Lila: Yes, guilt. That little voice from one’s conscience that says that abortion is not all fine-and-dandy.]

“Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.”

Lila: Translation:

As long as you can make yourself feel good about it, go ahead and do what you want. Ignore anyone who suggests that, if not garden-variety murder, this is something less and more at the same time.

Above all, feel good, because feeling good is all that matters.

For that, keep tight control of the language and the images.

Don’t let either get out of your control.

As long as you can make yourself look good, through subversion of the language  you can feel good.

As long as you feel good, you are good.

And anyone who fails to go along with that self-portrait, why, they’re nothing more than haters.

The political use of “anti-Semitism” in the Ukraine

Tablet Magazine:

“It’s use the Jew day in Ukraine—again. For millennia, treatment of a country’s Jews has served as the canary in the coal mine, and now the canary is tweeting all over the American and Israeli media. According to reports, a leaflet, now basically debunked and yet still inspiring fury all over Twitter, was handed out in Donetsk, the heavily Russian-speaking town in Eastern Ukraine, instructing Jews to register with authorities.

According to Ynet, the flier read as follows:

“Dear Ukraine citizens of Jewish nationality, due to the fact that the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported Bendery Junta [Stepan Bandera] and oppose the pro-Slavic People’s Republic of Donetsk, (the interim government) has decided that all citizens of Jewish descent, over 16 years of age and residing within the republic’s territory are required to report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and register.”

The media response was predictable. USA Today, the Jerusalem Post, and others were quick to proclaim “Jews ordered to register in Ukraine!” cleverly omitting one important question: By whom? The word “Jews” is even trending on Twitter.

The flyer is both real, and not. It’s important to see this in the context of how the Jews have been used from the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine: as fodder for the provocation machine. Indeed, Julia Ioffe at The New Republic reached out to the Donetsk Jewish community, who dismissed the flier as an attempt by Western Ukrainians to delegitimize the pro-Russian sentiment in the Eastern part of the country, just as the Russians used accusations of anti-Semitism to delegitimize the Maidan revolutionaries.

As Ioffe puts it, “This may be just another tactic to smear the so-called anti-Maidan in the east of Ukraine: you think we’re fascists? Well, take a look at these guys.” The Jews of Ukraine are not registering.”

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: Mt. Gox goes poof!

Mt Gox has gone bust.

Ahem.

We’ll take a quick bow (along with Gary North, Robert Wenzel, Bionic Mosquito, and several others).

We Bitcoin-deniers stood our ground in the face of relentless and shameless]pumping, supported by rent-a-libertarians, like the former chief editor of the Daily Reckoning, Joel Bowman and shameless other opportunists

[On rereading this, I think I want  soften my tone, since the anti-BTC’s have been proved by events.[

See the two MBP posts below:

BTC: My Comments at EPJ

Bitcoin: My Comment at EPJ and Block’s Reversal

See also the following anonymous comments at EPJ in December and November 2013:

My comments are anonymous, because I was worried that the elites might attack people who criticized BTC, just as they trashed Assange critics all over the net:

Comments at EPJ on December 3

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila )
  2. Stick with Gary North, Wenzel.

    Better the known devil than the unknown.

    And talking about unknown devils, who is this Paul Rosenberg from Cryptohippie?

    Who owns Cryptohippie?

    Might they have connections to TOR, Wikileaks, Assange, and/or the Internet billionaires (Zuckerberg, Brin, Thiel, Omidyar)? If so, can DARPA be far behind?

    How would we know since Bitcoin is so mysterious……

    In fact, how would we know if Bernanke himself wasn’t moonlighting as an “anti-Fed” bit-coiner?

    Answer is we wouldn’t.

    Also, what reason could there be for the inventor of an invention of this magnitude (purportedly) to coyly refrain from taking any credit or recognition?

    Another question, why does Julian Assange tout it?

    These are the things which must be investigated before anyone other than fools and gamblers will go near this scheme.

    Anonymous (Lila Rajiva)
  3. Maybe they gain something personally from promoting Bitcoins? Credibility with the hacker-anarchist world, for instance. Maybe even money. How do you know?

    It takes a big person to stick to his guns, even when peer pressure might suggest otherwise.

 


 

Comments at EPJ on December 12:

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila)
  2. @anonymous

    I don’t have time to refute step by step.
    Just the obvious points.

    You claim bitcoin allows you to transfer any amount of wealth anywhere in the world almost instantly and almost free.

    Actually, you can already do that with an ACH transfer (upto 10K), wire transfer ($25 for any sum) cash (as much as you can stuff undetected into your suitcase or cash cards. You can also do hawala.

    The limits in all these cases don’t arise from the medium, but from government restriction, which could be enforced much more thoroughly through BTC than by other means.

    Second. Bitcoins aren’t “free.” They require not only a very good computer, but an excellent internet connection, encryption of a very high order not only for the connection but for the hard drive.. and considerable technical knowledge to thwart the net-savvy people who swarm around bitcoin users.

    None of that is free or widely prevalent.

    In most countries, you don’t even have good enough internet.

    Plus, all of it can be snooped on and shut down.
    That is just one objection out of dozens I could raise.

    Reply

 

1.  Nov. 25, 2013 comments at EPJ

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila)
  2. Shame on anyone who is so credulous to believe this is the “free market” at work.
    Shame on anyone who supports this kind of elaborate con played by the very cartels that anarchists are supposedly fighting.

    Bitcoin is a Rothschild-backed intelligence-funded pump-and-dump. The purpose is to destabilize the dollar and provoke demand for a global single currency.

    It is the global elite-backed “controlled opposition,” using spokesmen from the CIA-infiltrated/ hard-money or “libertarian” community. The ones pitching it will make money as the proles rush in.

    It is easily tracked, easily gamed.
    More so than the dollar or gold.

    This massive swell of interest and pumping by all and sundry is a sure sign of intel involvement.

  3. People promoting this might as well have INTEL stamped on their forehead.
  4. Or FRAUD.

 

Anonymous (Lila)

 


 

 

@Philip, Anonymous, edward.

 

Intelligence and government are multi-layered, not unitary.

 

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes even the left hand doesn’t know. Just a finger or a nail knows.

 

Intelligence might take a while to understand the potential in something their scientists come up with. So it might take a year or two or more. Then they embrace it.

 

The MSM media is brain-washed one way – the obvious mainstream, Keynesian brainwashing.

 

The alternative media, including hard money people, are past the mainstream brainwashing, but they fall for the second-level brainwashing – they fall for Snowden, Assange, Hacktivism, Crypto-currency, Wikileaks, and all such black operations, meant to appeal to gullible, egoistic anti-govt types.

 

There are legions of agencies involved who profile dissent and come up with the red herrings that will be swallowed by the maximum number of fools and opportunists.

 

The economic dissenters trust their hard-money gurus, but that crowd is filled with two-bit cons who will fit their agenda to whatever the intelligence agencies tell them.

 

Please go back and look at when Bitcoin mania started and look at who has promoted it.

 

Be wise as serpents, my friends. Wenzel’s instincts are right. I hope he will not be dazzled by Mayer’s “expertise” and misled into supporting this con game.

 

As for sources. Do some research directly yourself and see what you find.

 

Reply

 

their ‘endgame’ …. .

 

 

Anonymous (Lila)

 

 

@Phil McKreviss, EndtheFed,

 

There are a few libertarian (rightist and leftist) blogs where Assange and Snowden have been deconstructed thoroughly. No need to reinvent the wheel here. Let your fingers take a walk and you will see that they are both mouthpieces for the global elites.

 

Some reliable sources you could read: Cottrell, Rappaport, Creighton, Rajiva, Madison…off the top of my head.

 

China – China is a COMMUNIST country, my friends. Goldman Sachs has a big presence there.

 

End-game is control – maximum control over your assets, your money, your movements, your writing, your thoughts – so they can harvest it all for themselves.

 

The elites would be gods…and for that, they need for you to be less than men. They need for you to be little BITS of a machine.

 

Read everything critically, inwardly, not in this trusting fashion.

 

Rest assured, when something shows up on the internet, with this much fanfare, the elites approve.

 

Freedom is hard.

 

It will not come without sacrificing some time, effort and along the way, some favorite delusions and consolations too.

 

Biggest delusion is to believe that there is any quick simple remedy whereby you get to make a ton of money quicker and liberate “the world” too.

All that is Grimms Fairy Tales in a special edition for libertarians.

40% of acid-attack victims are men

A Voice for Men overturns the feminist claim that acid-attacks are gender-based violence (a claim that I, unfortunately, once trusted):

“On another acid survivors website from Cambodia they have numbers from 1999 – 2013. There numbers show that 40% of the adult victims were adult males, 44.8% were adult females, 7.3% were male children under the age of 13 and 8% were females under the age of 13.

Despite about 40% of the acid attack victims being male acid survivors foundation true to feminist form states:

“Acid violence is a form of gender based violence that reflects and perpetuates the inequality of women in society.”

And helping that lie spread was boosted by COMBATING ACID VIOLENCE IN BANGLADESH, INDIA, AND CAMBODIA

This is subtitled as:

Report by the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell
Law School, the Committee on International Human Rights of the New
York City Bar Association, the Cornell Law School International Human
Rights Clinic, and the Virtue Foundation

Notice the list of organizations who are helping promote this heinous lie that acid attacks is gender violence? All of them owe a duty of care to us, society to be honest but hey their feminists so that duty of care is tossed in the manure pile. Too bad their reports aren’t there too, where they belong.
Here is what these alleged groups wrote when describing acid attacks;

“Acid violence is gender-based violence that reflects and perpetuates the
inequality of women in society and as such is prohibited by international law

I call BULLSHIT. There is a about a 10% difference between the sexes in acid attacks. That is not gender based violence. Even if we include the children the percentage of men only drops down to just over 35% that is still not gender based violence.

And what about the criminals inflicting incredible human suffering you ask. Well it is not just men who are tossing acid on women:

Woman throws acid on sister-in-law over land dispute

Two women accused of plotting an acid attack that left a local woman disfigured have been found guilty

Just like every other feminist claim of gender-based violence this one too is a half truth. Omitting the male population from the awareness campaigns is the standard operating procedure of feminism.

To reference my compatriot, Robert St. Estephe again, please note: neither historically nor in modern times have acid attacks been something “men to do women.” It’s something people do to each other, in various times and places. If you doubt there’s anything weird or unusual about women using acid as a weapon, in addition to Robert’s other article (referenced above) see Three New York “Acid Queens” of 1901.

I’ve said it earlier in this article and I’ll say it again:

The feminist claim that acid attacks is gender violence is BULLSHIT.”

Comment

See

“Mystery of the sudden surge in acid attacks on men by women,” Kerry Mcqueeney Daily Mail, UK, May 10, 2012

Acid attacks on men related to gang violence, say experts,” Ruth Evans, BBC,  November 9, 2013

As Partners for Law in Development notes in a paper on the subject, acid-attack legislation needs to be framed gender-neutrally, so that the increasing number of male victims and female perpetrators will be included in its provisions.

Google’s “Hummingbird”: IP Theft & Mind-Control

Google’s new search algorithm Hummingbird adds to the company’s sinister reputation among privacy advocates.

Google’s creepy Google Glass didn’t help it either.

Now comes Hummingbird, the biggest algorithm change in the search engine in twelve years.

“Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words,” Sullivan reports. “It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.”

(Hummingbird is Google’s biggest algorithm change in 12 years,” WebProNews,  Sept. 28, 2013)

Simply put, Hummingbird is about Google trying to find the holistic meaning behind the individual words of a search-string (the query or series of words you input into the search function),  or, in the case of websites, the overall intent behind the key-words most used.

Bottom-line: Google is trying to figure out what’s going on in your mind when you type out certain words.

That is terribly similar to an area of research dear to the defense and spy agencies – predictive software and technology.

For instance,  DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is very interested in developing the cognitive footprints of users for identification purposes.

The goal is to bypass the need for passwords, which tend to be cumbersome for users and vulnerable to password-cracking, phishing, social-engineering, memory failures, and hardware theft.

Software biometric modalities” are to be used to develop what it terms Active Authentication.

Anyone can see how useful the new Hummingbird algorithm would be to DARPA.

Indeed, given Google’s prior collaboration with the CIA in the monitoring of social media, it wouldn’t be surprising if Hummingbird has also come out of a joint project with the government.

The defense agencies come up with the technology to figure out what random “bad guys” are up to. Google monetizes it and returns the favor by data-sharing with the government.

The consumer might have his every need…indeed wish…met, but web-users are now going to find that Google’s “free lunch:” is not only not free, it’s not remotely cheap.

And web users are the ones footing the bill.

Here’s how.

“Google Hummingbird: Where no search has gone before,” Jeremy Hull, iProspect, Wired, October 15, 2013

Google has updated its search algorithm many times over the past few years, but previous updates were focused on making Google better at gathering information — for example, indexing websites more often and identifying spammy content. Hummingbird is focused on the user. It’s about Google getting better at understanding what searchers really want and providing them with better answers.”

That’s Google’s stated objective, of course. But how about websites?

When you search Google for answers to questions, what website owners want is for you to go to their site to get the information.

This is not only because they might hope to sell you something and thereby earn a living.

It’s also because they hope that by giving you good information not available in the mainstream media,  they might attract you to their site and persuade you on other issues.

By offering free information, web writers hope you will find them reliable, credible, or interesting and become committed readers. That’s why millions of writers and websites, spend inordinate amounts of energy and time finding answers and giving them away to others for free.

Of course, ethics and decency demand that readers who benefit from that information cite the place they found it and give the author credit.

Not Hummingbird.

It harvests information from the net and puts it on Information cards that pop up in answer to searches.

Now, if the information is immediately given to the reader by Google, why will they visit the websites from which Google might have culled the answer?

They won’t.  That means that Google is not only stealing the private data of its users through Gmail, Google Earth, and a bunch of other programs, it’s also stealing from the websites it’s supposed to be helping.

But “Hummingbird” is not just unfriendly to websites offering information to the public, it acts to control what information is presented to you and how.

Hummingbird’s graphic is an easy way for Google to give you what Google (and very likely, the government) want you to know, rather than what you might learn if you delved into your search results yourself.

The new graphic could even give you downright misleading or inaccurate information. Just think about Snopes, the ostensibly myth-busting site that somehow manages to bust myths only in left-liberal ways.

So, Hummingbird is not only using your personal information for Google’s own commercial (and the government’s surveillance) purposes, it’s using information from blogs/websites, without their permission, for its own operations.

That’s two counts of IP theft.

Then, the whole business of trying to determine exactly what you’re thinking when you type certain things into the search function sounds awfully like mind-reading to me. In order to do that kind of mind-reading, all sorts of personal information from your web usage (even more than Google has been collecting so far) has to be collated and compared. Mapped, if you will.

That’s two counts of privacy invasion.

Finally, by manipulating access to the knowledge available on the Internet, under the guise of consumer satisfaction, by giving you pre-packaged answers before it gives you your search results, Google is actually  trying to control your thinking.

That’s one count of mind-control.

Is it any surprise that the new algorithm shares its name with DARPA’s nano flying robot/drone Hummingbird, which beats its wings like a bird?.

DARPA’s Hummingbird is a spy drone:

“The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the ‘bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it’s only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

But that’s not vanity — it’s key to the drone’s use as a spy device, as it can perch near its subject without alerting it.”

Google’s Hummingbird seems no less innocuous and no less insidious.

It’s more evil-doing from the Franken-SearchEngine that routinely spies for the NSA and CIA and systematically  commits Intellectual Property theft.

Read more at Entrepreneur .com

False rape reports in US army up by 35% in 3 years

The Washington Times,  May 12, 2013 reports that a Pentagon study has shown false rape reports increasing almost 9 times the rate of increase in abuse reports:

QUOTE:

‘From 2009 to 2012, the number of sexual abuse reports rose from 3,244 to 3,374 — a 4 percent increase.

During the same period, the number of what the Pentagon calls “unfounded allegations” based on completed investigations of those reports rose from 331 to 444 — a 35 percent increase.

In 2012, there were 2,661 completed investigations, meaning that the 444 false complaints accounted for about 17 percent of all closed cases last year. False reports accounted for about 13 percent of closed cases in 2009.

Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and analyst at the Family Research Council, is writing a book for Regnery Publishing Inc. about the Pentagon’s push to put women in direct ground combat in the infantry, armor and special operations.

“In the course of conducting interviews with commanders, I heard time and again complaints about female service members making sex-related allegations which proved unfounded,” Mr. Maginnis said. “Not only do some women abuse the truth, but it also robs their commanders from more important, mission-related tasks.

“Female service members told me that some women invite problems which lead men on and then result in advances the woman can’t turn off. Too often, such female culpability leads to allegations of sexual contact, assault and then the women feign innocence.”

Comment:

“As in the hyped Indian rape crisis, the cause for the increase in assaults and false accusations of assault lies in ill-conceived laws put in place to satisfy the gender feminists’ need to have perfect equality with men, regardless of the dictates of nature or nurture.

See “Flawed new rape laws roils military justice system,” MacClatchey, Sept. 21, 2011 which reports on the crisis in military justice caused by a badly thought out law provoked by the rise in intimate contacts between men and women as they become more integrated in the army. In other words,  integration of the sexes has back-fired in ways gender feminists refuse to accept.

QUOTE:

“Six years ago, Congress tried cracking down on rape in the military. Prompted by disturbing reports of sexual assaults in military academies and war zones, lawmakers rewrote the rules. They wanted to protect victims and help prosecutors.

Now it’s clear that the effort backfired.

The politically attractive but poorly understood legal changes have incited courtroom confusion, judicial frustration and constitutional conflict. Extensive interviews and a McClatchy review of thousands of pages of court documents and internal studies find a congressionally caused crisis of military justice that few civilians know anything about.”

Fake “Rape Crisis”: UK rape rate ten times Indian

One feminist notices something odd in the hype about the Indian rape crisis:

QUOTE:

“Let’s look at the numbers for India, population 1.2 billion (about 48% of whom are women):

In 2011 there were 24,206 reported rapes. Of these 26 per cent resulted in convictions.

The UK has a population of about 56.2 million.”

Lila: This  article was written in January 2013.  I don’t know where the author got her numbers.

The UK population in 2011 was 63.3 million. The population in 2012 was 63.7 million.

The Indian population in 2011 was approx. 1.21 billion.    In 2012 it was 1.22 billion.

That means that the UK has a population that is roughly 20 times smaller than India’s.

The article continues:

QUOTE:

“Fifty-one per cent are female.

In 2011 there were 14,624 rapes reported. Of which 24 per cent resulted in a “conviction or caution”.

Lila: If these rape statistics are in any way accurate, then the rape numbers in the UK are nearly half those in India, even though the Indian population is 20 times greater.

That means that the per capita rape rate in India is TEN TIMES smaller than that in the UK, a settled and developed country, with high levels of prosperity and education, one of the major powers.

Moreover, the UK rape rate is this high, even though Britain is a heavily policed country, with perhaps the most extensive surveillance networks in the world that routinely and illegally snoop on British citizens.

Britain also has a large and complex criminal justice system with multiple agencies to protect women and an academic culture that often shills for the feminist agenda.

But nonetheless the British rape rate is ten times that of India.  Where is the outrage?

Remember that the Indian rape rate is ten times smaller, despite extensive and severe poverty in India, few social networks outside kinship networks, and a very low per capita rate of policing.

Remember that India also has a very large population of illiterate young males, many without jobs and routinely experiences huge influxes of migrant workers into  severely overcrowded cities, already suffering from near-collapse in infrastructure and utilities.

Remember that India suffers from critical energy and water shortages, from soaring food and gas prices, from inflation and endemic corruption.

It has some of the world’s most congested and dangerous roads and some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and separatists.

It is the target of unrelenting espionage and interference from the major powers.

India suffers in addition all the extraordinary stresses of very rapid economic development coupled with the crushing impact of  an alienating foreign culture on its traditional social fabric.

Finally, remember that behind the Indian rape rate are financial incentives created by feminist laws that reward women with windfall sums for bringing rape charges.

The Indian law privileges women as rape-victims while denying even the possibility that women might molest and rape, thus erasing the male as victim of sexual violence.

India has a jurisprudence weighted in favor of the woman coupled with a  feminist leadership that nonetheless demands even greater privileges and exemptions.

It has a media culture that is sensitive to every outrage to women and silent on outrages against men.

And yet, incredibly, the rape rate in India is ten times smaller than that in Britain.

So, where, I repeat, is the outrage?

Where is the United Nations study on the parlous condition of women in the United Kingdom, which rapes at ten times the rate of India?

Where is the UN study on the US, which rapes at higher rates than India?

Where is the UN study on South Africa, which rapes at higher rates than India?

“Non-interfering” Kerry Cheers Overthrow Of Ukrainian Gvt

Daniel McAdams at LRC blog comments on John Kerry’s interventionist position on Ukraine:

“I am on RT today discussing John Kerry’s Munich trip, where he met the Ukraine opposition parties and said that the US is “fully behind” those seeking to overthrow the democratically-elected government by force — right before he warned any outside powers against interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs.”

See also “US and Europe stand with people of Ukraine, says John Kerry,” The Guardian, Feb. 1 , 2014

NATO has joined Kerry to bully the Ukrainians government not to crack down on violence:

“Nato’s chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he was “very concerned by attempts to involve the military in the crisis”.

The equivalent in terms of international provocation would be if the Russian President were to proclaim solidarity for the Occupy movement on US soil and warn American police against any militarized response.

While Kerry was double-dealing with the Ukrainians and thumbing the American nose at Russia, a little research turns up the interesting point that the largely peaceful Ukrainian protest suddenly turned violent at the same time as  Kerry’s visit and stepped-up support for it.

“Russia slams West’s support for Ukraine opposition,” AP, The Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2014

“The protests had been mostly peaceful until mid-January, when demonstrators angered by the new anti-protest laws launched violent clashes with police. Three protesters died in the clashes, two of them from gunshot wounds. Police insist they didn’t fire the fatal shots.

See also “Russia slams as circus Kerry Ukraine opposition meetings,” Daily Star, Feb 1, 2014

“Russia’s outspoken Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin called Kerry’s upcoming meetings a “circus” in a tweet on Friday.

“It’s also necessary to involve Verka Serdyuchka in the talks,” he said in apparent sarcasm, referring to Ukraine’s bombastic drag queen pop star.

“Her/his authoritative opinion should be heard by the White House and taken into account!”

Is this another covert destabilization effort in the tradition of the color revolutions?

Evidently so.  At Storyleak.com, Michael Thomas breaks down the history:

“What is particularly surprising about the current color revolution unfolding in the Ukraine is that this nation was the site of the very same CIA implementation plan back in 2004/2005.  The Orange Revolution, as it was known at the time, was a classic CIA-engineered plot to impose their political outcome on the Ukrainian people. And they succeeded with flying colors.

That CIA-sponsored coup d’etat was so successful that it has since been used as a model for every other CIA-manufactured scheme that has toppled governments and reversed fair election outcomes the world over. In fact, the Ukraine is where the various social network utilities were used so effectively that the new MO has become known as the digital blitzkrieg. Never in human history have so many citizens been stampeded in the direction of overthrowing their government while being completely ignorant of the real forces manipulating the cattle prods.”

The article suggests that the Ukrainian government seems to be master-minded, as well the protesters. The result is that the Ukraine is being shepherded into the Eurozone, a communistic/fascistic scheme that will allow the patrons of the Eurozone to replenish their depleted treasuries:

“…. the Ukraine is looked to as a temporary savior because of its many large and robust markets, well established industrial base and transportation links to Asia, as well as it vast natural resources and raw materials.”

US And Its Keystone Kops Gestapo?

Ilana Mercer at BarelyaBlog.com

“Note that TOP SECRET is defined as information which could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to America. Stolen and released here were 3 million documents. HOW SPECIFICALLY did America suffer from this “exceptionally grave damage”??? Did Godzilla stomp over Maine? Was Iowa sucked up by a sinkhole? Did bubonic plague kill everyone in California? Was Duck Dynasty cancelled? Did employment in the US drop from 65% of adults to 58% ? – (yes – but this was related more to wasting trillions on idiotic wars than Snowden’s leaks)?

According to the news, the Pentagon has come out with an assessment of the 3 million “beyond exceptionally grave damage” incidents that have ruined life in America. Of course, it turns out that the “beyond exceptionally grave damage” is also TOP SECRET – yes, America has been destroyed but don’t tell a soul.

Or is the real scandal that trillions of $$$$ have been spent generating classified documents that are mostly worthless toilet paper, while this country remains utterly ignorant of anything that occurs overseas?

[Lila: Slight correction. The “country remains utterly ignorant” is the POINT of the whole thing. That’s not “inept.” That’s super-efficient.]

That’s the way the whole system is supposed to operate, with complete “freedom of expression” guaranteed to produce cacophony, over which no one can distinguish true from false without considerable effort and time that most people cannot afford to expend.

“Trillions are “wasted” only if you care about the serfs who are generating the trillions of real “wealth,” which include people here and all over the world.

By the miracle of unlimited carpet-bombing-sustained-dollar-generation, global casino capitalism, rigged market indices, rigged media, and rigged language  (“free trade,” “human rights” and “democracy”), the cartel which runs the system manages to paper over what is actually a brutal global plantation of managed trade, liberventionism, and fascism, run through a malign network of spy/surveillance mechanisms, proxy wars, police-actions, NGO campaigns, and propaganda, operating globally, but headquartered in Israel, the US, and the UK, with satrapies all over.

“That the US winds up funding and building up both sides in wars and pseudo-wars in third-world countries by people who generally hate our guts?

Lila: They generally “hate our guts” because of things done by the US Govt, which are concealed or distorted by its propaganda arm – academia, think-tanks, and the media (left and right, print, online, major, and alternative, including conspiracy sites). All are infiltrated, controlled, and distorted, not only by propaganda but also by commercial imperatives.

That we have politicians who cannot find Niger on a map bloviating about the “evil of Snowden”? That the archived trillion-trillion bytes of searchable database on Americans is far more likely to be abused by paranoid politicians like Nixon, Clinton, Obama, and Christie against domestic political opponents than to sort out minutia between illiterate Taliban goat-herders in Afghanistan?

At best, after Abdul blows up his backpack, we may find that he had earlier been “talking Jihad” with Ishmael and we subsequently kill Ishmael and 50 others at a wedding party proudly announcing that we have killed “Ishmael the potential terrorist,” while forgetting the relatives of the other 50 who are new terrorist recruits.

What America has made is an NSA “Keystone-Kops-Gestapo” that is as inept as it is insidious – sucking up a whirlwind of mostly useless data and the 4th Amendment in the process. While the NSA archives our tweeting and our twerking, let us not forget Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither”. The “exceptionally grave damage” is to our freedoms!

For syndication rights to http://BarelyABlog.com or http://IlanaMercer.com, contact ilana@ilanamercer.com. Read more @ http://barelyablog.com/#ixzz2qlmEsmhg
Comment:
I am in general agreement with this, except for the reference to Keystone Kops.
The Keystone Kops routine is only at the level of what the politicians and public figures do.

Behind the scenes, the spy agencies, the puppet-masters behind them (not always in control but certainly in charge) pursue, quite ruthlessly and well, an agenda whose visible outlines are by now apparent even to ordinary people.

Daily Kos Runs Wrong & Inflammatory Headline

Here’s the headline on a Daily Kos post about the American school’s tax violations:

India to strip search teachers at American Embassy School (or not)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/15/1270000/-India-to-strip-search-teachers-at-American-Embassy-School-for-Visa-fraud-or-not

Here’s how it looks on Google search:

  1. Daily Kos: India to strip search teachers at American Embassy

    www.dailykos.com/…/-India-to-strip-search-teachers-at-AmericanEmbassy

    14 hours ago – New York Times is now reporting a significant visafraud‘ by American citizens who are teachers in the American Embassy School run in New 

You can’t see the part that denies the headline in the search result until you click on it. Cute, eh?

Now, India has done no such thing nor has it threatened to do such a thing, because it would be custodial RAPE in India.

But why let that spoil a header which will show up in Google searches and Twitter reposts  WITHOUT the exculpatory phrase ” (or not)” visible and without the disclaimer in the body?

Remember, this is in a good alternative left blog, which is quite sophisticated in its understanding of politics and the shadow government.

Meanwhile, in the commentary on that post, someone also mischaracterized what happened to Khobragade as an aberration of US law and lamented the lack of sympathy among Indians for Sangeeta, the maid.

Don’t they get the point yet?

The outrage is over the fact that it is OFFICIAL POLICY of the United States, since 2012, sanctified by the  Supreme Court, to conduct strip-searches with cavity inspection, upon any arrest, for whatsoever reason.

Custodial rapes might happen in India, but they’re not the policy.  They’re crimes.

Big, big, big, difference.

And the US government custodially raped the senior female diplomat of a friendly nation over a visa practice that had been accepted for years and contracts that haven’t been proven to be in violation of law yet; and they did that even though the US position itself involves a violation of the Vienna Convention, which is the International Law governing diplomacy: the US A3 visa violates international law.

The arrest and search was done, moreover, in total breach of diplomatic protocol, while the state department officials actually enabled obstruction of the judiciary in India and  violation of local tax laws.

Final point. The comments on the post suggest that Khobragade saw her children as American and were trying to return, come what may. This suggestion has shown up repeatedly in comments on the story online.

But it has no basis in fact that I can find.

Instead, this is what is being reported about her plans, in India:

“Asked about her daughter Devyani’s priority to bring back her two children to India, he said that they will be back next month.

We will have to get their admissions done in a Delhi school to continue their education,” said Khobragade, who had served as general manager with BEST.”

Note: Daily Kos is the site started by Markos Moulitsas, who is alleged to have CIA-connections.

Gore Vidal WAS A Pedophile, Says Family

UPDATE

Further substantiating my accurate analysis that Vidal’s “anti-establishment” stance (including his “antiwar” stance) was not in anyway a principled objection to abusive power, notice from this report that he craved the status granted by elite institutions like Harvard (not having gone to college himself); notice that his hatred of the state was mixed with feelings of thwarted ambition because he’d always wanted to be president; notice that his anti-establishment rants were mingled with constant remembrances of status symbols and the upper-class gilded life to which he belonged and in which he reveled; notice the opulent life-style he lived (not that I have anything against that) and his $37 million estate); notice the deep alcoholism and madness in which he ended his life.

Now put against that the FACTS about Gandhi:

1. Was in excellent physical and mental condition late into life, when he was undergoing month-long fasts.

2. Was repeatedly offered leadership positions in the state and turned them down. Counseled against imitating Western state structures.

3.  Although once prosperous, gave away most of his belongings and was left with nothing more than a watch, his glasses, his loincloth and shawl, and a bowl out of which he ate.

4. Died not from alcoholism and insanity, but from a bullet delivered by an assassin. His last words were “He Ram” (Oh God).

No need to demonize Vidal, of course.

He was a talented, clever, witty man, who said many true things about history and government and he was a prolific, popular novelist of varying ability. He was a fine essayist, no doubt.

But he was also a compulsive  promiscuous pedophile (and most likely a child rapist) who publicly defended  other child rapists (Roman Polansky, Catholic priests).

He was nasty to friends and foes, envied others and relentlessly slandered them. He harbored demons to the end of his life that he was too weak to overcome. He deserved  the prayers and intervention of his friends and family in life, not the mindless adulation of strangers in death. He doubtless victimized scores of children, Thai children, whom we’ll never hear about. Safe Horizon, so exercised about the Indian nanny fake-slaver case should perhaps be called in about this compelling example of real child-sex tourism.

The American media can keep Gore Vidal for a hero. He fits their values.

I’d rather look among hundreds of unsung activists/writers for mine.

ORIGINAL POST

Gore Vidal’s family supports the long-standing rumors of Vidal’s pedophilia that I published here and that I decided, after analysis, were credible.

For that, this blog was hacked, and a week or so later, some spooky electronic harassment took place. I’m not really sure how that happened. I only know it took place.

I think I was alone among antiwar bloggers, most of whom praised Vidal to the skies, ignoring everything except the fact that his position on war was theirs.

I usually wouldn’t criticize a man on his death, but the universal praise of such a deeply flawed man, just after the contemptible and untruthful slurs against Gandhi, cried out to be corrected.

So here’s the post I wrote: Vidal, Polanksy and Kinsey, August 4, 2012.

In contrast, here’s Justin Raimondo’s piece “The Last Jeffersonian,” August 3, 2012

[I have always liked Raimondo’s investigative pieces on the Israeli lobby, one of the more dangerous areas for writers, so this isn’t meant as an attack on him.]

Here’s another libertarian Bill Kauffman on Vidal.

Now for the main points from the Daily Mail piece on Vidal:

“In a feature that appeared in the New York Times, Ms Straight – who had a ‘turbulent though close relationship’ with Vidal – said the openly-gay author had had sex with underage men.

“She described the alleged circumstances as ‘Jerry Sandusky acts’, referring to the former Penn State assistant football coach convicted of child molestation.

“Mr Steers – who directed the Zac Efron film Charlie St Cloud – said that conservative columnist William F. Buckley – who had a long-running public feud with Vidal, which also played out in court – had evidence linking Vidal to the alleged crimes.”

AND

“The New York Times article also says that the ever-opinionated Vidal had a strange and controversial take on the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests.

“‘He would say that the young guys involved were hustlers who were sending signals,’ Mr Steers said.

[Lila: Based on this statement alone, I would give credibility to the charges against Vidal.]

“However the author of the article, Tim Teeman, wrote that ‘other friends of Mr. Vidal told me they doubted he had sex with underage men’.

“I”Vidal suffered from dementia and alcoholism towards the end of his life.

“Mr Steers said he would drink single male scotch ‘until he collapsed’.

Vidal also had ‘wet brain’ – proper name Wernicke-Korsakoff – a syndrome characterized by a number of symptoms, including confusion and hallucination.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2496631/Family-Gore-Vidal-allege-pedophile-challenge-writers-37-million-will.html#ixzz2q2g6wNOz
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Vidal was not only a pedophile, it seems he beat up gays, so intense was his own self-loathing.

[Lila: I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not his “pedophilia” but his involvement in even worse – violence against  male child prostitutes that might be the real story and the “yes he was a pedophile” simply a diversion. After all, pedophilia apologias have already appeared in mainstream media, like The Atlantic.]

Consider the reverential treatment given to this insane, addicted, unpleasant man, who was a self-confessed pederast. His well-documented compulsive lifestyle was passed over in silence by the establishment media, since he was “one of them,” from the ruling class.

But of Gandhi, a man who fought his devils all his life bravely, with the utmost candor, and engaged, successfully or not, in one of the biggest social upheavals in modern history,  the same media has recently had nothing but scurrilous and easily discredited innuendo.

Malicious critics called him a bisexual pedophile molester, based on deliberate falsification and exaggeration of historical evidence. They called him a hypocrite, whereas the truth was he was compulsively open to his critics, even begging them to write the worst they knew about him.

Why so much venom? Because Gandhi was Indian and the media in the West has over the last two years been engaged in a systematic campaign of vilification and half-truths against India, along with literal provocations, as I’ve amply documented.

While Vidal,  a hero of  modern liberals, lived in terror of the truth about himself coming out, Gandhi courageously reported every passing sexual feeling in his diaries, urged his critics to say the worst about him that they could, and berated himself endlessly for even mental failures of continence.

Here’s more about  the new claims about Vidal:

“Vidal accused Buckley of being a “crypto-Nazi”; Buckley responded by labelling Vidal a “queer” and telling him to stop his insults or Buckley would “sock [him] in the goddamn face”.

Their argument ended up in the courts, where Buckley first lost an expensive lawsuit against Vidal for libel, before winning a settlement from a magazine that republished Vidal’s written attack years later.

Vidal once estimated he had slept with 1,000 men before he was 25, and boasted of having had sex with Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson and Noel Coward, according to Mr Teeman.

While enjoying a 53-year relationship with his long-term partner, Howard Austen, before Austen’s death in 2003, he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, that he was “attracted to adolescent males”…….

…Buckley’s son, Christopher, has said that while clearing out his late father’s study, he found a file labelled “Vidal Legal”, which he threw into a dumpster…….

An unidentified “longtime friend” of Vidal’s added that the author had once shocked a guest at his home in Ravello, Italy, by announcing: “You know I’m a pederast”.

This friend focused on Vidal’s time spent in Bangkok, Thailand, a city notorious for its sex trade. “He did go to Thailand every year, and he was definitely having sex with male prostitutes there, and they weren’t older male prostitutes,” the friend said.”

Evil people lie about good people for one principal reason – vanity.

They cannot stand being shown up by anything or anyone better than they are.  A couple of years ago, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote about the profound intolerance of sin for anything that rebukes it, in an essay, “Evil preaches tolerance only when it’s weak.”

So also lies cannot tolerate truth.

But  the world is not built on lies.  And man cannot live on lies.

At the end, when the mud and the bile and the envious distortions of petty men have had their day, the truth will be vindicated.

India Nanny-Gate: Color Revolution In the Making: Part One

I’m re-posting this blog-post from a few days back, with footnotes and links.

I’ll be adding to the evidence shortly.

INDIAN NANNY-GATE: COLOR REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING?

PART ONE: THE WELL-FUNDED NGO’S BEHIND THE ANTI-TRAFFICKING AGENDA

By now, everyone knows that on December 13, 2013, an Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, was arrested and strip-searched by New York police on charges that she failed to pay her Indian maid minimum wage and lied about it to the US government.

In the Western media, the diplomat Devyani Khobragade was treated as a poster-child for the latest human-rights cause celebre, transnational human-trafficking.

However, a closer reading of media reports suggests that the case was set up from the beginning and might well be part of an organized attempt by the Western elites to destabilize India, as part of their ongoing attempt to replace nation-states around the world with transnational bureaucracies under their own direction.

Here’s the evidence so far:

A.

The activists advocating for the maid are part of a very well-financed, ideologically left-wing, transnational network.

The maid’s lawyer Dana Sussman works in the anti-trafficking program of a New York outfit called Safe-Horizon, the largest victims services outfit in the US.

Its directors include representative of the leading multinational financial institutions and corporations in the US, including UBS, JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, and Calvin Klein. (1)

The anti-trafficking program at Safe Horizon was started by Florrie Burke, “a consultant on Human Trafficking and modern day slavery to both governmental and non-governmental agencies.”(2)

Ms. Burke is also on the steering committee of the New York Anti-Trafficking Network and chairman emeritus of the Freedom Network, a coalition of 35 experts and NGOs across the nation, which styles itself the only national group to adopt a “rights-based framework” for its efforts.(3)

The 2013 -2014 policy committee of the Freedom Network is co-chaired by Naomi Tsu of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Dana Sussman, the maid’ lawer, from Safe-Horizon.(4)

The SPLC, once a well-regarded civil rights organization, is increasingly regarded as a biased and selective enforcer of left-wing ideology, known for over-the-top characterizations of its ideological foes.(5)

This should lay to rest any idea that Dana Sussman is just a lawyer defending a client. She is instead a prominent activist, paid by the biggest victims services Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the USA and, thus, in the world.

B

The Anti-trafficking network has the backing of major corporate and financial leaders.

Safe Horizon not only has the backing of major banks and corporate bosses in the US, it is embedded in the NY city government through its court-based victims services programs.  (6)

New York’s government is the most important local government in the US, since New York is the financial capital of the nation and the home of many international bodies, including the United Nations.

C. The Freedom Network has taken a vociferous and one-sided stance on behalf of the Khobragade maid, as evident from letters on its site, such as the following:

“An Open Letter to Ambassador Samantha Powers Regarding Exploitation Charges Against Indian Diplomat.”
(7)

D.

The chief of the anti-trafficking network was on an extended tour conferencing with media and government in sensitive areas of India at the time of Khobragade’s arrest.

Just before the arrest of Ms. Khobragade, Ms. Burke was in India on December 7 at Guwahati in the north-east state of Assam.

She was there for a conference on human-trafficking, which she described as a menace needing an all-India body that would coordinate efforts across the states to combat it. (8)

To the Assamese newspaper, Sentinel, Ms. Burke said:

“After Abraham Lincoln, it is only Obama who has spoken out as stridently as possible against modern day slavery.

Besides Assam and Andhra (a Southern coastal state), Ms. Burke mentioned Afghanistan and Pakistan as sites where anti-trafficking efforts should be expanded.

Andhra has been a site of Naxalite terrorism, as well as of CIA and NGO/Church interference in the government, as has Assam.

Many have seen such intervention as the soft-power arm of empire, operating through bribery and espionage. (9)
Afghanistan and Pakistan of course are targets of imperial hard-power, that is, bombs.

Ms. Burke didn’t explain why her anti-trafficking interests mesh so exactly with US strategic interests.

Recall that the Indian electric outage first began in the North-East region of India, as I blogged in July-August 2012. (10)

Since then, other bloggers have shown that there is evidence that the electricity outage might have been caused by Stuxnet. (11)

With that background, and with our current awareness of the level and depth of US and Israeli espionage against the entire globe, it is interesting to find that the Guwahati anti-trafficking conference promoted the use of software enabling cross-border collaboration between law-enforcement agencies prosecuting anti-trafficking cases. (12) (My emphasis)

Cross-border collaborations between intelligence agencies of countries as far apart in their ability to “project power” as the US and India must inherently be asymmetrical and accrue to the advantage of the more powerful country.

In short, collaboration may be just another pretext for Great Power spying for business and military ends.

Remember that the biometric ID has already been introduced in Afghanistan and is being pushed in India. (13)
Again, as with the anti-trafficking program, the ID is advocated with a “good governance” pretext, in this case, that it will reduce fraud in welfare distributions.

Returning to Florrie Burke’s tour of India as chief of the Freedom Network and its anti-trafficking agenda, we find that the Facebook page of the anti-trafficking conference at Guwahati shows an Indian newspaper editor (Editor, Sikkim Express) receiving the “Impulse” Model Award For Media Change Maker from Cristina Albertin, Representative, UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) Regional Office for South Asia. (14)

Awards are also being given to the editors of papers from Meghalaya.

Thomas Lim, editor Meghalaya Times and Deepak Singh, Associate Editor of Meghalaya Times received the Impulse Model Award For Media Change Maker from Helen LaFave, CG, U.S. Consulate, Kolkatta.

The presence of a US consular officer shows once again that the US government itself is never far behind altruistic “human rights” outfits.

To put this more bluntly, the national anti-trafficking coalition which has been vocally lobbying against Devyani Khobragade has also been canvassing support for its agenda among the media of outlying states in India.
These are the states with histories of being infiltrated and subverted by Maoists and Naxalites, often abetted by the CIA, American NGOs, proselytising churches and missionary bodies. (15)

In fact, since the arrest of Ms. Khobragade took place only a few days after this anti-trafficking grand tour, it wouldn’t be too much to wonder if the two were coordinated.

E.

The Indian media networks that endorse anti-trafficking also support key elements of the UN’s Agenda 21, which has the backing of George Soros, the billionaire front for the Zionist/Rothschild banking cartel.

The “Impulse” in Impulse Media, one of the groups referenced in the Face-book page of the anti-trafficking conference at Guwahati, refers to Impulse Social Enterprises, a group that says it supports ‘sustainable livelihoods for all.” (16)

Now, “sustainability” is a word that crops up frequently in any program espoused by the Western power-elite.

Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) says, “It turns out that virtually the entire agenda of the progressive left can be fit inside the word sustainability.'” (17)

In fact, the word “sustainability” is code for UN Agenda 21, signed by the US in 1992 (18):

Vice President Gore s book, Earth in the Balance, addressed many of the general issues of sustainability.

Within the past year, the President s Council on Sustainable Development has been organized to develop recommendations for incorporating sustainability into the federal government.

Also, various groups have been formed to implement Agenda 21, a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable development that was adopted at the recent UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro (the Earth Summit. )

and later,

A common misconception is that sustainability is synonymous with self-sufficiency; on the contrary, sustainability must recognize the interconnections between different levels of societal structure. (18)

One American activist writes:

Agenda 21 is about total control of our personal property, our ability to travel, our energy consumption& health; the list literally goes on and on.

As Rosa Koire, author of Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21 states, under an Agenda 21 future, your energy consumption will be controlled until you can’t farm, can’t manufacture, can’t travel, can’t fish, can’t use your land.

Productivity and businesses are limited now.

Through pushing everyone into smart cities and onto smart grids, the Obama EPA s clampdown on coal, and the steering of all manner of public policy from land-use and land ownership restrictions to seemingly small traffic initiatives that ultimately restrict personal travel, evidence of Agenda 21 can be found everywhere we look these days.

It s just as former Rockefeller Board of Trustees member (the Rockefeller Foundation is behind Agenda 21 imitative America 2050? among others) and Earth Council Chairman Maurice Strong envisioned when he wrote the forward to ICLEI s The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide sustainable development implementation document:

In my parting words at the conclusion of the Earth Summit, I said that we all must move down from the Summit and into the trenches where the real world actions and decisions are taken that will, in the final analysis, determine whether the vision of Rio will be fulfilled and the agreements reached there implemented.

Of the many programs that have resulted from the Earth Summit, none is more promising or important than this one, which has hundreds of local authorities around the world now setting out and implementing their Local Agenda 21s.” (19)

It’s clear from this that the anti-human-trafficking program is closely tied to Sustainability and Human Rights, two of the pillars of the UN/CIA agenda and that the terms mean something far different from what they mean in ordinary usage.

The UN/CIA agenda has been shown by activists to be funded and supported by George Soros.

Soros is a billionaire front of the Rothschild banking cartel. (20)

Would it be too far-fetched to ask if there might not be a financial and strategic reason for the pursuit of the anti-trafficking agenda, and would it be too cynical to ask, cui bono?

(TO BE CONTINUED)

NOTES

(1) http://www.safehorizon.org/index/about-us-1/board-of-directors-88.html

Executive Committee members include the following:

Paul Germain, Global Head of Prime Services, Credit Suisse

Cheryl Abel-Hodges, President, Calvin Klein Underwear

Jeffrey S. Brodsky, Chief Human Resources Officer, Morgan Stanley

Nancy Clark, Senior Vice President, Operational Excellence & Process Transformation, Verizon
Founder Chairman A.S.O. A Second Opinion, Serves on Whole Foods Board and HSN Board

Linda Lam, Partner, Professional Practice Quality and Regulatory Matters, Ernst & Young

Rohit Menezes, Partner, The Bridgespan Group

Samantha Saperstein, Head of Card Strategy

Consumer and Community Banking, JPMorgan Chase

Mark C. Smith, Financial Advisor/ Account Vice President of Investments, UBS Financial Services Inc.

Many other corporate representatives.

(2) http://freedomnetworkusa.org/tag/florrie-burke/

(3)http://freedomnetworkusa.org/about-us/human-rights-approach/

(4) http://freedomnetworkusa.org/about-us/policy-advocacy/

(5) “Isn’t the Southern Poverty Law Center the Rea Hate Group?” Human Events, July 28, 2011.

http://www.humanevents.com/2011/07/28/isnt-the-southern-poverty-law-center-the-real-hate-group-2/

(6) http://www.safehorizon.org/index/what-we-do-2/court–community-58.html

(7) http://freedomnetworkusa.org/an-open-letter-to-ambassador-samantha-power-regarding-exploitation-charges-against-indian-diplomat/

(8) “Implement, Coordinate, Tackle: Florrie Burke – The Human Trafficking Menace,” Bikash Sarmah, The Sentinel, Guwahati, December 7, 2013
http://www.sentinelassam.com/mainnews/story.php?sec=1&subsec=0&id=177449&dtP=2013-12-08&ppr=1

(9)
See Introduction, “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault-lines,” Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, July 1, 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-India-Interventions-Dravidian-Faultlines/dp/8191067374/ref=sr_1_2/190-4553732-5082940?m=ANJ49XFOVFOZN&s=merchant-items&ie=UTF8&qid=1388957989&sr=1-2

(10)

“War on India: Is Massive Electricity Outage Sabotage by Elites?” Lila Rajiva, Mind-Body Politic blog, July 31, 2013.

http://mindbodypolitic.com/2012/07/31/war-on-india-is-massive-electricity-outage-sabotage-by-elites/

(11) “India on the Grand Geo-Political Energy Chessboard – Part One,” Shelley Kasli, Great Game India blog, June 30, 2013
http://greatgameindia.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/india-on-the-grand-geopolitical-energy-chessboard-part-i/

(12) Facebook page of Impulse Social Enterprises
https://www.facebook.com/ImpulseSocialEnterprises?hc_location=timeline

TiP Conclave 3 Session 4 (5 photos)
Collaboration across the borders between the Law Enforcement through Anti-Human Trafficking Software
6th December 2013 in Guwahati, India.

(13) See “US Army Amasses Biometric Data in Afghanistan,” Jon Boone, The Guardian, UK, October 27, 2010.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/27/us-army-biometric-data-afghanistan

(14) Face-book page of Impulse Social Enterprises
https://www.facebook.com/ImpulseSocialEnterprises?hc_location=timeline

Amit Patro, Editor Sikkim Express, receives Impulse Model Award For Media Change Maker from Cristina Albertin, Representative, UNODC Regional Office for South Asia with Arijit Sen and Amit Patro in Guwahati, India.

(15) See Introduction, “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines,” Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, July 1, 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-India-Interventions-Dravidian-Faultlines/dp/8191067374/ref=sr_1_2/190-4553732-5082940?m=ANJ49XFOVFOZN&s=merchant-items&ie=UTF8&qid=1388957989&sr=1-2

See also, “Former IB Chief: Maoists Won’t Hurt Collector,” Sheila Bhatt, Rediff, April 23, 2012:
“Young Christians are their [Naxalites’] primary constituency,” he [Intelligence Bureau chief] added, “and they bank heavily on them in the jungles.”

For the history of Naxalite terrorism, see

“The Naxalite Rebellions,” Haider Ali Hussain Mullick, The American Interest,
August 11, 2013

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2013/08/11/the-naxalite-rebellions/

Mullick writes:

“Today we spend less on training Indian security personnel than we do on security forces from Morocco, Tunisia, El Salvador, Poland and Pakistan. Compared to the zero dollars currently allocated to India in the Foreign Military Financing account, we provide $13.2 million to Bulgaria; $22 million to Indonesia; $35 million to Yemen; $42 million to Poland; and $296 million to Pakistan. Moreover, $800 million is allocated to Pakistan under the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund, with little bang for the buck. This distribution of resources, compared to both need and affinity, makes little sense.”

Rajiva: On the other hand, it makes perfect sense, if US-India security cooperation is less about security from terrorist threats and more about using the country as a cats-paw to further US goals in the region.

Note: The Global Terrorism Index 2012 ranks India in the top five countries around the world suffering from terrorism, ahead of countries like Somalia and Columbia in the number of terrorist incidents and deaths.

(16) See the website of Impulse Social Enterprises, http://impulsempower.com/

(17) “The Worst Campus Code-Word,” John Leo, April 19, 2008, www.mindingthecampus.com.
See also “From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology is Born,” Peter Wood, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2013.

(18) “How Sustainable Is Our Planning?” Robert Odlund, American Planning Association Newsletter, 1994
The newsletter excerpts are cited in “You Want Proof? Here is the Smoking Gun,” Tom De Weese, News With Views, July 2, 2013
http://www.newswithviews.com/DeWeese/tom235.htm

(19) Melissa Melton at Truth Stream Media.
http://truthstreammedia.com/smoking-gun-proof-sustainable-development-is-u-n-agenda-21/

See also “Behind the Green Mask,” Rosa Koire, The Post Sustainability Press, September 2, 2011
http://www.amazon.com/BEHIND-THE-GREEN-MASK-Agenda/dp/0615494544

Also, see the Post-Sustainability Institute
http://www.postsustainabilityinstitute.org/what-is-un-agenda-21.html

(20)  “George Soros Digs Deep for Human Rights With $100 million Gift,” The Independent, 2010.

(21) Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics
https://wikispooks.com/ISGP/intro.htm

“The donation will put the once-small group [Lila: Human Rights Watch] into the same league as organisations such as Amnesty International. The £65m will allow Human Rights Watch to add 120 members of staff to its 300-strong payroll, and almost double its annual budget to £50m, meaning it could expand operations in such countries as South Africa, China and India.”

Soros Outfits Behind Indian Diplomat Anti-Trafficking Case

THE DEVYANI CASE BEARS THE EAR-MARKS OF A SET-UP – PART ONE

I have said that the Devyani Khobragade case has all the ear-marks of a set-up:

From a previous post Rothschild Banks Behind NGO’s Helping Maid:

“Bharara is an approved Rothschild enforcer and part of the NY/NJ political machinery.
Safe Horizon the NGO behind the maid, is the largest victims services groups in the US. Its board of directors are officers of several Rothschild cartel banks.
Dana Sussman, the attorney from there who is representing the maid, is a gender feminist and abortion rights activist with a history of litigating discrimination claims. Her law firm was the same one that handled the previous diplomat forced-labor case. In that one, the maid changed her story several times and retracted half the charges. Safe Horizon is embedded in the NY city government.”

Now to be more specific. Here are some facts that bolster the theory that the whole Devyani Khobragade case was set up from the beginning.

I’m reposting this blog-post from a few days back, with footnotes and links. I’ll be adding to the evidence shortly.

IINDIAN NANNY-GATE: THE WELL-FUNDED NGO’S BEHIND THE ANTI-TRAFFICKING AGENDA  Part One

By now, everyone knows that on December 13, 2013, an Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, was arrested and strip-searched by New York police on charges that she failed to pay her Indian maid minimum wage and lied about it to the US government.
In the Western media the diplomat Devyani Khobragade was treated as a poster-child for the latest human-rights cause celebre, transnational human-trafficking.

However, a closer reading of media reports suggests that the case was set up from the beginning and may well be a part of an organized attempt by the Western elites to destabilize India, in their ongoing attempt to replace nation-states around the world with transnational bureaucracies under their own direction.

Here’s the evidence so far:

A. The activists advocating for the maid are part of a very well-financed, ideologically left-wing, transnational network.

The maid’s lawyer Dana Sussman works in the anti-trafficking program of a New York outfit called Safe-Horizon, the largest victims services outfit in the US. Its directors include representative of the leading multinational financial institutions and corporations in the US, including UBS, JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, and Calvin Klein. (1)

The anti-trafficking program at Safe Horizon was started by Florrie Burke, “a consultant on Human Trafficking and modern day slavery to both governmental and non-governmental agencies.” (2)

Ms. Burke is also on the steering committee of the New York Anti-Trafficking Network and chairman emeritus of the Freedom Network, a coalition of 35 experts and NGOs across the nation, which styles itself the only national group to adopt a “rights-based framework” for its efforts. (3)

The 2013 -2014 policy committee of the Freedom Network is co-chaired by Naomi Tsu of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Dana Sussman, the maid’ lawer, from Safe-Horizon. (4)

The SPLC, once a well-regarded civil rights organization, is increasingly regarded as a biased and selective enforcer of left-wing ideology, known for over-the-top characterizations of its ideological foes. (5)

This should lay to rest any idea that Dana Sussman is just a lawyer defending a client. She is instead a prominent activist, paid by the biggest victims services Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the USA and, thus, in the world.

B The Anti-trafficking network has the backing of major corporate and financial leaders.

Safe Horizon not only has the backing of major banks and corporate bosses in the US, it is embedded in the NY city government through its court-based victims services programs.  (6) New York’s government is the most important local government in the US, since New York is the financial capital of the nation and the home of many international bodies, including the United Nations.

C. The Freedom Network has taken a vociferous and one-sided stance on behalf of the Khobragade maid, as evident from letters on its site, such as the following:

“An Open Letter to Ambassador Samantha Powers Regarding Exploitation Charges Against Indian Diplomat.”
(7)

D. The chief of the anti-trafficking network was on an extended tour conferencing with media and government in sensitive areas of India at the time of Khobragade’s arrest.

Just before the arrest of Ms. Khobragade, Ms. Burke was in India on December 7 at Guwahati in the north-east state of Assam. She was there for a conference on human-trafficking, which she described as a menace needing an all-India body that would coordinate efforts across the states to combat it. (8)

To the Assamese newspaper, Sentinel, Ms. Burke said:

“After Abraham Lincoln, it is only Obama who has spoken out as stridently as possible against modern day slavery.

Besides Assam and Andhra (a Southern coastal state), Ms. Burke mentioned Afghanistan and Pakistan as sites where anti-trafficking efforts should be expanded.

Andhra has been a site of Naxalite terrorism, as well as of CIA and NGO/Church interference in the government, as has Assam.

Many have seen such intervention as the soft-power arm of empire, operating through bribery and espionage. (9)
Afghanistan and Pakistan of course are targets of imperial hard-power, that is, bombs.

Ms. Burke didn’t explain why her anti-trafficking interests mesh so exactly with US strategic interests.

Recall that the Indian electric outage first began in the North-East region of India, as I blogged in July-August 2012. (10)

Since then, other bloggers have shown that there is evidence that the electricity outage might have been caused by Stuxnet. (11)

With that background, and with our current awareness of the level and depth of US and Israeli espionage against the entire globe, it is interesting to find that the Guwahati anti-trafficking conference promoted the use of software enabling cross-border collaboration between law-enforcement agencies prosecuting anti-trafficking cases. (12) (My emphasis)

Cross-border collaborations between intelligence agencies of countries as far apart in their ability to “project power” as the US and India must inherently be asymmetrical and accrue to the advantage of the more powerful country.

In short, collaboration may be just another pretext for Great Power spying for business and military ends.

Remember that the biometric ID has already been introduced in Afghanistan and is being pushed in India. (13)
Again, as with the anti-trafficking program, the ID is advocated with a “good governance” pretext, in this case, that it will reduce fraud in welfare distributions.

Returning to Florrie Burke’s tour of India as chief of the Freedom Network and its anti-trafficking agenda,
we find that the Facebook page of the anti-trafficking conference at Guwahati shows an Indian newspaper editor (Editor, Sikkim Express) receiving the “Impulse” Model Award For Media Change Maker from Cristina Albertin, Representative, UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) Regional Office for South Asia. (14)

Awards are also being given to the editors of papers from Meghalaya.Thomas Lim, editor Meghalaya Times and Deepak Singh, Associate Editor of Meghalaya Times receive the Impulse Model Award For Media Change Maker from Helen LaFave, CG, U.S.Consolate, Kolkatta.

The presence of a US consular officer shows once again that the US government itself is never far behind altruistic “human rights” ourfits.

To put this more bluntly, the national anti-trafficking coalition which has been vocally lobbying against Devyani Khobragade has also been canvassing support for its agenda among the media of outlying states in India.
These are the states with histories of being infiltrated and subverted by Maoists and Naxalites, often abetted by the CIA, American NGOs, proselytising churches and missionary bodies. (15)

In fact, since the arrest of Ms Khobragade took place only a few days after this anti-trafficking grand tour, it wouldn’t be too much to wonder if the two were coordinated.

E. The Indian media networks that endorse anti-trafficking also support key elements of the UN’s Agenda 21, which has the backing of George Soros, the billionaire front for the Zionist/Rothschild banking cartel.

The “Impulse” in Impulse Media, one of the groups referenced in the Face-book page of the anti-trafficking conference at Guwahati, refers to Impulse Social Enterprises, a group that says it supports ‘sustainable livelihoods for all.” (16)

Now, “sustainability” is a word that crops up frequently in any program espoused by the Western power-elite.

Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) says, “It turns out that virtually the entire agenda of the progressive left can be fit inside the word sustainability.'” (17)

In fact, the word “sustainability” is code for UN Agenda 21, signed by the US in 1992 (18):

Vice President Gore s book, Earth in the Balance, addressed many of the general issues of sustainability. Within the past year, the President s Council on Sustainable Development has been organized to develop recommendations for incorporating sustainability into the federal government. Also, various groups have been formed to implement Agenda 21, a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable development that was adopted at the recent UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro (the Earth Summit. )

and later,

A common misconception is that sustainability is synonymous with self-sufficiency; on the contrary, sustainability must recognize the interconnections between different levels of societal structure. (18)

One American activist writes:

Agenda 21 is about total control of our personal property, our ability to travel, our energy consumption…the list literally goes on and on. As Rosa Koire, author of Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21 states, under an Agenda 21 future, Your energy consumption will be controlled until you can t farm, can t manufacture, can t travel, can t fish, can t use your land. Productivity and businesses are limited now.

Through pushing everyone into smart cities and onto smart grids, the Obama EPA s clampdown on coal, and the steering of all manner of public policy from land-use and land ownership restrictions to seemingly small traffic initiatives that ultimately restrict personal travel, evidence of Agenda 21 can be found everywhere we look these days.

It s just as former Rockefeller Board of Trustees member (the Rockefeller Foundation is behind Agenda 21 imitative America 2050? among others) and Earth Council Chairman Maurice Strong envisioned when he wrote the forward to ICLEI s The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide sustainable development implementation document:

In my parting words at the conclusion of the Earth Summit, I said that we all must move down from the Summit and into the trenches where the real world actions and decisions are taken that will, in the final analysis, determine whether the vision of Rio will be fulfilled and the agreements reached there implemented. Of the many programs that have resulted from the Earth Summit, none is more promising or important than this one, which has hundreds of local authorities around the world now setting out and implementing their Local Agenda 21s.” (19)

It’s clear from this that the anti-human-trafficking program is closely tied to Sustainability and Human Rights, two of the pillars of the UN/CIA agenda and that the terms mean something far different from what they mean in ordinary usage.

The UN/CIA agenda has been shown by activists to be funded and supported by George Soros, billionaire front of the Rothschild banking cartel. (20)

Would it be too far-fetched to ask if there might not be a financial and strategic reason for the pursuit of the anti-trafficking agenda, and would it be too cynical to ask, cui bono?

(TO BE CONTINUED)

NOTES

(1) http://www.safehorizon.org/index/about-us-1/board-of-directors-88.html

Executive Committee members include Paul Germain, Global Head of Prime Services, Credit Suisse; Cheryl Abel-Hodges, President, Calvin Klein Underwear;Jeffrey S. Brodsky, Chief Human Resources Officer, Morgan Stanley; Nancy Clark, Senior Vice President, Operational Excellence & Process Transformation, Verizon;
Founder Chairman A.S.0. A Second Opinion, Serves on Whole Foods Board and HSN Board; Linda Lam,
Partner, Professional Practice Quality and Regulatory Matters, Ernst & Young;Rohit Menezes, Partner, The Bridgespan Group;Samantha Saperstein, Head of Card Strategy, Consumer and Community Banking, JPMorgan Chase; Mark C. Smith, Financial Advisor/ Account Vice President of Investments, UBS Financial Services Inc., among many other corporate representatives.

(2) http://freedomnetworkusa.org/tag/florrie-burke/

(3)http://freedomnetworkusa.org/about-us/human-rights-approach/

(4) http://freedomnetworkusa.org/about-us/policy-advocacy/

(5) “Isn’t the Southern Poverty Law Center the Rea Hate Group?” Human Events, July 28, 2011.

http://www.humanevents.com/2011/07/28/isnt-the-southern-poverty-law-center-the-real-hate-group-2/

(6) http://www.safehorizon.org/index/what-we-do-2/court–community-58.html

(7) http://freedomnetworkusa.org/an-open-letter-to-ambassador-samantha-power-regarding-exploitation-charges-against-indian-diplomat/

(8) “Implement, Coordinate, Tackle: Florrie Burke – The Human Trafficking Menace,” Bikash Sarmah, The Sentinel, Guwahati, December 7, 2013
http://www.sentinelassam.com/mainnews/story.php?sec=1&subsec=0&id=177449&dtP=2013-12-08&ppr=1

(9)
See Introduction, “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines,” Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, July 1, 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-India-Interventions-Dravidian-Faultlines/dp/8191067374/ref=sr_1_2/190-4553732-5082940?m=ANJ49XFOVFOZN&s=merchant-items&ie=UTF8&qid=1388957989&sr=1-2

(10) “War on India: Is Massive Electricity Outage Sabotage by Elites?” Lila Rajiva, Mind-Body Politic blog, July 31, 2013.
http://mindbodypolitic.com/2012/07/31/war-on-india-is-massive-electricity-outage-sabotage-by-elites/

(11) “India on the Grand Geo-Political Energy Chessboard – Part One,” Shelley Kasli, Great Game India blog, June 30, 2013
http://greatgameindia.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/india-on-the-grand-geopolitical-energy-chessboard-part-i/

(12) Facebook page of Impulse Social Enterprises
https://www.facebook.com/ImpulseSocialEnterprises?hc_location=timeline

TiP Conclave 3 Session 4 (5 photos)
Collaboration across the borders between the Law Enforcement through Anti-Human Trafficking Software
6th December 2013 in Guwahati, India.

(13) See “US Army Amasses Biometric Data in Afghanistan,” Jon Boone, The Guardian, UK, October 27, 2010.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/27/us-army-biometric-data-afghanistan

(14) Face-book page of Impulse Social Enterprises
https://www.facebook.com/ImpulseSocialEnterprises?hc_location=timeline

Amit Patro, Editor Sikkim Express, receives Impulse Model Award For Media Change Maker from Cristina Albertin, Representative, UNODC Regional Office for South Asia with Arijit Sen and Amit Patro in Guwahati, India.

(15) See Introduction, “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines,” Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, July 1, 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-India-Interventions-Dravidian-Faultlines/dp/8191067374/ref=sr_1_2/190-4553732-5082940?m=ANJ49XFOVFOZN&s=merchant-items&ie=UTF8&qid=1388957989&sr=1-2

See also, “Former IB Chief: Maoists Won’t Hurt Collector,” Sheila Bhatt, Rediff, April 23, 2012
“Young Christians are their [Naxalites’] primary constituency,” he [Intelligence Bureau chief] added, “and they bank heavily on them in the jungles.”

For the history of Naxalite terrorism, see “The Naxalite Rebellions,” Haider Ali Hussain Mullick, The American Interest,
August 11, 2013

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2013/08/11/the-naxalite-rebellions/

Mullick writes:

“Today we spend less on training Indian security personnel than we do on security forces from Morocco, Tunisia, El Salvador, Poland and Pakistan. Compared to the zero dollars currently allocated to India in the Foreign Military Financing account, we provide $13.2 million to Bulgaria; $22 million to Indonesia; $35 million to Yemen; $42 million to Poland; and $296 million to Pakistan. Moreover, $800 million is allocated to Pakistan under the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund, with little bang for the buck. This distribution of resources, compared to both need and affinity, makes little sense.”

Rajiva: On the other hand, it makes perfect sense, if US-India security cooperation was less about security from terrorist threats and more about using the country as a cats-paw to further US goals in the region.

Note: The Global Terrorism Index 2012 ranks India in the top fivecountries suffering from terrorism in the world, ahead of countries like Somalia and Columbia in the number of terrorist incidents and deaths.

(16) See the website of Impulse Social Enterprises, http://impulsempower.com/

(17) “The Worst Campus Code-Word,” John Leo, April 19, 2008, www.mindingthecampus.com.
See also “From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology is Born,” Peter Wood, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2013.

(18) “How Sustainable Is Our Planning?” Robert Odlund, American Planning Association Newsletter, 1994
The newsletter excerpts are cited in “You Want Proof? Here is the Smoking Gun,” Tom De Weese, News With Views, July 2, 2013
http://www.newswithviews.com/DeWeese/tom235.htm

(19) Melissa Melton at Truth Stream Media.
http://truthstreammedia.com/smoking-gun-proof-sustainable-development-is-u-n-agenda-21/

See also “Behind the Green Mask,” Rosa Koire, The Post Sustainability Press, September 2, 2011
http://www.amazon.com/BEHIND-THE-GREEN-MASK-Agenda/dp/0615494544

Also, see the Post-Sustainability Institute
http://www.postsustainabilityinstitute.org/what-is-un-agenda-21.html

(20)  “George Soros Digs Deep for Human Rights With $100 million Gift,” The Independent, 2010.

(21) Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics
https://wikispooks.com/ISGP/intro.htm

“The donation will put the once-small group [Lila: Human Rights Watch] into the same league as organisations such as Amnesty International. The £65m will allow Human Rights Watch to add 120 members of staff to its 300-strong payroll, and almost double its annual budget to £50m, meaning it could expand operations in such countries as South Africa, China and India.”

The CIA, Carl Oglesby, and Business International Corp.

Update:

[I should clarify that the article on the site, which is devoted to LaRouche is not from the EIR itself, but from a critic, who has added some more interesting details to the story, in the comment section0.

Update:

Just to be clear, my link to the Lyndon LaRouche site (at the bottom) isn’t meant to support the man’s theories.  LaRouche is a Hamiltonian. I am not. He was also involved, allegedly, in cult-like behavior toward followers.

However, LaRouche, as even his strongest critics (like Chip Berlet here) admit, has good research. [ To clarify, the piece is not by LaRouche but by a critic who keeps tabs on his work and thus stores an archive of it.]

Linking to people like LaRouche, Stewart Rhodes of Oath-keepers (whom someone now informs me is considered a neo-Nazi)  is a no-no, apparently, in the PC world.

One is supposed to link only to certified organic, FDA-approved, brand-name thinkers.

On top of that, I just read today that the phrase “Talmudic Jew” is considered “Nazi” language.  Now, I don’t think I’ve ever used it, but I’ve surely written somewhere about Talmudic Judaism.

And to add to my sins, I’ve defended Ayn Rand (not that I am a Randian by any means). But when the media piles on someone,  some instinct in me compels me to rush to their defense.

Dear lord.  We say “Biblical Christian” all the time. And “Shia Muslim.” What about “Vedic Hindu?” Those are fine, aren’t they? Why the difference?

I know I can denounce the “bourgeoisie” as vermin all day long and still be OK. I can even talk about  femi-nazis without a  problem. ….just so long as I approve of Chip Berlet’s employers bombing the right sort of victims.

I give two figs for such puerile nonsense.

Because someone might read the  theories behind Hitler or Mao and try to understand them, it doesn’t follow that they are Nazis or Maoists themselves.

Vegetarianism doesn’t become Nazi become Hitler adopted it.

Hitler, Mao, PolPot…as monstrous as the crimes they enabled might be, they are not qualitatively different from the crimes of the average man.

No untouchables please, whether physically – through legal deprivations of their rights…or intellectually….through ghettoization and demonization.

ORIGINAL POST:

Carl Oglesby: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. . . . Nuns will be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled.”

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/04/violence-and-mayhem-have-long-been-a-tool-of-the-left/#GbpcTScjJoQ0Mycu.99

One of the most respected student leaders of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was Carl Oglesby, who worked with Murray Rothbard, says Charles Burris at Lew Rockwell.

Not being more than a cursory student of this period, I did a little digging.

Here’s what I came up with:

Oglesby was initially a technical writer/editor with a defense contractor called Bendix, before entering politics. He soon rose to the head of  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the best-known antiwar group.

The SDS was a splinter group from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was affiliated with the  National Student Association, formed in 1947.

The NSA was outed in 1966 as a CIA front.

(also here).

This was in an expose in Ramparts Magazine, a Catholic left-wing magazine.

The writers were Robert Scheer and Stanley Scheinbaum, who is described here as a communist activist.

This Catholic writer says Ramparts was a communist front posing as Catholic outlet to better attack the church.

In 2006, I wrote a piece called “Portrait of the CIA as an artist,” about cultural outlets that were set up or operated by the CIA, as the Cold War developed. Among the CIA-funded outfits was the Congress for Cultural Freedom .

All this is well known.

Besides that, several leaders in the antiwar movement, including feminist leader Gloria Steinem, received funding from the CIA.

Again, this is well-known.

New to me was that there was a  meeting set up between the business establishment and the leadership of the SDS. The  outfit involved was something called Business International, which seems to be the same Business International Corporation for which Barack Obama worked.

It’s long been considered an intelligence front.

So, you have a high-security employee of a defense contractor that was working for NASA and was later affiliated with Raytheon, entering an anti-government student movement, quickly becoming its spokesman, and letting the CIA spy on the movement without a qualm,…..but, yo,  it’s all good…

The ex- Bendix employee  suspects the company is an intelligence front trying to co-opt the movement, but that’s a good thing, because there’s an even worse bunch of business interests called “cowboys” that needs to be bested.

So, no problem.

The student movement thereafter develops a violent faction that blows up – literally as well as figuratively –   while from 1968 onward, the whole antiwar “scene” turns into a drug-addled, bead-wearing, orgiastic escape into self-help.

Oglesby worked closely with Murray Rothbard, about whose interactions with suspected CIA-affiliated figures – James Dale Davidson (of Agora Inc.), Robert Kephart, and Noam Chomsky –   I’ve blogged at length.

The Business International connection adds to the list.

Of course, I make no hard and fast claims. I just raise the issue.

Some links:

“Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy,” Daniel Brandt (NameBase.org):

“Almost everything that happened to the student movement (Lila: the antiwar protests against US involvement in Vietnam) is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn’t amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening — the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:

  • Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
  • Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
  • The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
  • Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton’s, didn’t hurt his career either.)
  • Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
  • The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.

For more on Carl Oglesby’s meeting with Business International (the CIA front):

“Omnisicient Gentlemen of the Atlantic,” Maureen Tcacik at The Baffler, 2012 (Tcacik is an exceptionally talented writer and astute analyst of politics):

“In one of the many surreal chapters of Journey in Faith, Gene [ Lila: Gene Bradley] later attempted to influence—thought-lead?—what he saw as the perilously bereft civic “education” of the student left. The year was 1968, and the official story is that he was researching a Harvard Business Review feature—which he produced, although the research seems to have been rather more intensive than required. Gene describes consulting with the FBI, a connection made via “mutual good friends,” and a deputy of J. Edgar Hoover’s gladly inviting him to take a look at the Bureau’s secret files on the student left; then traveling through Switzerland, Germany, and France “observing” demonstrations (though none are shared in the book or the story); and, finally, most bizarrely, leading a delegation of fellow businessmen in a “debate” with Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby—hosted (“with the best of intentions but with a full measure of naiveté,” he writes) by a concern called the Business International Corporation.

It seems likely that the 1968 summit at which Bradley “debated” one-time SDS president Carl Oglesby was the same SDS-BI meeting referenced in James Simon Kunen’s SDS memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. In the SDS version, the purpose of the meeting is straightforward. Certain unnamed businessmen who portray themselves as “the left wing of the ruling class” are seeking to “buy off some radicals”—purportedly because they’re rooting for Gene McCarthy to win the presidency. The businessmen “see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [segregationist George] Wallace,” Kunen reports. The idea is that heavy protests, which the businessmen offer to finance, will “make Gene [McCarthy] look more reasonable.”

This stated fear and motive seems dubious. Gene, after all, reported in the first chapter of his memoir how effectively he repressed his own fear of fascists. And the only people spooked by Wallace were those powerless enough to intimidate. Whatever the executives wanted from a bunch of college hippies, though, they were willing to both lie about and pay for. It’s all too easy to see in retrospect that lopsided “debates” of this sort had accumulated into a political reality that, for the lifetime of a college kid in 1968 anyway, was inextricable from the concoctions of Cold War propagandists.

Just the year before, the National Student Association, the dominant campus activism network that had spawned SDS, had been outed (along with the CCF enterprises) as a CIA front. It would not be until the late seventies that the bland-sounding sponsor of the Oglesby Bradley forum, Business International, would concede its own dual role as a CIA operation.”

“Ravens or Pigeons: SDS Meets Business International” (From Lyndon Larouche’s archives):

In his monumental history of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale arguably makes a monumental goof. In his detailed discussion of 1968, he fails to mention one critical incident: the attempt by former SDS president Carl Oglesby to broker an alliance between SDS and the “Eastern Establishment” via Business International (BI), a firm that published sophisticated economic reports and advised top corporations. Sale’s mistake seems especially odd since the debate over Business International inside SDS was hardly a well-kept secret; there was even a long article about BI in New Left Notes.

The SDS-BI talks inspired the discovery of a supposed war between the “Yankee” and “Cowboy” factions of U.S. capitalism. In April 1968, Oglesby wrote a long article in the National Guardian promoting the idea of a deep split in the ruling class between two capitalist factions that he labeled “Yankees and Cowboys.”12 He argued that SDS should align with the Eastern Establishment Yankees, who, he argued, were anti-war, pro-Bobby Kennedy and opposed to newer and meaner factions of U.S. capital centered in the South and Southwest.13 In an August 1974 Ramparts article, Steve Weissman reports that in 1968 there was even a “vague proposal” by the Business International network to do “whatever was possible” to help SDS stage “a massive demonstration against Humphrey” in Chicago and one against Nixon in Miami.14 Weissman then recalled that SDS “refused the offer.”

In his memoir Ravens in the Storm, Oglesby discusses his negotiations with BI president Eldridge Haynes.15 Oglesby recalls that he first met Haynes at the Gotham Hotel in New York in the spring of 1968. As for Haynes:

He was a Harvard man. He had spent much of his career in the Foreign Service but had left government during the Kennedy years to become a consultant to businesses operating in the “frequently turbulent” countries of the Third World. This work had grown into Business International, Inc. CIA, right?16

The next day Oglesby took part in a roundtable presentation about SDS to a select group that included executives from GM, GE, AT&T, IBM, Ford, the AP, and even “a man from the State Department.” Two weeks later, Oglesby helped organize another dialog between BI clients and half a dozen SDSers from Columbia and CCNY. . . . SDS groups without me continued these meetings, sitting down with BI people four times that spring. . . . Haynes and I kept meeting. A little later that same spring, Haynes popped the big question. “Suppose Robert Kennedy were to become a presidential candidate. Do you imagine, Carl, that SDS might be inclined to support him?”17

Oglesby then explains:

I must confess, too, that I’d been scared of heavy-metal politics from the beginning . . . My fears of SDS’s leftward inclinations were strengthened by my sense, as of the BI meetings, that an alternative to a politics of rage was within our reach, and that it was essential that we choose it. . . . There was no way for us to achieve our objectives, I thought, without at some point establishing a sotto voce relationship with mainstream grown-ups.18

Clearly Haynes had done his homework and chose his first big SDS contact well.

Oglesby relates a conversation he had with Bernardine Dohrn who, like the vast majority of SDS members, opposed any alliance with BI, “sotto voce” or not. Oglesby says that he told Dohrn that even if “Haynes or the CIA has a secret agenda, I believe it’s not to screw us up but to use us in some way to help make RFK president.”

[Lila: as I believe the CIA – and Ron Paul’s campaign – used the Ron Paul libertarians to make Barack Obama president again.]

Dohrn replied:

Well, it could be both, couldn’t it? . . . You say this BI’s thing is to gather intelligence on Third World countries and sell it to the guys you once denounced as corporate imperialists. I don’t understand you, Carl. It seems like you talk one way and act another.“19

Oglesby remarked that Dohrn “was probably right in assuming that BI and Haynes were tied to Kennedy and very possibly to the CIA. . . . But who cared? As far as I was concerned, the more the CIA knew about SDS, the better. We had nothing to hide!”

Gene Bradley was one of the participants in a BI-sponsored meeting with Oglesby. A Christian Science devotee, Bradley headed up the International Management Association. In a 2012 article for The Baffler, Maureen Tkacik notes that Bradley’s life reads like the history of a “big-time spook.”20 In September 1968 Bradley, a vice-president of the National Strategic Information Center as well as a businessman, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Businessmen Need to Know about the Student Left.” In his memoir The Story of One Man’s Journey in Faith, Bradley reports that as part of his research, “mutual friends” invited him to meet Hoover’s top FBI aide William Sullivan, who let Bradley read FBI files on the New Left. Bradley also recalls debating SDS’s “Carl Ogilsvie.”

Lila:

And, finally, here is Russell Kirk on the progression of Carl Oglesby from high-security employee of  defense contractor Bendix, which made telecom equipment for NASA, to president of  SDS, whose parent organization was a CIA front.

Oglesby was a friend of both Bernadine Dorn and of Hillary Clinton…until he finally left politics to write history and make music.

“Humane Letters and the Clutch of Ideology”

(Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, March 2012, originally published in The Political Science Reviewer, Fall, 1973)

“Indeed, the eagerness of certain contributors to withdraw from political activism into literary scholarship is almost embarrassing. Take Mr. Carl Oglesby, who once led the riots at the University of Wisconsin.

Mr. Oglesby here gives us an essay entitled “Melville, or Water Consciousness 8c Its madness.” Herman Melville, he says, found a madness he could live with. Ahab was evil, exploiting his crew, and Moby Dick was the victim of Ahab’s imperialism.”

QUOTE FROM OGLEBY

So with a subdued Melville, I ask: Given some broad estimate of the scale, tempo and rhythm at which protoimperial systems condense out and acquire historical outline and social architecture, then swell and grow fevered, finally either to hang suspended a moment before a sometimes luminously sweeping descent, or else to burst all at once and splash blood everywhere, leaving little behind besides shards, cripples and memories that everyone who survives them pants to forget: given ‘these choices, what is the political utility of the concept anti-imperialism?”
END QUOTE

Russell Kirk:

“Is this rich, beautiful prose, transcending the sorry time? Mr. Oglesby clearly hopes so. But Mr. Oglesby’s prose will make no revolution; it may not even make sense. He sedulously avoids any direct reference to Viet Nam, as if he were writing in the Circum- locution Office – as if he would be prosecuted for so heroic a dissent. One thinks of a remark by Georges Sorel, meant to be approbatory: “Our experience of the Marxian theory of value convinces me of the importance which obscurity of style may lend to a doctrine.

They talk of liberty, but hunger for power; they idolize the People, but serve the ego. If one is bound for Zion, it is not well to plod round a prickly pear planted long ago by Mr. Marx of the British Museum; nor is that a good exercise for rousing the literary imagination. Nevertheless, the cactus land of ideology is perfectly safe for an American writer nowadays.

Blessed are the academic revolutionaries, for they shall know tenure.”

Aaron Swartz: folk hero and also NWO front? (Update)

Update:

And confirming my suspicions, here’s a detailed piece about Swartz’s ties to the hacker community, linking Aaron Swartz to Wikileaks (which had already claimed he was a source after his death); to Jacob Applebaum. Applebaum is the WL hacker whom I’ve mentioned before as being linked (in a Rolling Stones article) to imagery from the  “V for Vendetta”  movie. Swartz is also linked to Bradley Manning.

The Manning tie suggests a motive for Swartz’s depression (if indeed depression was what led to his death).

Swartz might have feared much worse from the Feds than just the investigation of the JSTOR articles.

It also makes one wonder if someone else might have had a motive for eliminating him. It was always implausible to me that Bradley Manning got all those documents on his own.  If someone had to get them for him, who better than Aaron Swartz, with his savant0-like skills.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve never swallowed the media’s uncritical praise for “information activist,” Aaron Swartz.

One story that kept getting repeated was how Swartz co-founded Reddit.

Indeed he did no such thing. He was the founder of Infogami.

The founders of Reddit were Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Infogami merged with Reddit and one of the pay-offs to Swartz was that he got to claim that he was co-founder.

It’s time put that story to bed. Along with the notion that Aaron Swartz was a hacktivist who gave his life for information freedom.

That’s the story pushed by the media establishment, including its Internet billionaires, who, naturally can make anything a story all on their own, with no factual “there” there.

Aaron Swartz made a lot of money out of what’s in the public realm. He just couldn’t let other people do the same thing.

Just as Julian Assange wanted everyone else’s secrets outed, but not his own.

That’s a  self-contradiction so obvious only the media here could gloss over it.

Swartz, a Chomsky and Michael Moore admirer, achieved Internet sainthood, but it is the sainthood conferred by cyber-swarms that engage in kamikaze attacks on any blog that doesn’t join their enthusiasms.

Aaron Swartz was very smart and gifted, but he was also young and naive.   He was, I believe, used by the globalist establishment in its ongoing attack on the nation-state of America……..in the services of the supra-national world order.

[Added, Nov. 9. The NWO both attacks and defends the nation-state alternately so as to co-opt both sides of the struggle, but it’s an international order. If there was a natural devolutionary process, I would be all for it. A managed devolution can have only the result all managed processes have –  a top-heavy central bureaucracy and increasingly hollowed -out societies.]

[Lila: Nov 8. I rewrote one passage above because I was much too sharp toward Swartz, who was, after all, only 26 or 27. He couldn’t be expected to know all the forces at work in politics nor understood how attractive a great talent would be to them, as a mouthpiece for their ambitious projects. ]

The nation-state is dead. Long live the global state.

When Reddit was created, it struggled initially. Then it suddenly acquired millions of readers and was bought out by Conde Nast publications.

Who is behind Conde Nast?

Samuel Newhouse, the 47th richest American in 2011 (according to Forbes) and the chairman and CEO of Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast.

Through Conde Nast, Newhouse owns a whole host of magazines: Vogue, Vanity Fair,  The New Yorker, Glamour, Ars Technica, Wired, Architectural Digest, and many others.

Yes. Ars Technica, where the only internet record of Edward Snowden surfaced, wearing the handle the True Hoo Ha .

One meaning of Hoo Ha is vagina. Does that ring a bell?

Vagina was the 2012 book by OccupyWallStreet advocate and chief agitator, Naomi Wolf.

Vaginas are called “p******” in slang.

P**** Riot was the CIA-inflected group behind agitation against the Orthodox Church in Russia.

The New World Order ostentatiously celebrates female sexuality, although it ostentatiously denounces female fertility.

Wired is the magazine whose chief investigative writer Kevin Poulsen worked on a project with Swartz.

Poulsen was once a serial black-hat hacker. He also worked in Silicon Valley in the employ of defense contractors and he hacked into telephone systems, spying on and stealing information from anyone. Poulsen was in the thick of a fight between Glenn Greenwald and Salon on the one hand and Wired and Poulsen on the other about whether chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning actually showed evidence of Wikileaks’ involvement. Poulsen was accused of withholding information, in the same way Greenwald is in turn accused of withholding information.

Is it just coincidence that the same outfits keep showing up in these squabbles or can we surmise that though on opposing sides they set up the parameters of the debate and indeed create the debate?

That Swartz hid his tracks  shows he knew what he was doing wouldn’t be passed off as a prank.

That he chose to commit suicide only lends credibility to the suspicion that he might have been used by more powerful entities.

Yes, the prosecution was over-zealous and blundering. But Swartz himself was not doing anything completely innocuous. He was engaged in the “propaganda of the deed” and had been for a while. That made him an enemy of the government.

Too stupid to uncover the networks behind Swartz, the government, as usual, hit the weak link in the chain with as big a hammer as it could.

Swartz took his life.

No telling where the investigation might have led.

Had we even the suspicion of a press, someone would have followed the money…

The real story behind much contemporary  “hacktivism” and a good deal of  social activism.

You heard it first here –

Aaron Swartz was a front.

Advance Publications was the 52nd largest private company in the US in 2012 and it is the holding company for the Newhouse family’s interests.

Through Advance, the Newhouse family owns such cable/telecom companies as Brighthouse Networks and a 31% share in the cable-network Discovery Communications.

Discovery’s other owners include reclusive billionaire John Hendricks, its founder.

Discovery’s most famous shows are the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. In 2009 it ran a viral pandemic survival show.

Discovery Channel has been fingered by several independent bloggers as a venue for the dissemination of disinformation that sanitizes or mainstreams the New World Order and its symbols.

Newhouse and Advance are the powers that propelled Reddit to fame and success.

A precocious savant, Swartz used his credibility as a computer genius to enter politics on behalf of bigger government, surely a strange career move for a “libertarian” folk-hero.

I’m not talking of a law changed here or there. I am not talking about removal of subsidies and enforcement of existing laws.

Schwartz was a front for Democrat interests, as the mover behind Demand Progress and  Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

PCCC was behind the rise to stardom of chief “sheriff” on Wall Street, Elizabeth Warren:

“The campaign to draft Elizabeth Warren was declared “The Most Valuable Campaign of 2011” by The Nation magazine.[13] With almost 50,000 individual contributions, the PCCC raised more than $800,000 for Warren’s campaign. (Wikipedia)

The point is not the individual positions for which PCCC advocated – whether for Wall Street reform and net neutrality or against SOPA and Stand Your Ground. I have been on the same side on some of them.

The point is that the PCCC advocated progressive Democrat positions across the board.

It was a partisan political organization. Not an individualist advocate of this or that position, each judiciously considered on its own merits.

Swartz’s last post on his blog before his suicide was about the film, “Dark Knight,” according to a blog calling itself Digital Dark Knight (it carries the subtitle The Ethics of Anonymous).

This Digital Dark Knight blog appears to carry only a few posts from January to April 2013 and they deal with Anonymous, the Dark Knight, the Joker, Swartz and Batman.

Apparently on his personal blog, Raw Thought, Swartz had been writing about The Dark Knight. It was his last entry.

Swartz wrote:

“The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain, but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero. But even though his various games only have one innocent casualty, he’s much too crazy to be a viable role model for Batman. His inspired chaos destroys the criminals, but it also terrorizes the population. Thanks to Batman, society doesn’t devolve into a self-interested war of all-against-all, as he apparently expects it to, but that doesn’t mean anyone enjoys the trials.”

The Dark Knight is another of those movies, like “V for Vendetta,” “Avatar,” and “Zeitgeist,” that propagates images and themes needing to be impressed on the public mind.

The masks from Vendetta appear in a Rolling Stone article about Wikileaks and Jacob Applebaum.

Imagery from Dark Knight follows Julian Assange in his media appearances.

The Digital Dark Knight blog looks much like one of the fake internet persona promised to us by the new information warfare technology of the government and its corporate big brothers.

It seems to have been set up solely to make a connection between Swartz and Dark Knight.

Swartz must be linked in the public consciousness with liberation and salvation.

Assange/Swartz/Anonymous are batmen. Lulz and other pranksters are the Joker.

This is subliminal prepping of the public mind for revolution against the state. But it is a corporate-state sponsored revolution, like Occupy Wall Street.

Behind Wikileaks we find the Rothschild machinery.

Behind Anonymous, Snowden and Greenwald,  mega-billion dollar spy corporations.

Behind Aaron Swartz and the anti-IP movement, the cyber-warriors, and the hacktivists, we will also find the information/internet billionaires who make money from the use of public information but object to others doing exactly the same thing.

Their objection is not an ideological one. It is simply a pragmatic one, a partisan one.

The more information a company can take without paying for it, the more money it makes when it commercializes the information. The bigger their market share, the less for others (so they believe) and the more power – financial, social, and political- they gain.

Theft is a great business model, saving R&D costs.

How better to get the public to regard theft as innovation than by adding the word activism to hack?

Doing well by doing good.

Sometimes, just doing well.

Leave doing good to the movie.

Part-Time Cop Wannabe, Full-Time Wuss, Zimmerman Walks

UPDATE:

I fully support the right to carry a gun and to fire in self-defense, as anyone who has read my pieces on V Tech knows. That is not the point. Nor do I suggest that the streets are safe. Or, that “mental toughness” always carries the day. My point is the better part of valour, or self-defense, is prudence.  Don’t follow people on the street at night. Mind your own business. It’s common sense.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
So you can walk drive around armed like a cop, following people around in the night, get down and stalk them, and when they get frightened and throw a punch at you, and you start quaking because you’re scared, you can blow them away and there’s no culpable negligence involved?

Hmm..mm.

Lila: Was Zimmerman really being beaten to death by Martin?

FoxNews.com

“An expert witness testified Wednesday that none of George Zimmerman’s DNA was found under the fingernails of Trayvon Martin, despite defense attempts to portray Zimmerman as only firing his gun in self-defense.

Crime lab analyst Anthony Gorgone testified no DNA samples taken from Martin’s fingernails matched that of Zimmerman, a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer charged with killing the teenager during a scuffle.”

Lila: Did Martin really grab Zimmerman’s gun, as Zimmerman testified?

“Gorgone also testified that two different DNA profiles were found on the pistol grip. One was Zimmerman’s but the other could not be identified. However, Gorgone said he was able to determine that it did not match Martin’s DNA sequence.”

Lila: Was Zimmerman a cop wannabe?

During questioning, Pleasants confirmed that Zimmerman had taken an online course he taught in the summer of 2011 called Criminal Investigation, and that Zimmerman had voluntarily attended optional in-person lectures. Pleasants also confirmed that Zimmerman posted on the class online discussion board that he wanted to pursue a career in law.

“He said his goal was to become an attorney and eventually a prosecutor,” Pleasants said.

Lila: Was Zimmerman exposed to militarized police tactics?

“Prosecutors called a military prosecutor who taught a criminal procedure class at Seminole State College in which Zimmerman earned an A.

“He was probably one of the better students in the class,”said Alexis Francisco Carter, an officer in the U.S. military JAG corps.

Lila: Was Zimmerman a wuss?

“Firearms expert Any Siewert testified that Zimmerman’s weapon had a full magazine plus an additional bullet in the chamber”

Trayvon Martin, we all know, was unarmed.

Lila: Zimmerman was armed and had a car. He initiated the encounter by stalking someone. Trayvon was unarmed, walking and just minding his own business.

Comment:

I am about five seven and range between 125 and 140 pounds. I’ve walked through bad neighborhoods in Baltimore, late at night sometimes, carrying school material, even radios, and have never been attacked. I’ve had twelve year old boys carry my things for me. An old man pushed my suitcase two streets one rainy night. People have given me directions and friendly warnings a lot of times.

I ‘ve been intimidated once or twice. A couple of people yelled racial insults (telling me to go home to my s***** country and asking if my dad had a corner store..that sort of thing).

I mostly ignored that kind of stuff, except once, when I returned the favor and the whole thing blew up. The guy, a homeless black guy, grabbed an iron rod from some construction material lying around (this was on North Charles Street, downtown), so I grabbed one too.  We faced off for about three minutes. Then I realized I was being foolish and ducked into a restaurant.

A couple of “r**-n****” have slammed doors in my face and given me dirty looks. They were carrying skinny shot-guns and had those mean slit-eyes.

I don’t know which was more dangerous.  The guns or the fists and rods.  I’ve never carried a gun ( there are several in the house), but I always carry mace, and except in the last few years, when there’s been the cyber-stalking stuff, I honestly don’t remember being all that scared.

Zimmerman is a wuss.

Once, I was stuck at the Greyhound at 2 AM in the morning and I heard some awful shrieking and carrying on and then two young black teens (guys) rushed out, followed by a big black girl who was throwing a fit and waving something. I was sitting on the bench watching, and one of the guys comes up to me and tells me quickly to get out, the girl’s got a razor, and she’s acting crazy. Then they ran away with the girl behind them.

I moved quickly but it didn’t scare me. Not really. I think if you’re centered in your body and your energy is positive, you mostly repel things like that. It’s like an invisible sheath. But when you feel broken inside or unhappy, then the sheath breaks and bad stuff gets through. Or, maybe you’re projecting something (not necessarily aggression) that’s attracting that energy in some way. It sounds a little far out. It’s not. It’s traditional yogic teaching.

What you are inside, your mental and emotional and spiritual world, that is what you create outside –  given your circumstances.  We often take that in a materialistic “prosperity gospel” way. But it’s not a materialistic teaching in origin (Hindu) or in its later instantiations (Christianity).

I taught some level-five kids once. Kids. They were half a foot taller and at least fifty pounds heavier and they would act up, every so often. They had to have a bouncer standing ready, just in case. We had to put on gloves to handle one of the kids, a girl. She was the daughter of a crack-addict and if she cut herself, her blood would be infectious. She’d go batty every so often, spinning around wildly, banging her head against the walls and glass,  so getting hurt was a real possibility. Never did, though.

I carried mace everywhere when I had to walk. I was lucky. No one attacked me.  No one raped me. No one molested me.  Baltimore streets are bad, but frankly I’ve had more real trouble on college campus. And the worst “assaults” and “looting” I ever experienced were perpetrated by people in button-down shirts and wing-tips.

Edward Snow-Job? (Updated)

uPDATE (jUNE 15)

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.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

More manufactured “dissent” and intelligence-funded “revelations” that everyone already knows endorsed by that lovable mouthpiece, Glenn Greenwald…whose general point of view I otherwise endorse.

Notice Snowden’s props for Ron Paul, whose credibility has already been compromised.

Snowden joins the tediously long list of intel-manufactured whistleblowers, from old faithful Daniel Ellsberg to such recent star-turns as Julian of the Rothschilds, Bradley what’s-it, Brandon Multi-level Silver Marketer Raub, Madman Kokesh, the Non-Pauls, and all the other entertaining props and faux revolutionaries of NWO theater…

From Willy Loman:

“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?

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/manufactured-hero-the-nsa-whistleblower-exposed-as-career-nsa-cia-special-forces-trained-agent/

See also, this second Loman piece describing Facebook censorship of his article.

“Language Of Empire” Influences Lankan Human Rights Debate

Lankan minister and eminent writer/teacher Rajiva Wijesinha gave a  thumbs-up to “Language of Empire” in March on Lanka Web.

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.

Wijesinha, like many others, had been wondering about the manipulation of the international “human rights” agenda (the game of who gets to call what a genocide).

This manipulation has been termed Human Rights Imperialism by Jean Bricmont.

In this case,  the manipulators are the Tamil Tigers and Eelam separatists and their new-found supporters in the West, including Ron Paul’s legal advisor, one Bruce Fein.

The evident purpose of the manipulation is the continuance and augmentation of a covert war on the island….and on India….in an area of great strategic importance to Western interests

….that is not too far from Tamil Nadu with its huge concentration of foreign and domestic corporate interests and its nuclear reactors – one at Chennai and the other at Kudankulam, bordering the ocean, just opposite Sri Lanka. Kudankulam has been the site of intense anti-nuclear activism, which seems to have a covert political agenda and is apparently financed from abroad.

Of-course, India’s nuclear policy itself  seems to have come with foreign strings attached, so there is nothing to choose between the two sides.

Rajiv Malhotra’s “Breaking India” describes this long-term policy and its role in creating, sustaining, and manipulating Dravidian identity politics in Tamil Nadu as part of the creation of a larger Afro-Dravidian identity that has global consequences that play into Western geopolitical goals.

The manipulation of Nicholas Berg’s killing makes for interesting reading from this angle and throws a good deal of light on, among other things, the images of the alleged torture and assassination of Tiger leader Prabhakaran’s son, Balachandra, which became a cause celebre in the strange, seemingly “fanned” anti-Lanka rioting in Tamil Nadu, in March-April.

Wijesinha writes (“Dealing With Allegations of War Crimes,” March 10, 2013, LankaWeb):

“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….”

Read the rest at Lanka Web.

One shade of trash.. (Updated)

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.

It can also be found reprinted in volume 2 of the 3-volume Exotique hardcover collection.

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.

Joshua Holland on the myths behind Romney’s “47%”

Joshua Holland at Alternet has a thoughtful piece on the intellectual fudging behind  Romney’s  “47%” who allegedly don’t pay taxes, don’t have skin in the game, and feel both entitled and victimized.

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.

But consider what Mr. Romney does NOT consider a silver spoon:

“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.

Anti-Islamic movie made by convicted Californian fraudster

Update: The Daily Bell is running with this story today, a little late in the day.

( We wrote about Gladio in 2005…..)

Meanwhile, it was  the mainstream media that actually did the best job of putting together the story yesterday.

The alternatives mostly swallowed the “Israeli Jews did it” red herring.

Fortunately, I took my own advice and waited for more reports…

In other words, it’s not a psyop by “Jews”….it might not even be a psyop by “Muslim Brothers” made to look like a psyop by “Jews”.

It could be a psyop by the “Jews” or the “Christians” made to look like a psyop by “Muslim Brothers” made to look like a psyop by “Jews.”

Or even deeper.

I’ve figured out a bit more than this, but I won’t be putting that research on the net. ….

ORIGINAL POST

The hunt for the man behind the offensive anti-Muslim film gets weirder by the hour.

Jeffrey Goldberg at “The Atlantic Wire” writes:

“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.”

Just yesterday I posted a piece advising people to take everything in the major media as a psyop.

It turned out to be good advice.

The first reports (see this Guardian piece) said that the  horrible and tragic murder of the American ambassador in Libya, Christopher Stevens, had been triggered by a video made by an Israeli Jew.

Other reports claimed that Bacile was a Coptic Christian Israeli, not a Jew.

But the latest reports tell a different story.

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.

One of the consultants on the film, Steve Klein, turns out to be  a counter-terrorism expert in California, who belongs to an ultra-conservative Christian group. He published a strongly anti-Islamic tract last year.

The Guardian:

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.

Another weird twist is that the film was apparently altered unknown to the original actors and writers to convey insults to Islam:

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.

In the latest news, reported at NPR, it turns out that Bacile has been convicted for financial fraud.

“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.

Check out my previous posts on false-flags:

The involvement of the CIA in the Mumbai bombing;

Mossad links to the killing of Bassam Trache, a Syrian doctor in Hungary;

CIA/Mossad involvement in plans to Balkanize India.

Suspected Israeli targeting of Kochi naval base in India

US/Isreli involvement in Stuxnet virus attack on Iran

Mossad killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai using forged passports from other countries

The killing of the Polish prime minister and his entourage

Martha Nussbaum defends burqa against French neocons (Updated)

Update (Sept 10)

Another thought occurs to me.  What level of brainwashing does it take to lecture the Islamic world for its “medieval” and “degrading” attitude toward women,  when the most popular book in the west today  is”Fifty Shades of Grey”). No individualists have said a word negative about this book, which describes how wonderful it is to be tied up and have steel balls pushed up your vagina by a controlling man who feeds you, dresses you, and employs you, while whipping you on your genitals and beating you until you cry.

Or, to take another case, what level of self-delusion does it take  to lecture extremely poor people in Asia, recovering from multiple centuries of enslavement and starvation, under a succession of empires, about physical dirt, while refusing to acknowledge a different kind of filth, which is perhaps more deadly. I am talking about the saturation of popular culture with perversions as disordered as cannibalism, sadism, coprophagia and necrophilia?

(Search the “Go Ask Alice” website at Columbia University, where these things are treated almost neutrally).

ORIGINAL POST

Martha Nussbaum brilliantly demolishes a series of justifications for banning the burqa, a costume not too different from the garb of nuns during the period of history that gave France some of its great cultural treasures.

I confess that I used to support a ban on burqas, from the point of view of security and civility, with the idea that it would enable natives to see Muslim immigrants as more human and akin to them.

But Nussbaum’s comprehensive essay has made me rethink that position.

Having grown up in a town in India where 30% of the population is Muslim and where most of the Muslims on the street wear Burqa all the time, in temperatures over 45 degrees celsius, I can tell you that the women I saw wearing them seemed quite happy with their choice.

Covering up the limbs and face preserves the skin from coarsening and burning, so it actually makes sense in very hot countries, especially for women.

No Florida “alligator” skin and rooster necks.  No discoloration spots and skin cancer.

It also makes sense to cover up in very crowded countries, where women are forced to rub up against strange men because of the crowds.

Covering up protects women against molestation. It carves out a sphere of dignity for a woman and protects her from violations of her personal space and modesty.

It prevents a women becoming a piece of meat on the market, which is often what happens in the West.

I felt noticeably more comfortable in the Muslim countries in which I’ve traveled alone, than anywhere in the West or in India.

The West can be terrifying for a single foreign women.  That has been my experience.  There is verbal intimidation, sexual assault, and vulgarity directed toward vulnerable women, especially divorced women, who are seen as fair targets for workplace slander and harassment.

In India, since the liberalization of the economy, the situation has also become difficult for women on the street. I know many foreign women, very good travelers, understanding of Indian culture,  who tell me they have been repeatedly pestered and molested since the l990s. American women have told me they’ve been assaulted in such porn-friendly cities as Buenos Aires.

[I should clarify: This may have less to do with porn as it has to do with the fact that they’re foreigners and blondes, at that. Blondes, I’ve observed, tend to have a harder time in Latin countries.  The woman who told me this said she’d been quite safe traveling alone in Thailand.]

Muslim countries I’ve visited were easily the most “women-friendly” for a single woman,

Nussbaum’s arguments about these matters, and many others, make a convincing case why the burqa ban is fundamentally anti-liberal and discriminatory.

First is the argument from security: it holds that security requires people to show their face when appearing in public places. A second, closely related, argument, which I shall treat together with it, says that the kind of transparency and reciprocity proper to relations between citizens is impeded by covering part of the face.

What is wrong with both of these arguments is that they are applied inconsistently. It gets very cold where I live in Chicago. Along the streets we walk, hats pulled down over ears and brows, scarves wound tightly around noses and mouths. No problem of either transparency or security is thought to exist, nor are we forbidden to enter public buildings so insulated.

Moreover, many beloved and trusted professionals cover their faces all year round: surgeons, dentists, skiers and skaters. The latter typically wear a full – face covering with slits only for the eyes, similar to a niqab. Some are even more covered than the typical burqa wearer. In general, then, what inspires fear and mistrust in Europe, and, to some extent, in the United States, is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.

So, what to do about the threat that all bulky and non-revealing clothing creates? Airline security does a lot, with metal detectors, body imaging, pat-downs, and so on (one very nice system is at work in India, where all passengers get a full manual pat-down, but in a curtained booth by a member of the same sex who is clearly trained to be courteous and respectful). Sport stadiums search all bags (though more to check for beer than for explosives, thus protecting the interests of in-stadium vendors). Retailers or other organizations who feel that bulky clothing is a threat (whether of shoplifting or terrorism or both) could institute a non-discriminatory rule banning; They could even have a body scanner at the door, but they don’t, presumably preferring customer friendliness to the extra margin of safety…….

…A third argument, very prominent today, is that the burqa is a symbol of male domination that symbolizes the objectification of women: it encourages people to think of and treat a woman as a mere object. A Catalonian legislator recently called the burqa a “degrading prison.” President Sarkozy said the same thing.

[Lila: Please note that certain libertarian outfits that would never speak out against the objectification of women in the dangerous practices of the global porn trade nonetheless come out with the same memes that neoconservatives used to justify the invasion of Iraq – the liberation of women – a meme thoroughly discredited and debunked by third-world and post-colonial critics and even by some more thoughtful liberal feminists like Nussbaum.

It hardly needs to be said that the people who make this argument typically don’t know much about Islam and would have a hard time saying what symbolizes what in that religion. But the more glaring flaw in the argument is that society is suffused with symbols of male supremacy that treat women as objects.

Sex magazines, pornography, nude photos, tight jeans, transparent or revealing clothing – all of these products, arguably, treat women as objects, as do so many aspects of our media culture. Women are encouraged to market themselves for male objectification in this way, and it has long been observed that this is a way of robbing women of both agency and individuality, reducing them to objects or commodities.

And what about the “degrading prison” of plastic surgery? Every time I undress in the locker room of my gym, I see women bearing the scars of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants. Isn’t much of this done in order to conform to a male norm of female beauty that casts women as sex objects?

……Respect is for the person, and is fully compatible with intensely disliking many things that many people do. So in a society dedicated to equal liberty people remain perfectly free to think and to say that the burqa is an objectionable garment because of the way in which it symbolizes the objectification of women…….

Myself, I think that a burqa is not a symbol of hatred, and thus not something that it would be reasonable to find deeply hateful. It is more like the boys and their tzizit, something I may feel out of tune with, but which it is probably nosy to denounce unless a friend has asked my opinion. Still, if someone else wants to say that it is deeply objectionable, and that she does not respect it, that does not in any way disagree with the principles I am defending here.

What respect for persons requires is that people have equal space to exercise their conscientious commitments, not that others like or even respect what they do in that space. Furthermore, equal respect for persons is compatible with limiting religious freedom in the case of a “compelling state interest………Which brings me to my next point.

Argument 4: Coercion

A fourth argument holds that women wear the burqa only because they are coerced. This is a rather implausible argument to make across the board, and it is typically made by people who have no idea what the circumstances of this or that individual woman are.

We should reply that of course all forms of violence and physical coercion in the home are illegal already, and laws against domestic violence and abuse should be enforced much more zealously than they are. Do the arguers really believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly Muslim problem? If they do, they are dead wrong.

According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, intimate partner violence made up 20% of all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001. The National Violence Against Women Survey reports that 52% of surveyed women said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of perpetrator.

There is no evidence that Muslim families have a disproportionate amount of such violence. Indeed, given the strong association between domestic violence and the abuse of alcohol, it seems at least plausible that observant Muslim families will turn out to have less of it…….

College fraternities are very strongly associated with violence against women, and some universities have made all or some fraternities move off campus as a result. But private institutions are entitled to make such regulations about what can occur on their premises; public universities are entitled to limit the types of activities that will get public money, particularly when they involve illegality (underage drinking). But a total governmental ban on the male drinking club (or on other places where men get drunk, such as soccer matches) would certainly be a bizarre restriction of associational liberty.

One thing that we have long known to be strongly associated with coercion and violence against women is alcohol. The Amendment to the United States Constitution banning alcohol was motivated by exactly this concern. It was on dubious footing in terms of liberty: why should law-abiding people suffer for the crimes of abusers? But what was more obvious was that Prohibition was a total disaster politically and practically. It increased crime and it did not stop violence against women……..

So, where should government and law step in? Certainly it should step in where physical and/or sexual abuse is going on, which is very often. Where religious mandates are concerned, intervention would be justified, similarly, where the behaviour either constitutes a gross risk to bodily health and safety (as with Jehovah’s Witness children being forbidden to have a life-saving blood transfusion), or impairs some major functioning.

Thus, I think that female genital mutilation practiced on minors should be illegal if it is a form that impairs sexual pleasure or other bodily functions. Male circumcision seems to me all right, however, because there is no evidence that it interferes with adult sexual functioning; indeed it is now known to reduce susceptibility to HIV/AIDS.

[Lila: Here, I think Nussbaum is mistaken. There is plenty of evidence that removal of the foreskin does affect male pleasure.  And there may be many other side-effects that haven’t been fully studied yet.]

….The burqa (for minors) is not in the same class as genital mutilation, since it is not irreversible and does not engender health or impair other bodily functions – not nearly so much as high-heeled shoes. If it is imposed by physical or sexual violence, that violence ought to be legally punished.

[Lila: Brilliant. There are far more crippling and unhygienic forms of clothing popular in the West, from thongs (which are gross and unhygienic!) to nylon stockings (itchy, and they constrict the blood vessels), crotchless panties (unhygienic and infectious), flimsy bras (lead to sagging breasts), baggy pants (can trip you up); tight skirts (prevent normal movements), low-cut blouses (ruin delicate breast and neck skin), deodorant (stops perspiration and lets toxicity build up in the body), shampoo (makes your hair thin and go grey prematurely).]

…. If people think that women only wear the burqa because of coercive pressure, let them create ample opportunities for them, and then see what they actually do.………

Argument 5: Health Risk

Finally, one frequently hears the argument that the burqa is per se unhealthy, because it is hot and uncomfortable. I have heard this argument often in Europe, particularly in Spain. This is perhaps the silliest of the arguments.

Clothing that covers the body can be comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on the fabric. In India I typically wear a full salwaar kameez of cotton, because it is superbly comfortable, and full covering keeps dust off one’s limbs and at least diminishes the risk of skin cancer. It is surely far from clear that the amount of skin displayed in typical Spanish female dress would meet with a dermatologist’s approval.

But more pointedly, would the arguer really seek to ban all uncomfortable and possibly unhealthy female clothing? Wouldn’t we have to begin with high heels, delicious as they are? But no, high heels are associated with majority norms (and are a major Spanish export), so they draw no ire.t harmful chemicals, and that other gross health risks are avoided. But on the whole women in particular area allowed and even encouraged to wear clothing that could plausibly be argued to create health risks, whether through tendon shortening or through exposure to the sun….

….The burqa is not even in the category of the corset. As many readers pointed out, it is sensible dress in a hot climate where skin easily becomes worn by sun and dust. What does seem to pose a risk to health is wearing synthetic fabrics in a hot climate, but nobody is talking about that.

The Burqa and the Limits of Laicite

All five arguments are discriminatory. We don’t even need to reach the delicate issue of religiously grounded accommodation to see that they are utterly unacceptable in a society committed to equal liberty. Equal respect for conscience requires us to reject them.

Let us now consider more closely the special case of France. Unlike other European nations, France is consistent – up to a point. Given its history of anticlericalism and the strong commitment to laicite, religion is not to set its mark upon the public realm, and the public realm is permitted to disfavour religion by contrast to non-religion. This commitment leads to restrictions on a wide range of religious manifestations, all in the name of a total separation of church and state. But if one looks closely, the restrictions are unequal and discriminatory. The school dress code forbids the Muslim headscarf and the Jewish yarmulke, along with “large” Christian crosses.

But this is a totally unequal burden, because the first two items of clothing are religiously obligatory for observant members of those religions, and the third is not: Christians are under no religious obligation to wear any cross, much less a “large” one. So there is discrimination inherent in the French system…….

Let’s now consider the language of the law banning the burqa. It prohibits “wearing attire designed to hide the face” (porter une tenue detinee a dissimuler son visage) – and then there is a long list of exceptions:

“The prohibition described in Article 1 does not apply if the attire is prescribed or authorized by legislative or regulatory dispensation, if it is justified for reasons of health or professional motives, or if it is adopted in the context of athletic practices, festivals, or artistic or traditional performances.”…….

Does the application of the ban to all religions mean that the ban, unlike the school dress code, is truly neutral? Well of course, although the word burqa does not occur in the legislation, we understand perfectly well that this is what it is all about. And the fact that they are so generous with other cultural and professional exemptions shows that they are not terribly worried about the practice as such – only when it is a religious manifestation. But still, isn’t that a consistent and, up to a point, neutral application of the polity of laicite?

The difficulty we have here is that no other religion has a custom of precisely that sort. So what the law has done is to single out something that is of central importance to one religion and to apply a very heavy burden to it, without similarly burdening the central and cherished practices of other religions. Indeed, it seems clear that one would not be fined for making the sign of the cross over oneself in a public place, for singing a religious hymn as one walked down the street, or for wearing any type of religious apparel other than the burqa: cassocks, nuns’ habits, Hasidic dress, the saffron garb of the Hindu priest – all of these remain unburdened. So it is neutral in one sense, but not at all neutral in another.

At this point, defenders of the ban will typically allude to one of the other arguments, saying that the burqa, unlike these other forms of clothing, is a security risk, an impediment to normal relations among citizens, and so on. But the fact that the government does not credit these rationales is clear from the fact that they permit so many exceptions to the ban. Even a public masquerade, at which hundreds of people cover their faces, received explicit defence in the statute.

So it’s clear that the government does not think that security provides a compelling interest in favour of the restriction: it’s trumped routinely by very weak and even frivolous interests.

So I conclude that the French ban is not truly neutral, any more than the school dress code. Besides the obvious objection that French secularism does not allow sufficiently ample freedom for religious observance, we may add the objection of bias.

***

Philosophical principles shape constitutional traditions and the shape of political cultures. I have tried to articulate some important principles behind traditions of religious liberty and equality in both the United States and Europe.

Today, a climate of fear and suspicion, directed primarily against Muslims, threatens to derail these admirable commitments. But if we articulate them clearly and see the reasons for them, this may help us oppose these ominous developments.

Excerpted from The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age by Martha C. Nussbaum, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 2012 by Martha C. Nussbaum. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. You can listen to her in conversation with Andrew West on Radio National’s Religion and Ethics Report.”

Assange & Anonymous: Sock-Puppet Rebels..

Willy Loman has an impassioned plea to forget the “dissent-chiefs” and official revolutionaries on the left (Greenwald, Ellsberg, Hedges, Cole, Chomsky, Goodman, Assange, Anonymous etc.) and on the right (Ron Paul, Alex Jones, Doug Casey, etc.).

Take what’s good in them, but go beyond.

They are reliable on past conspiracies.  Don’t believe them on present ones, unless confirmed by your own analysis. (Hint: If they support Assange and Anonymous, or keep pointing to the approved activists, think twice).

Light your own fire. Think your own thoughts.

And, follow the facts, not the leader.

Willy Loman::

The rolling psyop known as Julian Assange is not done with us just yet.

After serving as the CIA’s front-man for the distribution of phony intel for a couple years (and getting paid well for it) and then living like a king in an English mansion under “house arrest” for 500 days (while the patsy Bradley Manning is in lock down 24/7), now Julian is getting his very own interview based TV show…….

..Julian Assange lives with a globalist billionaire in the heart of the new imperialist England and he’s going to tell us 99%ers what we should be doing and which “politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, artists and visionaries” we should trust and follow.

Anyone else see an inherent problem with that?

With yet another economic collapse just off the horizon and the Occupy Spring taking shape and the entire European continent rioting, you don’t think steering the boiling over dissident movement would be something that the CIA, NSA, and the State Department would be interested in, do you?

If a psyop gets any more obvious than Julian Assange, I haven’t seen it……..

Unfortunately as you know there will be those on the dissident left and right who buy into this shit, believe it or not. Let’s see how our old friend Glenn Greenwald writes about it.

“A WikiLeaks press release states, “‘The World Tomorrow’ is a collection of twelve interviews featuring an eclectic range of guests, who are stamping their mark on the future: politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, artists and visionaries. The world’s last five years have been marked by an unrelenting series of economic crises and political upheavals. But they have also given rise to the eruption of revolutionary ferment in the Middle East and to the emergence of new protest movements in the Euro-American world. In Julian’s words, the aim of the show is ‘to capture and present some of this revolutionary spirit to a global audience.’””  RT

[Lila: This is exactly what this Peter Dale Scott article at Lew Rockwell is about. It too lists the activists you should pay attention to.  That’s just what prizes are intended to do – focus your eyes on what the globalists want you to focus on. That is how revolution has been co-opted from the start of scientific state propaganda.]

“Does anyone remember how much we trusted al Jazeera English after their great coverage of the Egyptian protests? Anyone getting the feeling that Russia Today is headed down the same path AJ took right after they earned our trust?

The RT article announcing this weekly psyop is hinting that the proven NSA asset “Anonymous” may be one of his first interviews.

The guest list has not been revealed, but it has been hinted that the first guest will be someone controversial. A tweet from the WikiLeaks account asks provocatively, “Any bets on who The World Tomorrow’s first mystery guest(s) are?” It then adds the hashtag “#ExpectAssange” — a play on the Anonymous slogan, “Expect us.” RT

“For those of you who don’t understand how these games are played, I’ll give you an example. If a law enforcement agency wants to get a new man on the inside of an organization, say a mob organization, what they do is they have someone who is already on the inside vouch for him. Someone with “street cred” so to speak. This is the same thing they do when trying to influence movements of different types.

Take for instance the Truth Movement (or what’s left of it). You have a fake “truther” named Jon Gold. His idea of the “truth” of 9/11 is whatever George Bush and Dick Cheney told us… plus.. “foreknowledge”… well, foreknowledge minus insider trading which he doesn’t think took place. Well, you have that guy (which no real Truth advocate believes for a second) write a book and then you get Sibel Edmunds of Boiling Frogs to stand beside him claiming he is the real deal. Then Gold promotes Sibel’s LIHOPy book and BINGO… you have the APPEARANCE of a consensus in the hijacked movement.

See how that works? One fake vouches for another fake. Jon and Sibel = Julian and “Anonymous”

[Lila: To give Sibel Edmonds credit, she is a lot more credible to me than the others. She is after all a brave person and a whistle-blower who has called out a lot of the lazy activism of another very well-heeled, “comfortable” group, Antiwar. Edmonds seems to be reliable until she gets to 9/11 and she falls silent about Hank Greenberg, as do most Republican activists. But other than that, I don’t feel she belongs in this group. I feel she’s been forced to join them.]

In the world of organized crime, this kind of game can be a bit dangerous. In the world of crime fighting this can be very very dangerous. But in the world of dissident movements, what’s the risk? Remember that guy who was busted infiltrating that movement down in New Orleans? What happened to him? Nothing. He went on after he was exposed to start some new assignment and that was the end of it. What happened to Nurse Nariah (whatever her name was) or that guy who pretended to be the “Gay Girl from Damascus” or “Syrian Danny” once they were all exposed?

This is how they work.

Right now we are on the edge of a massive popular uprising and it just so happens that their two most successful psyops are about to go on one of the most respected news outlets left to us to tell us what to do.

Get it?

Assange himself says in the trailer for the show, “Today we’re on a quest for revolutionary ideas that can change the world tomorrow.” RT

oooooo…. Julian himself tells us what to do…. oh I can’t wait… and “Anonymous” will be there too? And it’s on RT? Well hell, that must be legit.

If you notice though, at the end of the RT article, they seem to be presenting a little disclaimer. Turns out RT didn’t produce this CIA/State Department psyop… some “independent” company out of London produced it. I wonder if it is owned by the same globalist billionaire who is letting Julian live in his mansion while under “house arrest”

“A press release for the show, however, emphasizes that it was put together by an independent UK producer and that RT is merely serving as the initial broadcaster. Negotiations are presently underway with other possible licensees, who might broadcast longer versions of the same interviews.” RT

Seems like RT is already making sure they can distance themselves from this psyop even before it launches it’s first installment……

John Young of Cryptome said years ago that he knew Assange and Wikileaks was a CIA honeypot from the start and he was correct.

Now they are trying to cash in on his “street cred”, street cred that was given (“given”.. not earned) him by the likes of Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, and Daniel Ellsberg.If you still that that is a group of true dissidents, I can’t help you.

[Lila: So what does that make Peter Dale Scott who points to the dissent-chiefs?]

All I can say about this State Department infomercial is: Don’t believe it folks and don’t watch it.

Let them know via their own ratings tools that we can’t be fooled by their Disneyesque smoke and mirrors.

The PR and influence peddling institutions think they’re the real power behind this country and time and time again they’re proven wrong but they just keep plugging away telling themselves they are smarter than all of us. They’re not.

If you don’t take the hint from me, take a cue from the RT article… there’s a REASON they posted the disclaimer in their press announcement and the article about the show. RT is trying to tell you something. The reason is… it’s BULLSHIT.

Don’t watch the show. Tell others its bullshit. Make sure Julian and his NSA handlers get the rotten tomatoes ratings they deserve.

No more Syrian Danny no more Gay Girl no more Julian of the Mansion. We’ve outgrown it. We’re tired of the bullshit. That’s it.

This is going to be our revolution and NOTHING they do is going to hijack it.

Whomever he puts on that fraud of a show of his is suspect. Whoever is on that show of his is just as much of a fraud as he is.

We saw through Invisible Children and Kony 2012 in record time (less than a day I believe) and we will see.. through.. this.. too.

No prepackaged heroes, no ready-made leaders. It’s ham-handed and obvious and we are too tired and angry to fall for this shit.”

Assange Circus: Smoke-Screen To Hide Real Whistle-Blower

At Veterans Today, a fascinating take on what’s real behind the Assange circus at the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK:

“Have you ever asked yourself why the founder of WikiLeaks always reaches the front pages of our daily and international newspapers and yet this unknown entity (Andrea Davison) has little or no coverage!!

You may be surprised to learn that in the real sense what Ms Davison knows far outweighs the out of date garbage that comes from Julian Assange!!

Ms Davison had an incredible amount of very secretive documents in her possession that had the potential to put many ex and current Prime Ministers in prison for life and in some case many other very senior MP’s and members of the House of Lords so I again keep asking the same question why is the world’s media ignoring Ms Davison?

I would now like to continue in exposing exactly what this woman knew as proof that our government and the opposition certainly are making sure that the media does not get hold of this story.

Here is more information that Ms Davison herself produced and published in her own words with the title:

MI5 DESTROY THE BLAIR BROWN IRAQ DEFENCE ARE THEY NOW WAR CRIMINALS – Jul 20, 2010:

Former head of MI5 in her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry showed Tony Blair’s evidence that “Toppling Saddan Hussein helped make Britain safe from terrorists” was false.

In her testimony she said, what every intelligence service in the world knew, that Iraqwas no threat and did not have the capability to use WMD’s. Whilst she did not say that Saddam had mobile biological weapons units in the southern marshes it was revealed in a memo to John Gieve, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, in March 2002, that Saddam was not likely to use chemical or biological weapons unless “he felt the survival of his regime was in doubt”.

Britain and the USA supplied Iraqwith a military industrial base which included the facility to produce chemical and biological weapons and deliver them. Britain supplied large amounts of VX gas and the tech transfer which resulted in a bio engineered flu virus transposed with a biotoxin. Following Desert Storm much was transported to Sudan, Iran and Libya.

The intelligence reports from around the world did not suit Tony Blair’s agenda and he made war on Iraq causing the radicalization of British Muslims and thereby increasing the threat of home grown terrorism Just as the intelligence reports he chose to ignore warned. Some of those reports were written by former arms investigator and intelligence agent Andrea Davison.

Manningham-Buller also said Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and insisted there was no evidence of a link between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. “There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA,” she told the inquiry. “It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine.”

Former head of M15 Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed that there was such a surge of warnings of home-grown terrorist threats after the invasion of Iraq that MI5 asked for – and got – a 100 per cent increase in its budget. Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director general of MI5 in 2002-07, told the Chilcot panel that MI5 started receiving a “substantially” higher volume of reports that young British Muslims being drawn to al-Qa’ida.

As reported she told the inquiry: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.” She added: “Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi Jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.”

Her words are in stark contrast to the claim that Mr Blair made in front of the same inquiry on the 29 January this year “If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are. “It was better to deal with this threat, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.”

Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, added: “I should be astonished if Mr Blair were to return to give further evidence, but questions will remain as to what it was which prompted him to disregard the reservations of officials and their advice. If only Britain had been as well served by its politicians as it was by Eliza Manningham-Buller then we would never have got ourselves into the illegal mess of Iraq.”

Only 16 days before Blair gave evidence to the Inquiry documents were seized by Derby Police from Andrea Davison proving that the Government knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq at the time of the second Iraq War, along with Intelligence reports which would have ended Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s carefully laid tissue of lies

Ken Livingstone, who was Mayor of London at the time of the 7 July bombings, said: “Eliza Manningham-Buller’s evidence is a damning indictment of a foreign policy that not only significantly enhanced the risk of terrorist attacks in London but gave al-Qa’ida the opening to operate in Iraq too.”

Evidence showed that a year before British troops went into Iraq, Elize sent the Home Office a memo which – though phrased in official language – demolished the idea that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a credible terrorist threat to theUK. The memo went on: “We assess that Iraqi capability to mount attacks in the UKis currently limited.”

Lady Manningham-Buller also hinted at disagreement between Blair’s office and MI5 over the dossier that the Prime Minister presented to Parliament in September 2002, to prepare public opinion for the likelihood of war.

“We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn’t think it was reliable,” she said.

Andrea Davison has repeatedly asked the Home Office for the Return of her documents and Intelligence reports from the Derby Police in order to present them to the Iraq enquiry without success. Why the new Government want to keep them hidden is a mystery yet to be revealed.
They both ended up seeking political asylum in this building – The Ecuador Embassy in London

As I told you all in my last article Ms Andrea Davison has far more to offer than the CIA conman Julian Assange so why isn’t the world media interested in this scoop and more to the point just what does this women know that the British Government does not want you to know?

To prove that the information I printed is authentic I will now show you some very sensitive letters letter that Ms Davison herself released into the public domain before she was gagged and forced to take down her webpage…….you will see extremely confidential letters that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that all that she did was known to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current PM David Cameron who between them not only carried out breaches under the Nuclear Explosions Act but she herself and her journalistic puppet, Pete Sawyer, could both have breached the Official Secrets Act!!

This story is truly a major scoop but the current Zionist controlled world media refuses to print it and those in high places continue to evade prison!!

Here are a sequence of letters that show communications between Ms. Davison and the Prime Minister and other very senior MP’s and member of the House of Lords which clearly reveal that the current Chilcot Inquiry will be a total cover-up and the star witness – Ms Davison was never called to give her evidence…….not to mention the fact that three nuclear weapons went missing and were allowed to be sold on the black market………many of the above received back handers from that fraudulent deal including our current PM who received £17.8 million for his party and another £1 million went to Tony Blair….not forgetting many other of the political elite who also got a slice of the cake!!

I will also mention other names such as Sir Ken Warren and Peter Lilley MP who employed Ms Davison and Dr. David Kelly who suffered the ultimate sacrifice in being assassinated simply because he knew too much!!!

Here are the letters in sequence of date order…….note the items seized during the police raid as highlighted in the letter to Gordon Brown the PM at the time and also note the reference made to the DTI which obviously implicates Sir Ken Warren and Peter Lilley to name but a few of those involved:

One can clearly see political interference into the case being mounted by the Derbyshire Police which they ignored and continued to put Ms Davison on trial to which she was found guilty of 27 charges…….

However, she did not attend the Mold Crown Court and so the police issued a bench warrant for her arrest…….she eventually turned up in the Ecuador Embassy in London and is currently seeking political asylum with Julian Assange as her roommate!!

The question remains will the Police or government ask the embassy to release her so that she can continue to give her vital evidence at the yet to be revealed Chilcot Inquiry……….obviously not as that would be the downfall of not only ex Prime Ministers but also the current PM and possible many members of the Government.

One should also mention in closing the fact that Ms Davison and her journalistic friend, Pete Sawyer could possibly also be charged under the official secrets act for holding and sharing official secrets and then in their publication on Ms Davison’s own blog and also in articles published by Mr. Sawyer himself that could be considered as highly sensitive!!

Mr. Sawyer had the audacity to tell Gordon and I that the reason he was attending the Royal Courts of Justice was to make sure we never printed such articles as this one……..Sorry Mr Sayer you failed on that point……also this so called journalist had the audacity to wait outside the court and take photographs of Gordon and I…………this gave me no option but to also film him which upset him deeply and he responded by almost poking his telephoto lens up my nostril……all to no avail!!!

Stayed tuned for more juicy government cover-ups and if you want to learn more you can go to the US Republic Broadcasting Network and listen to Paul Drockton and I in our own show……you can find this also on the link on this page……happy listening!!”

Peter Eyre – Middle East Consultant – 30/7/2012

Comment:

Paul-Lehrman Connection Meaningless, Says Daily Bell (Corrections Added)

Update: Subsequent to my posting this, the Agora disinfo agent/troll/paid basher Ryals reposts Amberger’s comments to him (rather than Amberger’s blog posts about Agora), simultaneously discrediting and neutralizing Amberger by an unsubstantiated smear (Nazi Stasi), just as he posts any substantial criticism of Agora, ALWAYS with slurs about the critics and always with OLD NEWS about Agora, usually attributing criminal behavior to the critics, for which he gives not a shred of proof.

His response fails to mention the people who really are responsible for Agora’s marketing and selling today – Myles Norin (CEO), Matthew Turner (counsel), Addison Wiggin (chief of Agora Financial, its flagship subsidiary, and also heavily involved in Oxford Group, Michael Masterson (Mark Ford), Byron King, Alexander Greene, Mike Ward, Julia Guth, and many others, whose border-line promotions were all deconstructed by Christoph Amberger. Instead, Ryals tries to discredit Amberger’s whistle-blowing. No question Ryals has some kind of tie to Agora.

To make things clearer, Agora is not solely Bonner’s company but owned by several people, some of whom no doubt have axes to grind with others. Bonner himself might have enemies within the company, for partisan, financial or personal reasons.

Notice how Ryals only focuses on the Republicans in the group, like Bonner, presumably Casey, and Robert Bauman, who specializes in the admirable field of asset protection. Now, unlike the state-worshipping fraud Ryals,  I would love to believe Bob Bauman is a really good asset protector (aka money-launderer), but, alas, if he is not what he seems (and I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest that), he is much more likely to be an IRS/DOJ honey-pot, if I know how these things work.

That’s what I believe large parts of the  asset-protection racket really is about, when it’s not about espionage and government-related money-laundering.

That might include the over-hyped Simon Black, who also seems to be a part of the LRC-Agora crew and constantly tells people that Singapore is a great place for financial security, when anyone who even researches the matter in a skimpy way will figure out that Singapore is crawling with Mossad and CIA.

NWO resistance indeed.

Anyone boosting simplistic asset protection, or simplistic encryption like Tor (heavens!) is simply pushing people into US govt supervised encryption. But, then, maybe that’s the idea.

ORIGINAL POST

The Daily Bell argues that the Ron Paul-Lewis Lehrman connection is meaningless (links to follow):

“Worse, in our humble opinion, whenever such issues arise these days, the dissemblers come out in force to attack the world’s only apparently honest politician, US Congressman Ron Paul, for working with Lewis Lehrman.

It is true that when Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman served (with many others) on a US Gold Commission during the Reagan years they wrote a minority report recommending a return to some sort of gold standard.

But Ron Paul certainly didn’t seek Lehrman out to write the report. He wrote it with Lehrman because Lehrman was on the committee. Ron Paul, of course, went on to call for a regime of competing currencies, which is something we’re partial to.”

Comment:

This would be a whole lot more credible if  The Daily Bell itself didn’t call out people on just as tenuous evidence, in much more black and white terms than I have ever done.

It also doesn’t help that the Bell dismisses critics of Paul as dissemblers.

Why?

What’s wrong with criticizing a politician who’s set up as the sole spokesman for libertarian issues?

Why would anti-state capitalists focus on a politician as their spokesman, in the first place?

What sense does that make?

Especially, when just a few days ago, the Bell raised no objection at all, when, in an interview on their site, Gerald Celente claimed Paul was “not a fighter” and had failed because he was not a fighter.

If that is the opinion of Paul’s friends, isn’t it natural that people on the paper-money team or outside the binary altogether (like me) would reach even more devastating conclusions?

I don’t believe most Paul critics are dissembling. I think they are genuinely disappointed and suspicious. I am too.

Three. The Bell loses credibility when it claims Paul is the “only honest politician in the world.”

That’s pure hyperbole.

I’m sure the Daily Bell doesn’t know “all the politicians in the world.” And Paul isn’t perfectly clean. There was rampant nepotism during his campaign. There was the alleged double-billing. There were other mis-steps.

They might all be minor. And the Lehrman connection might be innocuous too, but it’s not the only troubling thing that comes to mind.

Which brings me to my fourth point.

Paul has a long-standing relationship via Murray Rothbard with Agora Inc. and its founder, James Dale Davidson, about which I blogged in July (the first person to pull that little nugget up, I do believe….although, as soon as I say that, I’m sure a dozen quicky sites will pop up with the same information on them).

This is a very troubling connection, in my opinion.

The Agora Inc. network has  ties to Rockefeller-related groups, like the Peterson Institute. I blogged about that in 2009, January.

Now, I myself have once cited research produced by the Peterson.

[It’s in my piece on Krugman, at LRC, and the researcher was Anders Aslund, who was one of the advocates of privatization in the Soviet Union. Aslund was wrong about that,  although not the only one wrong, and certainly not the main one.]

But I post research from all over the place, and that is not an endorsement of the authors’ other works or of the websites carrying the research.

Agora’s ties to the Peterson Institute, however, are a bit more relevant and important than my posting or quoting someone once, casually.

The I.O.U.S.A film (a spin-off from Agora’ “Empire of Debt,” Wiley, 2005) was promoted nationally by the Peterson Institute. Some of the positions Agora supports are consonant with Pete Peterson’s interests, although I do believe most people at Agora are anti-state libertarians, whereas Peterson is no more than a  crony capitalist.

This is what I wrote in my 2009 blog post  about the Peterson connection:

“Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.

IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!”

Agora also promotes things like “peak oil,” which I don’t find persuasive, being a long-time believer in the abiotic origin of oil.

These positions are  accompanied by promotions throughout its marketing network from which it stands to gain financially, either directly or indirectly.

That surely calls into question the credibility of the positions of anyone deeply connected to them.

Is Paul connected to them in a serious way?

{Added, August 25: Obviously, Agora has also supported anti-war positions that have not won it popularity, so I should give them credit for that and I do.

But I also recognize that the “anti-war” position has a place in the permissible range of public opinion, as long as on crucial issues and events  antiwar advocates develop laryngitis. This strategy, devised by the intelligence services, ensures that there is “cognitive diversity” among critics of war and the police state that gives the appearance of a “liberal” political culture, while actually permitting them little impact.  It siphons off the energy, time, money, and ambition of perhaps 95% of activists and effectively marginalizes the rest. Zahir Ebrahim has written extensively about this at his depressing but honest website, Project HumanBeingsFirst.]

Besides the tie-in to the establishment via Peterson/Rockefeller and besides the commercial imperative which undermines the sincerity of its positions, there are also Rothschild connections to Agora.

First, Rothschild interests are now directly connected to Rockefeller interests, by a recent merger (which I’ve blogged a couple of times).

Second, there are also direct connections between the Rothschilds and Agora.

I wasn’t sure about some of those, a couple of years ago.

In fact, I thought the allegation that Agora was a Rothschild front was only innuendo concocted at Executive Intelligence Review by ex-Larouchite, Bill Engdahl, who often doesn’t cite his sources and has once picked up leads from me without acknowledgement, likely because I come from the right

That’s why, even though I was disillusioned with Ron Paul by then, I didn’t place much stock in the Engdahl charge, especially when it was picked up on Jennifer Lake’s blog (see this blog post of March 10 2010) and then embellished with a lot of strange errors.  I felt the whole thing had to be some kind of disinformation. I certainly didn’t make any connection to Paul.  I thought it was a ploy to muddy more concrete legal issues. One can’t be prosecuted for being a Rothschild front, after all, but one can discredit one’s detractors by posing as one, since the whole Rothschild conspiracy is beyond the pale for mainstream analysts and writers. In fact, Lake’s silly comments, which I was forced to address because they libeled me, actually damaged the very thing she –  with typical arrogance – thought she was assisting – the public interest. In short, she forced me to state things that tipped off the very people she claimed I was covering for.

That’s why I even thought Agora itself was encouraging the story, a view shared by at least one other credible journalist. For the same reason, I suspect that Tony Ryals, the cyberbully behind all the negative postings about me, isn’t half as insane as he pretends to be. In fact, I think he has indirect ties to Agora himself, since he never mentions the people there who have actual legal responsibility there, like CEO Myles Norin, or their attorney, Matt Turner, or Agora Financial chief, Addison Wiggin, or some of their star traders, like Alan Knuckman.

[Sept 6 – this morning, I checked to find that Ryals’ posts referencing these comments of mine and thus referencing these individuals had been deleted or “disappeared.” Of course, just to make me a liar,  they might pop back. But it’s interesting that it’s impossible to stop Ryals’s libels, when it’s someone like me (or others, who aren’t in charge at Agora or whose crimes, if they committed any, are beyond the statute of limitations, but it’s easy enough to get him to remove comments about the people still there.]

Funnier still, Ryals never mentions a former senior employee, Christoph Amberger, whose blog about the company’s shenanigans (cons would be a better word from what I read) was shut down in 2011. Reportedly, this was after he was paid to keep his silence, that is, hold to a non-disclosure agreement under threat of litigation. All traces of his blog about the company’s marketing deceptions (GreenLaserReviews) were wiped off the net in a matter of days.

Instead of mentioning all this, Ryals, who even corresponded with Amberger (who smacked him down for the troll he is) waffles on about Davidson, who is safely beyond reach of prosecution, and, in any case, seems to have more than paid for any sins by his investigations into the Clinton mafia and his insights into the manipulation of the stock markets; Bonner, who probably has no legal liability, as he’s not an officer of the company, and is too wealthy, too cautious, too smart, and too well-connected to get into trouble anyway; and Stansberry, who is already damaged goods and unlikely to get hurt any worse by innuendo.

But leaving aside intriguing theories about the cyber-underworld in which Ryals and his rants reside, I’m still not sure what the Rothschild connections to Agora really amount to.  The best I can say is I’m much more willing to believe some people there profit from them.

Why did it take me so long to get to that point?

Because it’s only recently (over the last year) that I’ve had the time to dig around and find any kind of credible accounting of how the Rothschild family might be the financial juggernaut they are said to be on conspiracy sites.

[I got there by adding material posted at Project Humanbeingsfirst  to my own research into BCCI (via Engdahl, Skolnik, DeepBlackLies, Yamaguchi.com, Forbes.com, LBMA website and other material.]

Now that I’ve come to think the whole “Rothschild” conspiracy  is something more than fiction, I’ve also begun to look at Ron Paul with a more critical eye.

So that’s where I come from on that.

Now, for my own credibility on the subject, given that I too have a connection to Agora.

This is what I have to say.

Except for the attacks following my pieces on Assange (by an attention-seeking Assange groupie, Tom Usher at RealLiberalChristian) and a legal threat at DailyBell by another fanboy and blatant troll, calling himself Al Kyder, and a couple of other things), one hundred percent of  the negative posts about me on the net stem from this one supposedly crazy person, who seems to have an indirect connection to Agora.

And all the rest of the monitoring/hacking I’ve experienced stem from my fall-out with Agora too.

What was the monitoring/hacking about? Simple.

In 2008, I gave whatever information I had  about certain sensitive issues to responsible journalists and investigators.

There you have it. That’s why their campaign against me didn’t end with the resolution of my IP issues with the company.  In fact,  it’s the reason why the IP issue keeps festering.

Who likes to be joined at the hip to someone who’s outed them? Who likes to know that someone knows what they are capable of?

That is why they are so bent on isolating me, stirring up third parties against me, and minimizing my influence in every way possible.

Since then, I’ve been warned by good people to “leave it alone” or possibly become even more of a target.  And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s not because I’m interested in covering up anything for anyone.

It’s because I see no reason to second-guess the integrity, good faith, and sound judgment of what I’ve been told but take it as solid advice from people who know better than me. And  it’s because I believe more evil than good will come from ignoring that advice.

Especially as there’s another layer of complexity to this story.

Agora Inc. was also the last business association of former CIA director, William Colby, who  seemingly committed suicide some twenty years ago.

I say seemingly, because the suicide theory has been peddled only recently, and only by one of Colby’s sons. No one else believes it and there’s not much evidence for it.

Thus far, the official story has been  that it was an accident.

That sounds just as unlikely to me, as I blogged earlier.

Note: Ryals not only filched the Davidson-Chomsky-Rothbard connection from my blog (posted on July 20), as well as the information about Rees-Mogg’s and Colby’s Le Cercle and Pilgrim connections (which I got by discovering and researching the ISGP.EU site in detail),** he failed to link the post and then tried to pretend that I was covering up something about the Colby killing, when I’d  blogged about it as a murder, long ago, in 2010, and before that, in 2009. In fact, I’d been researching Mockingbird, MKUltra, mind-control, and sex-trauma as early as 2004, for my first book, where I have a couple of chapters on the material.

In 2005 I wrote a piece about former CIA director Stansfield Turner and Operation Gladio. It was around then that I also first heard about about Colby.

The fact that I ended up in the company where Colby once worked is one of those strange coincidences that “intention” pulls out of the universe.

And, far from covering up any of this, I’ve blogged repeatedly about it.

For instance, here’s my comment on an interview of Rees-Mogg there:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:59 AM

Sorry. Colby was Cercle and apparently also Opus Dei …

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:55 AM

Rees-Mogg is reportedly a member of Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Society, as well as the exclusive Roxburghe club – supposedly a very influential part of the Anglo-American establishment. He was backed by speculator and corporate raider, James Goldsmith, relative and close associate of the Rothschilds.

Allegations are made on the left that Rees-Mogg is closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Rees-Mogg is also closely tied to James Davidson, Bill Bonner, and Agora, through the Strategic Investment newsletter and other publications.

Through SI, he’s also linked to William Colby, ex CIA chief, also a Pilgrim Society member, if I’m not mistaken.

By link, I just mean there exists a relationship. It’s by no means clear how that actually plays out, if at all.

Colby was murdered (?) early 1990s. My best guess is it was related to the opening of CIA files with the Church Committee (much earlier)….and inter departmental fighting that resulted; there’s also a connection to a White House- related paedophilia scandal in Nebraska that got hushed up in a hurry. Some have linked that scandal to CIA mind-control operations but I haven’t seen anything conclusive about it. “

It always seemed plausible to me that Colby’s death was a political assassination, given his involvement in Operation Phoenix and Project Mockingbird, his testimony at the Church Committee hearings, his interest in the Nebraska pedophile ring, and his work for the intelligence-affiliated Nugan Hand bank (which had ties to BCCI).

I learned about Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Circle from ISGP.eu, and passed that onto the Bell, as well.

I posted the link to ISGP.eu at the Bell below a July 8, 2010 article

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 07/09/10 12:28 PM
Sorry. Two careless mistakes.

@John Treichler (not Treicher, as posted before).

The site is the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP.eu not ISGPU, as I wrote in a hurry). Written from a very left-wing perspective. Meticulously compiled.

[Note: ISGP eu was up when I posted the link, but googling for it today, I find that the domain is for sale and I find a post at Cryptogon, dating back to January of the same year (2010), saying that the site had disappeared, but that the writer at Cryptogon had saved the information from the google cache in the form of a zip file. However the link he had posted didn’t open to the ISGP.eu file at all. He claimed he had given it to Wikileaks for safe-keeping. I later found it at wikispooks.]

So, that’s my explanation of why the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman link isn’t quite enough; why there are other reasons to worry about Paul, such as his connections to Agora; why I was slow to start looking at Paul critically; what Agora’s ties to the Rothschilds might be; and what my connection to the whole business amounts to.

There’s one other thing. The Bell is also a part of the same Agora network to which Paul seems to have ties.

You won’t hear that from them, though.  It’s one of those little omissions that are troubling,  like the repositioning and revisionism that goes on on the site, at times.

For instance, in the same piece on the Lehrman tie, Wile writes that he knew Assange was disinformation right away.

Not so. He got that from me (see these comments below a piece at Infowars.com

as well as these comments below another piece there.

I was perhaps the only rightist anti-neocon to criticize Assange.

Other debunkers were Wayne Madsen (the first on the case) and Bill Engdahl, both on the left.

Neither of those two, by the way, assembled nearly as comprehensive a critique of Wikileaks as I did.

And I know that research had an impact, because  the Guardian ran a piece derived from it shortly after (picking up on the John Shipton lead) and an Australian academic wrote a paper repositioning the cypherpunk association (deconstructed in my pieces) into a narrative more favorable to their man.

Wile relied on that research, as well as material on Gordon Duff’s site, in changing his opinion. Then he exaggerated and ended up with a kind of parody of my criticism of Assange.

This he tends to do, which allows an opening to people like Fed regulator, William Black, whom Wile once made the mistake of criticizing. Black reacted with a petty and surprisingly  personal attack, but, when you distort people’s positions, you have to expect vehement reactions.

Wile’s subtle perception management has even caught the attention of many contributors to the Bell, including pro-Paulian goldbugs like Bionic Mosquito and Leonardo Pisano, as well as paper-money anti-Paulians like FauxCapitalist and Memehunter.

Why does he do it? Most likely as a way for the site to stay viable on the net, while conspiracy mongering, or perhaps, as a way to manage the reactions of readers and associates. Nothing wrong with that, but, still, it’s unsettling and tends to make people suspicious.

It’s why I stopped posting on their forum, despite my gratitude to them. for providing a useful and unusual venue for discussions.

I also do respect Wile’s courage in tackling material people usually avoid for fear of losing their credibility.

So the Bell does get a lot of props from me for bravery and unique content, yes, but I also see them as compromised by their financial ties. The same goes for some other libertarian sites I still read.

Other pluses: Wile is almost always polite and he is not as Eurocentric in his thinking as some others.

I should add that I’m not one of those who think he’s running a limited hang-out himself.  Or, at least, he is doing it less than most.

Some final thoughts:

First, about Colby and Agora.

Colby had so many enemies that it would be hard to narrow down who murdered him, if he was murdered, without a lot more evidence being uncovered. But no one in officialdom or intelligence is likely to want to do that. And only a fool or a martyr would venture into that territory alone.

About the Agora connection (and, through them, to Paul):

Colby’s name appeared on Agora’s long-running Strategic Investments newsletter, with which the Rothschild-related Rees Mogg is/was affiliated, along with long-time anti-tax advocate, electronic counterfeiting (anti-Naked Short Selling) critic, and Forbes/Scaife protege, James Dale Davidson.

Davidson, Rothbard, and Chomsky all worked together in the 1970s, in antiwar activism, which by itself means little or nothing. Many ideological foes make common cause on single issues.

But, it was not “by itself,” as the evidence shows.

At least one of Paul’s writers (the guy who wrote the race realist pamphlets) is directly tied to Agora.

Paul himself has been incessantly promoted by Agora, until very recently, when affiliates and associates began promoting a few anti-Paul libertarians, like Wendy McElroy, N. Stephen Kinsella, and even Stephan Molyneux, who appeared briefly on the Doug Casey website, and then was pushed out.

It was also from Agora Inc. that I first heard of Ron Paul.

Casey, like Jeff Berwick and what looks like a majority of the hard-money community, is himself closely tied to the Agora network by business affiliation.

So also, as I said earlier,  the Daily Bell, with its multiple banking and gold community associations.

These ties may or may not mean anything nefarious, but they would certainly limit what the Bell, or any other libertarian writer in this circle, would be willing or able to say publicly.

Which means I really can’t trust someone in that circle to be too forthcoming about Paul, since they all share business networks.

That is simply common-sense.

Even I have had a hard time writing about Agora’s network, even though all I did was write and do some research there, and the only person I really worked with was Bill Bonner.

To put it as simply as possible for all the trolls who still can’t read my actual words, let alone between my words:

It is difficult to write critically about people with whom you have had personal and professional relationships; who have accessed your personal and business records (illegally).

It is even more difficult when their employees work and live close to where you work and live and they are native-born, while you are an immigrant.

It becomes impossible when the political and economic context is a multi-front global military and economic war, in which your motherland is also involved, and not always as an ally; when the legal and media environment of your adopted country is totalitarian; when your family lives abroad and you are self-employed and modestly well-off, while they have tens of millions of dollars behind them, are connected to intelligence and financial elites, have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers and friends to whom they can outsource their efforts, and when they are marketing, financial, and political players on a global scale.

If that is true of me, how much more is it true of the hard-money community, which is completely encompassed by the Agora network?

I don’t expect any of them to pipe up with anything but support for Ron Paul. They will alienate their business associates, otherwise.

I hope that explains why I don’t think the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman tie is sufficient by itself.

I say this as someone who took a long time to open their eyes about Paul.

Which person likes to think they’ve been had? Or, that establishment critics mightn’t be entirely off-base in their criticism of Paul?

As far back as 2008, I heard some mutterings from loyal fans of Paul but said nothing, hoping it was all minor or a mistake.

I even took the part of the LRC crowd against the WSJ in a lengthy blog post.

[As far as that WSJ incident goes, I still stand by the piece ]

In 2010 I spoke up about my dissatisfaction with Paul’s positions at the Daily Bell forum.

I didn’t want to, because I knew Paul supporters would get annoyed by it, but credibility is very important to anyone writing about politics. It should be more important than pleasing the team.

Then, a few people who’ve wanted to discredit me for supporting libertarian positions(albeit nuanced and rather more conservative ones than that of the anarcho-caps), or for criticizing Assange (albeit in a most circumspect and balanced way than his other detractors), or for deconstructing Ron Paul and his libertarian promoters (albeit factually and with respect), have tried to claim that I’m covering up for this or that person.

The truth is exactly the opposite. I’ve been libeled, monitored, and undermined covertly, almost continuously since 2007.  I’ve also been plagiarized repeatedly and marginalized.

I don’t really believe the government was behind any of that, except maybe at a very low level, in so far as some petty operatives might have been employed by my enemies to do the dirty work.

So, there is no cover up on my part. Or paranoia.  What I say is not a lie. It’s not propaganda. It’s not a smear or anything but the most truth it is possible, helpful, and advisable for anyone in my position to speak.

For the umpteenth time, I’m not RAW, nor CIA, nor Jihadi, nor Hindu fascist. I’m just a writer, with a lot of interests, an eclectic background, and too much curiosity and impetuosity for her own good.

It was a meaningful synchronicity that I got involved in the whole business. I don’t say that to promote myself,  create a mystery, or confuse the situation. I say it because that is really how it happened.

There are mysteries of “intention,” “attraction,” and the cycles of time.  And they have nothing to do with “dissembling”, “disinformation,” or “RAW”.

The innuendos by Jennifer Lake, Tony Ryals, and Tom Usher are simply smears, even if they are understandable smears.

There really are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio…

Ron Paul and Herman Cain Only Non-Deadbeats

LRC blog comments on a Politico piece about presidential dead-beats (“Presidential also-rans stiff small businesses, ” David Leventhall and Robin Bravender, Politico, July 29, 2011):


Politico goes down the list of shame, but for some reason neglects to mention the one non-deadbeat, Ron Paul.

Comment:

Ron Paul wasn’t mentioned, true. But why did Lew Rockwell emphasize Bachmann? The Politico piece emphasized her too and buried the Democrat names at the back.

It also buried Herman Cain’s notable difference from the crowd. He paid his vendors personally and ended up being owed by his own campaign, as well as Gingrich’s.

Even Bachmann was actually less in debt to vendors than the other candidates (under a million compared to multiple millions for the others, all of whom are richer than she was).

So why would a former paleo-libertarian pick on Bachmann?

Pandering to the left?

Murray Rothbard: Hooray For Che!

File under ideological insanity – Rothbard gives props to the people’s poseur, Che Guevara, whom even the anarchist left today has rejected:

“What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of “professional revolutionary.” And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.

Trained as a physician in Argentina, witnessing CIA-fomented counter-revolution by the thug Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Guevara dedicated the rest of his life to the Revolution. He found a promising field first in Cuba, where, as everyone knows, Che was second only to Fidel Castro in waging and then winning the revolution there.”

and this:

But in his mighty heart Che could not refrain from leaping a whole raft of stages, from plunging romantically but recklessly into the premature adventure of armed struggle in Latin America. And so, with tragic irony, Che Guevara, in his daring and courage, was betrayed by the very Bolivian peasantry whom he was trying to liberate, and who barely understood the meaning
of the conflict. Che died from violating his own principles of revolutionary war.

And this, enthusiastically quoting from Fidel Castro’s praise of Che:

“Newspapers of all tendencies have univermlly recognized Che’s virtues… . He is an almost unique example of how a man could win the recognition and respect of his enemies, of the very enemies he faced with his arms in his hands, of those who have been ideological enemies and have nevertheless expressed feelings of admiration and of respect toward Che.”

Murray Rothbard, “Ernesto Che Geuvara: RIP,” Mises.org http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_3/3_3_1.pdf

See also this article from a strict anarcho-capitalist position about Rothbard’s misrepresentation of his views to placate or mislead followers: The 10 Points Of The Libertarian Party Abolitionist Caucus.pdf.

Note – My main objection to an-cap positions is that they are easily manipulated by the state (national and transnational) for its own ends. An an-cap world is possible, but only spottily.

Now, in contrast to Rothbard’s glowing portrait, here is a more candid assessment of Che’s actual record from the anarchistlibrary.org (Che Guevara: why anarchists should view him critically):

Organise, Issue 47, Winter 1997/1998
flag.blackened.net

QUOTE: “After all, the Che cult is still used to obscure the real nature of Castro’s Cuba, one of the final bastions of Stalinism.”

QUOTE: “He demanded the death penalty for “informers, insubordinates, malingerers and deserters.” He himself personally carried out executions. Indeed the first execution carried out against an informer by the Castroists was undertaken by Che. He wrote: “I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain.” On another occasion he planned on shooting a group of guerrillas who had gone on hunger strike because of bad food. Fidel intervened to stop him. Another guerrilla who dared to question Che was ordered into battle without a weapon!”

QUOTE: “With the Castroite victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro, was put in charge of building up state control. He purged the army, carried out re-education classes within it, and was supreme prosecutor in the executions of Batista supporters, 550 being shot in the first few months. He was seen as extremely ruthless by those who saw him at work. These killings against supporters of the old regime, some of whom had been implicated in torture and murder, was extended in 1960 to those in the working class movement who criticised the Castro regime. The anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their press closed down and many militants were thrown in prison. Che was directly implicated in this.”

QUOTE: “Photo opportunities with the peasantry and proletariat, good looks and a dramatic death in no way exonerate him from his historical role in the suppression of the popular classes, state terror and capitalism, and changing Cuba from the semi-colony of one great power the US, to another, the USSR.”

QUOTE: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing” “Hate will be an element of the battle, a merciless hate for the enemy, that will inspire the guerrilla-soldier to superhuman efforts of strength and changes him into an effective, violent, selected, in cold blood killing machine”

The Truth About Dragan Mihailovich and Serbia’s Chetniks

Statement by Richard L. Felman, USAF, in front of the Serb National Federation, on July 7, 1987 and entered into the Congressional Record on Draga Mihailovic and the Serb Chetniks on November 19, 1987

President Stone, Reverend Clergy, Distinguished quests, members of the SNF, and fellow Chetniks:

Moja braco i sestre, (“my brothers and sisters” in Serbian language)

May I first express my deep appreciation to President Stone and all members of the Serb National Federation for inviting me to your 3 Day Serbian Day Weekend. I know it is a most important event and I am delighted you have asked me to share it with you.

Chetnik leader
General Draža Mihajlovi?

Before getting into my speech I would like to acknowledge how appreciated it is that today (July 17th) is the very day in 1946 that General Mihailovich lost his life to a Communist Firing Squad. I say it is appropriate because were it not for Draza Mihailovich and the Grace of God, I would not be shading here before you today. I have said it before and will say it again: I owe my very life to General Mihailovich, the Chetniks and the Serbian people and because of this whenever I get together with the Serbian people it is like a family reunion and fill me with much emotion. If I may state it as simply as possible: “OO MOM SERTZU YA SAM SERBEEN.” (This is the pronunciation script of “U mom srcu ja sam Srbin” – in Serbian or “In my heart I am a Serb” – in English.)

My feelings, however, go far deeper then just gratitude for saving my life. I say that because when I was shot down in Yugoslavia, I had the opportunity to know first hand what truly remarkable people the Serbians are … and the bond of brotherhood that we formed during the war continues to this day. In every Serb I met I always found a sense of honor and sense of freedom that is second to none … and in this day and age I feel privileged to know people who still maintain these values and have such a strong commitment to their God, their family and their heritage.

I was in England a while ago to celebrate the European Chetnik Congress and Karageorgevich Day. Needless to say the Serbian Hospitality and food were out of this world. But the outstanding part of my visit was meeting with the Serbian Youth and seeing how intense they were about carrying on their priceless heritage… Their parents told them about the American Airmen that Mihailovich had rescued but I was the first one they met and their questions were endless. I spent a great deal of time with them and came away inspired by their enthusiasm.

I am reminded of them as I see the young people in the audience today. If I may I would like to say to them: “Thank God you were blessed with such a proud heritage. I saw with my own eyes the blood shed by your parents and grandparents just so it could be passed on to you .. Be proud of this priceless treasure you have and preserve it the rest of your days… So many of today’s youth are troubled and searching for answers in many strange ways. You have all the answers you need right here in your own church and your own heritage.”

So much for the Sunday Sermon, and now I would like to tell you of my first introduction to the Serbian people an how I won my Ravna Gora Badge as an honorary Chetnik. The one good thing the Germans did during WWII was shoot me down, giving me a chance to meet the Serbian people. During World War II, I was returning from an air raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Roumania when my B-24 Bomber was attacked by German ME-109s over Yugoslavia. We managed to shoot down two of them before my pane caught fire and we were forced to bail out from 20,000 feet.

As soon as I landed I was immediately surrounded by about 20 Chetniks all shouting “Amerikanski”… Before I knew it they each took turns hugging and kissing me (only the men mind you, not the women). As my leg was bleeding, they carried me to a nearby kucha (house in Serbian) for treatment. They had no medical supplies, but they did have a bottle of slivovitza [Serbian plum brandy] and used it to clean my wound… Once that was done, we all sat around and drank what was left in the bottle.

Shortly after that, an elderly man about ninety motioned for me to follow him. I had no idea what he wanted but limped after him until we came to a small wooden chapel. He then got down on his knees, clasped his hand in prayer and motioned for me to kneel down beside him. It was a most unforgettable sight! Here we were: strangers from 2 different countries, we spoke two different languages and practiced two different religions. But in those few moments we were united as brothers kneeling to give thanks for my rescue to the one God we all worship: It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

It would be impossible for me to relate all the many wonderful things the Chetniks and the Serbian people did for me and my fellow American fliers. As our numbers increased, each man would tell of his own personal experiences. They told how the people went hungry in order to give them what little food they had. How many of them slept on the floor so that the Airmen could have the comfort of their beds. How they risked their lives to protect us from the German patrols. Not once did I hear anything but the highest praise from the 500 Americans rescued by General Mihailovich………

….Before getting into the concluding part of my speech, I would like to make brief mention of a matter of a personal nature which is added reason for my admiration of the Serbian people.

Besides being one of the American Airmen rescued, by the Serbian people, I am also a Jew! It is a matter of historical fact that Serbia was one of the very few countries where anti-Semitism was not permitted.

In the old kingdom of Serbia, and later in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Jews were, by law, equal members of the community and enjoyed all the rights and privileges of other citizens. This is so very remarkable when you consider the persecution of the Jewish people throughout history.

The historical goodwill between the Serbs and the Jews does not seem strange when you consider the many parallels in our history. We both suffered cruel persecution, both have been driven from our homeland and today we are both dispersed throughout the world.

One other amazing similarity is that both our peoples fought battles to the death for their belief in the freedom and dignity of man. The Jews at Masada and the Serbs in Kosovo.

In keeping with this same love of freedom, many Serbs risked their lives during World War II to save countless Jews from Nazi death camps. This is something we can never forget and for which I and The Jewish People will always be grateful……


Permit me to read what President Truman had to say in awarding him the highest combat award our nation can bestow on a foreign national:

“LEGION OF MERIT – CHIEF COMMANDER: General Dragoljub Mihailovich distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslavian Army Forces and later as Minister of War by Organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy which occupied Yugoslavia, from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovich and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies, and fighting under extreme hardships, contributed materially to the Allied cause, and were instrumental in obtaining a final Allied victory. March 29, 1948. Harry S. Truman.”


We now know that from this day forward there is a symbol on American soil that established a permanent bond between Gen. Mihailovich, President Truman and 500 grateful Americans… and it is here for all the world to see!

Since the end of WWII we have made great strides in trying to repay our debt of honor to the man who saved our lives. Permit me to read just a partial list of those who have joined us in support of General Mihailovic:
Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan;
The United States Senate;
hundreds of United States Congressmen;
the Secretary of the Air Force, Thomas Reed;
The Department of Interior;
The National Capital Memorial Advisory Committee;
the United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Laurence Silberman;
the Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Clement Zablocki;
a United States Commission of Inquiry;
the Arizona State Senate;
the governors of Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Texas;
the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley;
Bishops Firmilian, Iriney and Manning;
John Wayne;
The American Legion;
Polish War Veterans;
George Meany and the AFL-CIO;
the Teamsters Union;
The Heritage Foundations;
The Coalition for America;
The New Your Times;
Washington Post and Washington Times,
Toronto Sun, Christian Science Monitor, etc., etc…

And this is only a partial list. Incredible as it may sound, the only ones in the entire world who have not supported and continue to oppose us are the Communist Government of Yugoslavia and our own State Department….

..  What is even more bizarre is that our own State Department chose to take sides against us (its own combat veterans) and side with a Communist government that openly supports and justifies international terrorism.[LR: Tito’s government]

Bob Stone was there in the hearing room and I’m sure he can tell you more about the most incredible alliance of opponents American ever had to face in their own country. Had this been a court of law, the opposition would have been thrown out as completely irrelevant – but this was the political arena where truth takes a back seat to what is politically expedient.

If even the slightest semblance of doubt existed as to what the truth was, it was exploded beyond all recognition when the Encyclopedia Britannica published its revised account of Gen. Mihailovich and the CIA released (under the Freedom of Information Act) the previously unpublished top secret intelligence file on the activities of all parties in Yugoslavia during WWII. Here was the on-the-scene American intelligence reports to the President of the United States exposing all the propaganda lies that have stood in our way since 1944. If ever there was a smoking gun, this was it. And those who still insist on the propaganda fairy tale about Mihailovich’s collaboration, I suggest they join hands with those who believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and the flat earth theory.

Now that we have the top secret CIA Intelligence File an the same opposition continues to stand in our way, the American Airmen are publicly offering to pay the sum of $100,000 to the United States Government if the State Department or any of Mihailovich’s political opponents can prove in an American court of law the treacherous lies they continue to make against him in opposing our petition before Congress.

What’s more, if they have any respect for the service to the United States of America, the American Veteran represents, I suggests they should speak up now or forever hold their peace. We do not have another 40 years. You can bet your life we are justifiably outraged and fighting mad. Quite frankly, even if our offer were for ten times that amount, we have no fear it will ever be accepted. Under the close scrutiny of an American Court, the facts contained in the CIA file would prove to be an embarrassment and even humiliation to all those parties who continue to oppose us…..”

Richard L. Felman is president of the National Committee of American Airmen Rescued by General Mihailovich).

Reagan Revisionism From The Left

The Daily Bell has a good piece by Paul Craig Roberts about the continual historical revisionism that blames everything on Reagan.

Salient points excerpted:

1. Reagan most certainly is not to blame for the financial crisis or for the neoconservative wars for American hegemony.

The Reagan administration’s interventions in Grenada and Nicaragua were not, as is sometimes claimed, precursors to Clinton’s war on Serbia and the Bush and Obama wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, with more waiting in the wings. Reagan saw his interventions in the context of the Monroe Doctrine, not as an opening bid for world hegemony.

The purpose of Reagan’s interventions was to convince the Soviets that there would be no more territorial gains for communism. The interventions were part of Reagan’s strategy of bringing the Soviets to the table to negotiate the end of the cold war.

2. When Reagan understood what the Israelis had lured him into in Lebanon, he pulled out. Reagan opposed war as an instrument of American hegemony. It is the neoconservatives who use war to achieve hegemony. Reagan was not a neoconservative.

3. The first business of the new Reagan administration was to complete the Carter administration’s plan to save autoworker jobs by imposing quotas on imports of Japanese cars. Reagan did this even though it demoralized his conservative free trade supporters. Reagan got no thanks from the left who denounced him instead for bailing out his Republican buddies in the auto business.

4. I still hear from readers hostile to Reagan that Reagan’s firing of the illegally striking air traffic controllers is proof that he was a “union buster.” One sometimes feels sorry for people who have so little grasp of politics. For a new president to let himself be rolled up by a poorly-advised, illegally-striking public sector union would have rendered Reagan impotent and without the power to achieve his ambitious agenda of changing the economic and foreign policies of the US. Even Reagan’s court historians do not realize Reagan’s extraordinary achievements in economic and foreign policy.

5. It wasn’t Reagan’s agenda that was anti-left; it was the rhetoric Reagan used in order to keep the conservative base in line. Conservatives did not understand supply-side economics any better than did the economics profession and Wall Street. Conservatives wanted a balanced budget, which is their solution to every economic problem. Reagan was talking about a 30% reduction in marginal tax rates (the rate of tax applied to increases in income) and about faster depreciation schedules for capital investments.

What this meant to conservatives was more budget deficits. Wall Street never lobbied me to repeal Glass-Steagall, but Wall Street did lobby me to water down the Reagan tax rate reductions.

[LR: exactly. The financial world is left-oriented because they benefit most from finagling money/banking and not from tax reductions aimed at the manufacturing and non-financial business sector]

5. On the cold war front, conservatives were very suspicious of negotiating with the Soviets. Some conservatives put out the story that Gorbachev was the anti-christ, that he would take Reagan to the cleaners and we would all end up living under the red flag of communism.

[LR: Well, they got that half right]

6. Reagan did not cut back government or abolish the welfare state.

7.  If all the uninformed people who ranted about “Reagan deficits” and “tax cuts for the rich” had bothered to educate themselves about the policy that they so desperately wanted to demonize, a wider understanding of the Reagan era might have created an audience among Washington policymakers for writings by myself and others who stressed, to no effect, the adverse impact of jobs offshoring on the economy. Instead, this cancer, masquerading as the benefits of free trade, has gone untreated for 20 years.

8. The Presidents Working Group on Financial Markets, created in the last year of the Reagan administration, was labeled the “plunge protection team” by the Washington Post. The Working Group consists of the Treasury Secretary, Federal Reserve Chairman, and the financial regulators….. If speculators were indeed gaming the market at the expense of pension funds, IRAs, and long term investors, the government might have felt obliged to come up with new regulations or to use moral suasion or even direct intervention in order to protect legitimate investors from the greed of speculators. If speculators short the market and the Federal Reserve buys long, the shorts don’t pan out for the speculators.

How the Working Group has evolved since 1988 I do not know.

However, it is absurd to blame Reagan for the Federal Reserve’s different use or misuse of the Working Group twenty-four years later, if that is indeed what is occurring.

Elite Mouthpiece Taunts Ron Paul On Failure Of Fed Campaign

Added July 21, 2012:

How did I see the confrontation? I thought Paul did as well as anyone could in the time given. Except for a few word slips, he was pretty cogent and effective. Bernanke looked discomfited in the middle, when he was questioned about the transfer of authority from Congress to the Fed and when the issue of secrecy was brought up. Other than that, he was impassive and spoke little.  Paul wasn’t “subdued” at all. I don’t watch all his videos, but I’ve seen him a number of times in debate, and that was fairly straightforward Paul. If there was a white flag, I didn’t see it.

If he wasn’t as combative as some seem to think, it’s most likely because it’s his last such confrontation. He’s retiring, I’m told. Too bad.

I thought it was a fairly effective performance and a good wrap up of his major arguments. I think if you’d known nothing about the Fed until then, you would have got the salient points of the anti-Fed argument: he described Bretton Woods,  exchange-rate and interest-rate manipulation; big government financing through debt; transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the wealthy; malinvestment; money supply expansion versus CPI inflation; the housing bubble; and the need for Congressional oversight.

I wouldn’t call it a knock-out, simply because Bernanke was so impassive through out.

That of course helps the media to reframe the confrontation anyway it suits them. Which is what Dana Milbank promptly did.

Paul Vs. Bernanke video

“Ron Paul Vs. Bernanke: final battle ends on surprising note,” David Grant, Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2012

“Ron Paul Has The Final Say,” Bob Adelman, New American, July 19, 2012

ORIGINAL POST

Skull & Bones affiliated establishment journalist Dana Milbank taunts Ron Paul about the end of the “End the Fed” campaign in a piece entitled, “Ron Paul Fed Up With Trying To End The Fed” (Washington Post, July 18, 2012)

Well, I have plenty of problems with the whole Ron Paul movement these days (for a view from a Paul supporter see  this:), but the piece does more than criticize Paul.

What it does is gloat.

Here are some lines from it, with my parsing.:

“He didn’t even make a dent in it.”

[LR: The Fed is unassailable]

“…Paul raised the white flag.”

[LR: The Fed has won…]

“For the fiery Paul, it was a subdued surrender.”

[LR: So now you know how powerful we really are, old man.]

“….treating him with the cautious affection one might use to address a crazy uncle.”

[LR: You didn’t reach the point where we’d have to assassinate you, so we’ll just let people know that you and your supporters can’t be taken seriously.]

“But Paul faded away with surprising deference.”

[LR: Yes. He’s under our thumb. We call the shots. He knows what’s good for him, so he’s fading away.]

“The one substantial challenge to Bernanke — Paul’s “audit the Fed” bill, which the House is expected to approve next week before it dies in the Senate — was easily dispatched by the Fed chairman,”

[LR: Audit the Fed is croaking.]

“The Paul to Bernanke word ratio this time was 12 to 1.”

[LR: He’s just a rambling  old man. Real men don’t talk, they print.]

“There’s no constitutional reason why Congress couldn’t just take over monetary policy,” he said. “But I’m advising you that it wouldn’t be very good from an economic policy point of view.”

[LR: We’re the constitutionalists, not you. Audit the Fed is only about Congress taking over monetary policy, folks. Imagine! They can’t run a post office. How do you think they’re going to do with deep stuff like economics?]

“”At this point, the committee chairman cut him off. Paul’s time had expired.”

[LR: We’ve put up with you long enough, grandpa. Your time’s up. The game is over.]

The framing of the whole piece is quite masterful. There is not one substantial piece of analysis about the actual policies in question. We are not told what is involved in either “End the Fed” or “Audit the Fed.”

We are instead given information about procedure….rules regarding how bills go through the house, and how speakers get to speak. A contrast is set up between the grave, measured proceedings of the state and the law (the constitution) and the self-indulgent rambling of an aging politician.

The roles are reversed.

Paul becomes the political class. Bernanke becomes the embodiment of the constitution and of law.

From beginning to end we’re told how to think about what’s going on.

This is what we’re supposed to think:

Bernanke is sage, powerful and indulgent.

Paul is a crazy old man, who doesn’t know the elements of civility….or the constitution.

He’s an anti-government politician, but he’s for the government control of the money supply.

He cuts into other people’s time. He rambles on. He talks too much.

Paul is just a “supplicant” before the great Fed chairman. The final word is with the Fed.

So, even though he gets his fifteen minutes, it’s clear Paul doesn’t really understand the constitution or money.

And he’s for the government!

Notice how the piece distorts Paul’s position to make it look as if “Audit the Fed” (Paul’s fall-back position from “End the Fed”) is about putting arcane and complex professional matters into the hands of politicians.

Milbank turns Bernanke into the “private” expert and Paul into the bumbling government man.

That is sure to appeal to Americans of every political stripe. The average reader would immediately distrust anyone who intends to subject policies about the country’s money-supply to ignorant legislators driven by partisan bias.

What that does is clear.

It turns the  whole anti-government argument against anti-government activists.

It also turns  the pro-constitution argument against constitutionalists.

This is propaganda of the highest order.

Legendary Journalist, Alexander Cockburn, Dies Of Cancer

L.A.Time reports (h/t David Kramer, LRC) some sad news:

“Alexander Cockburn, the leftist journalist, has died. The 71-year-old had been living in Berlin and fighting cancer.

Cockburn was the co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the political newsletter Counterpunch. On the publication’s blog, St. Clair writes, “Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy.” Cockburn was a dedicated leftist; St. Clair described him as “friend and comrade.”

Jeff St. Clair describes him writing and publishing right through chemotherapy until the end.

This is really too bad.  I used to write quite a bit for Counterpunch, but stopped during the financial crisis, because I felt my views on economics weren’t in synch with theirs. But I’ve never stopped reading their combative and committed writing.  Both were good friends of India, as well. And both collaborated successfully on some of the most seminal works on propaganda and intelligence.

As long back as I can remember Alex  Cockburn defined smart, rowdy journalism, not afraid to roll up its sleeves and sock it to them, but always with wit and panache.  He will be sorely missed.

Ron Paul Dithering Suspiciously About Romney

Oh dear. I told you Ron Paul has been looking worse by the minute these past few months.

See this from Politico (h/t Wenzel):

“Asked on the Fox Business Network’s “After the Bell” on Thursday if he will cast his ballot for Romney, Paul responded, “I’ve not made a decision.”

Look, he seems to be a nice man. He’s cleaner than most people in politics. He’s been a huge name-draw for millions and brought attention to major issues that are important to anyone opposed to war and empire or the bankster regime.

But, am I deaf, an anti-white racist, an Indian spy or a potential terrorist, if I say the obvious – these are weasel words….. at least to my brown ears.

And I blogged about Paul’s weasel words before.

What’s difficult about saying NO?

As in, not, nein, nope, nah, nay, nada, nyet, noway, nohow,untilhellfreezesoverbuster

And what’s with Romney tweeting “audit the fed”

This is co-option central!

Thousands Attend Cremation Of Bollywood Legend, Rajesh Khanna

Rajesh Khanna, who died yesterday, was the biggest Bollywood star ever until Amitabh Bhachchan.

Khanna was cremated in Vila Parle in Mumbai, as thousands of people followed the cavalcade in the monsoon rains. Present at the cremation was Bachchan, a big fan himself, who complained that the huge crowd had come out to see the dozens of film stars at the funeral and not Khanna.

Khanna made some 120 films and had millions of fans who mobbed him each time he set foot outside his house. Known as India’s leading heart throb, Khanna had female fans who were known to marry pictures of him and write his name in blood.

Thus has India been ruled since independence.  Escapist film spectaculars and star-gazing for the impoverished millions, a form of narcotics.  For the intellectual and bureaucratic ruling-class, there is a different kind of escape, the coconut political/literary circles funded by the West and dominated by its ideologies, all shot-through with the malevolent intent of western state-craft, ceaseless in its goal of total dominion.

The masses of middle-class people who actually create value in society, remain invisible to a Western world fed a diet of media hype alternating between jet-setting  maharajas, models, and tycoons on one hand, and slums, sex-gurus, and call-centers on the other.

Obama Birth Certificate A Forgery, Says Sheriff Arpaio

Update (July 20): The Daily Bell has an interesting theory that this whole controversy might be engineered to rescue Obama in public perception. Their reasoning is that Sheriff Arpaio is himself a polarising figure guilty of many controversial practices and making him the center piece of the storm over the certificate (which broke in 2008) might be an clever way to diffuse the scandal. Additional proof for this theory is that the forgery itself is so clumsy that people have been speculating it was intended as a trap.

Well, well, well. Lookee here (chuckle, and h/t EPJ)…

Turns out Barack Obama’s birth certificate is definitely forged.

“I have to respect the science of document examination and the evidence there points to the forgery pictured above.  There are also serious signs that the forger of the Obama birth certificate released by the White House did not understand codes and numbers associated with the document.  Analysis of the numbers and code revealed that the document is not genuine.  The evidence is more than compelling.

The biggest error came as a result of the age of the document forger.  He or she was obviously too young to be aware of correct terms used to classify what we today call African-Americans. The creator of the phony document listed Obama’s race as African.  That is a huge red flag because that term was not applied as a race title until well into the 1980’s.  That term and the moniker, Black would have been considered politically incorrect and racist back when Obama was born.  The proper term throughout history until the late 1970’s was Negro. The government did not change this until well into the 1980s.

“Additionally the United States government standardized the acceptable terms for all identification documents.  Eventually Negro became an apparent derogatory term that sensitive politically correct Americans abandoned in the 1980’s.

This so-called birth certificate document was the product of a criminal conspiracy.  It needs to be investigated by Congress and the State of Hawaii.   The problem here is politics prevents the orderly administration of justice.  Democratic politicians have total control and are breaking the law by obstructing justice. “

Comment:

President Obama’s release of a long form birth certificate in April 2011 didn’t assuage his critics. They insisted it was forged.

The persistence of such doubts, die-hard Obama defenders in the media replied, was yet another yahoo conspiracy by bitter clingers.

Here are some reminders of what the mainstream said (courtesy of wikipedia):

Michael Tomasky called it racial paranoia “Birthers and the persistence of racial paranoia” The Guardian (London) April 27, 2011

[A guy called Tomasky would never express racial paranoia, I suppose]

Dan Vergano said it was racial prejudice, “Study: racial prejudice plays role in Obama citizenship views”. USA Today, May 1, 2011

[USA Today would never, never cater to racial prejudice.}

The New York Times said it was an embarrassment, “A Certificate of Embarrassment”. The New York Times. April 27, 2011.

[The NY Times is never embarrassed by the baldfaced banditry in its own backyard]

Fareed Zakaria said it was coded racism, “Fareed Zakaria on Donald Trump and coded racism”. Global Public Square (CNN), April 22, 2011.

[Zakaria apparently doesn’t mind racism when it involves dropping bombs on strangers in the Middle East]

Real estate mogul Donald Trump’s taste in wives  is much better than his taste in wedding-cake mansions…..or in bankster bail-outs, but he scored a bulls-eye on this one.

The fudge with “African” instead of “Negro” was discussed a long while back.

So what’s the news in the recent claim?

Apparently, a 95 year old retired state worker was able to point out numerical codes that hadn’t been filled in, while the boxes for race and employment had.

I’m not sure what to make of it yet, but I already know what to make of how it’s being spun.

I googled Obama birth certificate, and right after a couple of sites with the hot news at the top, where you’d expect it to be,  were sites that dismissed the birth certificate controversy as “birther” conspiracy.

They were in  third or fourth place when I saw them, which would seem to be pretty high when the news that’s breaking is that big.

Usually new stuff buries the old stuff and sends it way back past the fourth or fifth page in an Internet search…at least for the first day after a big story.

But not here.

Then I hunted for images to put up on my blog so people could see what the Sheriff’s team means about the fudge about “African.”

Well, when I searched google and then looked on the left-hand side of the search results for what comes up under IMAGES, the very first image on the left was the certificate.  But instead of getting a bunch of different sites where the image was posted, google kept redirecting me instantly to Snopes.  The redirection was blatant.

So why would google heart snopes?

Snopes, according to its ABOUT page, was founded in 1995 by Barbara and David Mikkelson of Los Angeles, to explore urban legends and such. Naturally, it just became the web’s leading “touchstone” for rumor research. Naturally, they got a couple of “Webbies” and “Best of the Web” awards and have been invited onto all the major networks.

So naturally, no one in their right mind would take them at face value.

And so it is.

Read anti-Zionist activist Maidh O’Cathail’s piece at Dissident Voice, exposing its pro-Israeli bias in covering 9-11 research.

See also the conservative blog called Huffington Riposte which considers Snopes a left-liberal propaganda outlet.

On the other hand, here are some Kossacks (from Daily Kos) claiming it pushes right-wing views.

My diagnosis of something that sounds left to the right and right to the left and reeks of big bucks?

You guessed it. George Soros.

US Navy Kills Indian Fisherman Near Dubai

Update:

To make my original post a bit clearer, you’d have to understand what is called “convergence” by some people. I call it the “commie-capitalist” kiss up.

What this amounts to is this. The elites try to subvert a country by soft and by hard power. The soft power angle is worked by human rights groups intentionally misrepresenting or exaggerating valid social concerns in a way that provokes rioting, secession, terrorism or civil war.

This then gives an excuse for intervention by the hard power arm of the empire (NATO police action, arms sales, legal actions, war financing).

In the case of India, you have a concerted ideological war on Hinduism played out in the looting of temples through communist-dominated/Christian friendly state governments.

Then you have the human rights focus on the plight of Dalits (socially the lowest caste). Their legitimate grievances are amplified and manipulated by Western interests to fracture the social fabric and enable legal action against state and federal governments which ultimately accrue to the benefit of Church-sponsored  NGOs and the Western powers themselves. Thus, in increasingly globalized Tamil Nadu,  Tamil secessionism is encouraged. Rumors of CIA/ Mossad involvement in the area should also not be discounted.

Then you have the communists in the West making common cause in the media with the communists in China (on the one hand)… and on the other, conflating the just demands of the Palestinians in the Middle East with revanchist Caliphate claims in India. This also incites secession among Muslim dominant states.

As someone who believes Asia has always been the main focus of the global elites since the end of WWII, the convenient Muslim terrorism narrative provides cover for both the expansion of Western hard and soft power in Asia, as well as a feint behind which covert operations against alleged allied of the US, like India, are conducted. In that sense, India is less an ally as it is a host incubating a parasite  that will eventually kill it.

Simultaneously, the globalist elites pressure the government through psychological war and cyber-war.  This explains the increase in negative portraits of India, the recurrent attacks on the political leadership for not giving into the demands of multinationals. For example, Arcelor-Mittal CEO  Lakshmi Mittal has  demanded that the Indian economy grow at the rate of 10 percent. The expulsion of Rajat Gupta (connected to Manmohan’s opening of the economy) displays the fist behind Mittal’s request.

Mittal has recently joined the board of Goldman Sachs (2011), and like the bank,  works with Rothschild interests, which were behind the opening of the Indian economy in the 1990s.

ORIGINAL POST

The Statesman reports on American naval fire on an Indian boat off the coast of Dubai.

Although so far it seems to be only an accident,it wouldn’t be far-fetched to wonder if it wasn’t a shot  in the low-grade psy war on India, about which I blogged here (Chinese cybera attacks on Indian naval HQ in Vizag) and here (Time’s derogatory cover of Manmohan Singh) and here (the criminal prosecution of Rajat Gupta, the man who opened up the Indian economy, most likely  by connivance between the government and the banking elites)  and  here (Rajiv Malhotra’s thesis of a US strategy of “breaking India” via  postmodern transnationalism, US intelligence and human rights activism all converging in NGO’s like Wikileaks that act as the soft power arm of  empire).

— An Indian fisherman aboard a boat shot at by the U.S. Navy off Dubai’s coast has told officials the crew received no warning before being fired upon, India’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates said Tuesday. The account differs from that provided by the Navy, which said it resorted to lethal force Monday only after issuing a series of warnings. One Indian was killed in the incident, and three of his countrymen were seriously wounded. The shooting underscored how quickly naval encounters can escalate in the increasingly tense waters of the Gulf.”

Note that this isn’t the first naval accident recently. In February 2012  an Italian cargo ship fired on an Indian trawler off the coast of Kochi in South India, killing two Indians. The equivalent of this would be Barack Obama’s face appearing in The Indian Express with the word ‘loser’ under it; Carly Fiorina arrested and convicted on weak evidence in India, while Indian CEOs guilty of multicrore fraud played witness for the prosecution; Indian and Iranian war ships shooting and killing American fishermen and officers off the coast of Florida and Scotland; and a pallid Indian hacktivist with an arrest record haranguing America on its internal affairs from the pages of a Chinese paper.