Police State Escalates War on Freedom of Speech

Corporate media refuses to report.

According to the MAGA nationalists, the “deep state” only persecutes “conservatives” while liberals get a free pass. 

The Gestapo-style raid of liberal journalist Max Blumenthal earlier this week demonstrates quite vividly that the state does indeed attack leftist or left-leaning activists and journalists, not only MAGA supporters and “New Right” nationalists. 

MAGA has deluded itself into the false belief the deep state is primarily comprised of Democrats on the warpath against “conservative” Republicans and New Right types. In fact, the state is apolitical in regard to national partisan politics. It favors Democrats and Republicans only if they tote the neoliberal and corporate line. If they deviate, they may suffer the fate recently experienced y Max Blumenthal. For now, this fate is reserved for those with high visibility such as Blumenthal. 

For really serious violations of the neoliberal code and the establishment’s prearranged political construct, the state prefers torture and slow death. It is currently doing this to Julian Assange. For the national security state, it is a cardinal sin and high crime to expose the dirty and murderous secrets of the state. 

Assange will not be killed outright like the journalists Michael Hastings and Gary Webb. Both Hastings and Webb exposed the crimes of the national security state and paid for it with their lives. Assange, on the other hand, will be slowly and sadistically tortured to death, thus revealing how the state responds when “national security secrets” are exposed and disseminated to millions of people. 

As should be expected, zero corporate media propaganda conduits have thus far reported on the Blumenthal raid, which is supposedly connected to his behavior at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington. 

At least one establishment connected organization that claims to protect journalists from government persecution has refused to defend Blumenthal. 

This is, of course, a technicality. Blumenthal is a journalist. He was reporting on the effort by Juan Guaido’s thugs to starve out and intimidate activists defending the Venezuelan embassy—with the permission of the elected Venezuelan government—although at the time of the purported incident he wasn’t writing or reporting. 

This should be expected. The US Freedom Tracker has partnered with Poynter, an organization working to circumvent alternative media. It is funded by George Soros’ Open Society and the Omidyar Network. Together both organizations pledged nearly a million and a half dollars to fund a supposed fact-checking network, that is to say identify and eradicate media that strays from permissible parameters established by the state.  

“Poynter has a longstanding history as an anchor in the journalism business. Its board of trustees includes execs from The New York Times, ESPN, Harvard, Vox, CBS, ABC, and The Washington Post. Poynter is currently working with Facebook and Google for its fact-checking programs,” writes Corinne Weaver.   

MAGA types and conservatives believe the jihad against media freedom by the corporate state is aimed exclusively at them and the perpetrators are largely Democrats and a handful of RINOS. This mindset is an unfortunate result of an ongoing operation to polarize and divide those holding differing political ideologies, a tactic that goes back to Julius Caesar, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Immanuel Kant. 

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A Futile Effort to End War and the Violent Insanity of the State

Lost in a brume of indifference. 

I feel like a guy standing before a rapidly advancing tsunami. I’m throwing up a peace sign as if that will stop the wall of water.

I began to realize in 1970, as did millions of other eighteen-year-old American males, that the government considered me little more than a dispensable body to be kidnapped and turned into a bullet-stopping slave. 

I was saved by the crank of a tumbler operated over television by two old men in suits. This was a year after the state decided to institute a “lottery” for the draft. I rolled high, so I didn’t need to flee to Canada. Millions of others were not so lucky. 

It wasn’t out of empathy and benevolence the state implemented this slavery lottery. For several years, college students and other young people were marching all over America, going so far as to burn down ROTC buildings and occupying college administration offices to force the state to end its insane war in Vietnam.

Eventually, this war was shut down, but behind the scenes less noticeable—to Americans at least—wars were waged around the world. You had to read between the lines of The New York Times and The Washington Post to learn about US dirty dealing in Angola, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Pakistan, Cambodia, on and on, seemingly endless. 

The Pentagon devised a new tactic. Instead of drafting middle-class kids, they made “military service” “voluntary,” in other words only the desperately poor—and those brainwashed by lies and “patriotism”—are sucked into the war machine. 

The corporate media, at the behest of the state and its apparatchiks, insisted the American people suffered from something called the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a malady related to “isolationism.” This was corrected in 1991 when Bush the Elder illegally invaded Iraq. Bush, a onetime oilman, and director of the CIA said America had finally “defeated the Vietnam Syndrome.” 

This was, of course, a lie. Millions of Americans, perhaps most, were reluctant to sacrifice their children, brothers, and fathers to imperialistic neoliberal dictates handed down by the state. Bush and those who followed—Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump—invariably donned white hats and portrayed carpet bombing, napalm, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, cruise missiles, stealth fighters, etc., as the tools of freedom and democracy. Photos and videos of the victims were not permitted. Journalists—mostly stenographic careerists—were “embedded” with a military that told them what to report. 

That’s how you defeat the Vietnam Syndrome—through lies, misinformation, omission, and an endless stream of propaganda, the latter shaping, and warping (or obfuscating altogether) the American public’s perception of crimes against humanity and the complicity of the state that claims to “represent” them. 

Like Pavlovian zombies, Americans invariably rally around the state during its wars, tie yellow ribbons around old oak trees, march in pro-war parades with little mass-manufactured flags, and demand unquestioning fealty to the state and its obscenely obese war machine. 

The founder of Hitler’s Gestapo, Hermann Göring, knew how the process works. All the state need do is scare the hell out of the “common people” by telling “them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Indeed, rallying around the flag and God-blessing the troops works the same in just about every nation on the planet. The “exceptional” and “indispensable” nation has mastered the art of disguising mass murder, destruction, and theft as “humanitarian intervention,” a core “value” of the “Obama Doctrine” that turned one of the most advanced nations in Africa into a hellish nightmare of murder, slavery, and fanaticism. 

Obama, however, when stacked up against the Bush-era neocons, is a lightweight. Killing tens of thousands of Libyans and targeting “suspected” terrorists with drones and Hellfire missiles is, for neocons like John Bolton, little more than appeasement. Nothing short of full-scale invasion and carpet bombing will suffice. 

Obama’s crowning achievement? Making a paltry and ineffectual antiwar movement even more irrelevant than it was under Bush, who dismissed it as a “focus group.” No longer is there an antiwar movement in this country, or at least not one that can get the attention of the American people, thanks to a war-promoting corporate media reading scripts handed down from the State Department and the Pentagon. 

The American people are irrevocably brainwashed. The state has distracted and divided them into mutually antagonistic groups. Instead of focusing on the US-spawned horror of forever war—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria—and economic warfare against an ever-growing roster of nations not submitting to neoliberal economic suicide (Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua), the people are distracted by celebrity pabulum, sports, television shows pushing identity and sexual politics and, recently arrived on the scene, a corrosive and vile partisan war that has since the election of Donald Trump resulted in riots, looting, violence, and death. It is now common to hear people demand the assassination of the president and the incarceration of his wife and children. 

As an example of how far away from reality many Americans have drifted—due largely to conflict engineering devised by the state (conquer and divide)—millions seriously believe Russia meddled in and dominated the outcome of the 2016 election with Facebook ads. They fear the same will happen in 2020. This dim-wittedness is pushed relentlessly by the corporate media. 

The fact Americans mistakenly elected a conman and crony capitalist to the “highest office”—primarily because they’re sick and tired of establishment politicians and corruption rife in the depths of the “swamp”—is rarely factored into the equation as the corporate propaganda media tells us what to think. For the state, these folks are “deplorables.” Many are now earmarked as conspiracy-peddling terrorists by the FBI.

As a victim of the FBI’s Vietnam-era COINTELPRO, I have a pretty good idea of what will happen to those of us standing in opposition to the wars and endless pilferage by the state, regardless of the fact most of us are politically irrelevant. 

I don’t know if the narcissistic buffoon and political ignoramus Trump will be impeached, re-elected, or if the deep state coup against him will result in a more gruesome outcome. However, if the Democrats take back the White House, and capture both chambers of Congress, the “witch hunt” Trump complains about will not be limited to the swamp—it will encompass all who dare stand in opposition to the corporate state (the true definition of fascism). This was signaled when the FBI sent out its bulletin designating “conspiracy theories” as a major threat to democracy. 

The US government and its partner, the United Kingdom, are now in the process of slowly killing Julian Assange. This is the ultimate fate of truth-tellers. The torture and slow murder of Assange is a billboard-sized warning to those who stand above the crowd and call for an end to the insanity and violence of the state. 

For the rest of us, less-known activists and bloggers, we will ultimately be denied access to the internet, social media, and online payment systems. COINTELPRO of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s excelled at ruining lives, ending careers, and setting up activists for long term prison sentences. This objective didn’t evaporate in the 1970s. 

This little political blog—under-funded with a paltry readership—will not be pulled down anytime soon, primarily due to the aforementioned lack of supportive readers. I am not a threat to the state—for the moment. 

History, however, demonstrates that, under totalitarianism, even pipsqueaks are persecuted. Opposition, no matter how small or ineffectual, is not tolerated. All must support the state, or at least appear to do so, or suffer the consequences. 

It may be time to shut down this blog—not due to fear or cowardice—but rather because it has at best nugatory influence. It faces a tsunami of indifference and a paucity of support and my efforts will undoubtedly be put to better use elsewhere. 

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Forever War Propaganda: Trump and the Death of al-Baghdadi

Time to readjust the narrative on forever war.

The ongoing theatrical absurdity of twisted forever war propaganda went over the top on Sunday when President Trump announced the death of the elusive leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 

Trump announced the death (said to be by way of suicide vest) while reading from a teleprompter, a skill he has yet to master. 

There is no evidence al-Baghdadi killed himself when confronted by US Special Forces in Syria, the same as there is no evidence that Obama killed Osama bin Laden (evidence indicates Osama died in Afghanistan of natural causes in late 2001). 

Abu “from Baghdad” has died before. In June 2017, Russia said it may have killed him during an airstrike in Syria. The following month, ISIS allegedly admitted al-Baghdadi was killed during an air raid in the Iraqi province of Nineveh. 

There is scant evidence Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi existed as described by the US military and the corporate war propaganda media. 

“Reclusive even when IS was at the peak of its power, the 47-year-old Iraqi, who suffers from diabetes, was rumored to have been wounded or killed several times,” the AFP reported this past April. “His whereabouts have never been confirmed.” He was known as “The Ghost” (al-Shabah in Arabic), the invisible caliphate leader.

There is little if any reliable factual information on al-Baghdadi. “There are disputes over his career depending on whether the source is ISIS itself, US or Iraqi intelligence,” the Independent reported in 2014. 

He was born in Samarra, a largely Sunni city north of Baghdad, in 1971 and is well educated. With black hair and brown eyes, a picture of al-Baghdadi taken when he was a prisoner of the Americans in Bocca (sic) Camp in southern Iraq between 2005 and 2009, makes him look like any Iraqi man in his thirties.

The newspaper reports it “believes” al-Baghdadi “was born in Samarra, a largely Sunni city north of Baghdad, in 1971 and is well educated. With black hair and brown eyes, a picture of al-Baghdadi taken when he was a prisoner of the Americans in Bocca Camp in southern Iraq between 2005 and 2009, makes him look like any Iraqi man in his thirties.”

We are told al-Baghdadi rose to the leadership of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn) after the supposed targeted murder of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, yet another elusive character who may not, in fact, have existed as described by the government and its media. 

The media, however, did report on the “Zarqawi program,” a psychological operation run out of the Pentagon. According to the Post: 

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response,” one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: “Media operations,” “Special Ops (626)” (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein’s government) and “PSYOP,” the U.S. military term for propaganda work…

The military’s propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. “strategic communications” in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the “home audience” as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

The Zarqawi myth was engineered specifically for the “home audience.” It was an effort to condition the American people to accept the war on terror abroad and a police and surveillance state at home. 

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky writes:

The practice of “successful propaganda” in relation to the Iraq war has gone well beyond the official boundaries contained in military manuals. Propaganda creates an “outside enemy”. Al Qaeda led by Osama and Al Qaeda in Iraq led by Zarqawi. Al Qaeda is behind most news stories regarding the  “war on terrorism” including  the suicide attacks. What is rarely mentioned is that this outside enemy Al Qaeda is a CIA “intelligence asset”, used in covert operations.

According to the official narrative, Baghdadi, aka Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai, was captured in Fallujah in 2004 and sent as a “civilian internee” to the Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca detention centers. 

Major General Doug Stone, the head of Task Force 134, Detainee Operations in Iraq, told Andrew Keane Woods of Lawfare in 2016 Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca served as “universities” for jihadi terror:

Stone had been brought in to clean things up after Abu Ghraib; at the time, he was a high-ranking marine reservist willing to take a job that many lifetime military folks wouldn’t touch.  Stone was shocked at what he found:  not just a few bad apples torturing a few prisoners, but rather a dysfunctional detention regime, one that seemingly had no purpose and was a proving grounds for young militants. 

This is a standard fallback story. It is similar to the “intelligence failures” that supposedly led to 9/11. The “detention regime” at these illegal prison facilities was not “dysfunctional,” but rather part of an operation to crank out terrorists and feed the war on terror, which is designed to last forever. 

The official explanation from the Bush administration upon revelations of torture and murder at Abu Ghraib was that the torture was “isolated” and not indicative of US policy. In fact, the opposite was true—Abu Ghraib was part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay (see Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror—a case against Donald Rumsfeld?).

The “enhanced interrogation” used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay was conceived by the CIA, not for interrogation but, as the CIA’s MKUltra demonstrates, for breaking down and brainwashing individuals. The techniques used were similar to those developed by the CIA and SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) developed by DoD and housed at Fairchild AFB, Washington, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Rucker, Alabama. SERE was based on supposed Chinese brainwashing techniques.

The truth about Abu Ghraib was revealed during the trial of Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, two CIA “psychologists” sued by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of two former prisoners and the family of one detainee who died of extreme cold in a secret CIA prison.

“Concealed from Congress and the public, the CIA had spent the previous half-century developing and propagating a sophisticated form of psychological torture meant to defy investigation, prosecution, or prohibition—and so far it has proved remarkably successful on all these counts,” writes Alfred McCoy. “Even now, since many of the leading psychologists who worked to advance the CIA’s torture skills have remained silent, we understand surprisingly little about the psychopathology of the program of mental torture that the Bush administration applied so globally.”

The CIA program of “mental torture” was not used to gain information on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State—it is well-known torture does not work and is counterproductive—but rather to breakdown detainees, vacate their personalities, and rebuild them as terrorists and suicide bombers. The “psychopathology of the program” is designed to keep the war on manufactured terror alive and the military-industrial complex fat and happy. 

“Enhanced interrogation” is an Orwellian term for trauma-based techniques engineered to brainwash and control individuals. However, as should be expected, the Pentagon has a cover for its behavior. From a US Army publication:

Task Force 134’s current strategy regards detention facility operations as a legitimate part of America’s overall counterinsurgency fight. The detention facility is not just a repository for those plucked from the “real” insurgency, but a legitimate arena for counterinsurgency actions. The task force has shifted detention operations from warehousing insurgents to engaging them. The strategy focuses on touching the human spirit and aligning detainee goals and aspirations with those of a peaceful and prosperous Iraq. 

In other words, working to have the Iraqi people accept the brutal invasion of their country, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, targeting of water and agriculture resources, and the murder of a million and a half people. 

I don’t believe the US military seriously attempted this, primarily because it is virtually impossible—the Iraqi people know who is responsible for the destruction of their country and the murder of more than a million of their fellow citizens. It is absurd to believe a half-baked “counterinsurgency” program would result in forgiveness of the neocons and George W. Bush. If Iraqis invaded your city or town and began killing your family and neighbors, would you be in a frame of mind to forgive and forget? 

No, I believe the real story of Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib is a secret Pentagon program designed to make certain conflict continues in the Middle East. The ruling elite responsible for the invasion of Iraq is not interest in the “goals and aspirations” of the Iraqi people. It is determined to balkanize and terrorize Arabs, Muslims, and especially the Shias of Iran. An endless cadre of jihadi (Wahhabi) terrorists is required to accomplish this feat and make sure the client states of Israel and Saudi Arabia are the dominant powerbrokers in the Middle East. 

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Russia and Clinton’s Election Plan B

Only Hillary can save us from Putin and his deplorables. 

America is an insular nation, exceptional only in its willful ignorance of the rest of the world. Many Americans, undoubtedly a majority, know very little about what is really going on in the world. 

Millions of Americans are unable to see Hillary Clinton for what she is—a “pay-to-play” corrupt psychopath and warmonger. It is entirely fair to say she is responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Libya and Syria. But, like most Americans, if you get your information from establishment sources, you’re not going to know about this. Only Benghazi briefly scraped away the patina and whitewash to provide a glimpse of the real Hillary Clinton, a glimpse long ago faded in the rearview mirror of controlled corporate media politics.  

Social media meme-izes a conspiracy theory so weak, so transparently bogus and manufactured it is sincerely shocking anybody beyond a six-year-old believes it. 

Meanwhile, if the idea Tulsi Gabbard is some kind of Russian subversion agent is too much for you to wrap your head around, there is a more believable lie to destroy the only antiwar candidate: insist she’s merely a “useful idiot” for Putin and the perfidious Russians. Evidence? She was favorably covered by Russian media.

Democrat zombies, mouthing fantasy talking points, actually believe “Tulski” Gabbard and the other mostly forgettable candidates are in the race simply to prevent “Wonder Woman”—I prefer the Iron Maiden of Creative Destruction—from grabbing her due. Anything less than ushering Hillary to the executive throne is “Putin’s Plan” to destroy democracy. All third party candidates are traitors. Jill Stein works directly with the Russians. 

How dizzy are Democrats? Check out the next tweet. 

Both ISIS and al-Qaeda were manufactured by the national security state as an excuse to stretch out the war on terror for long as possible—gifting the military industrial complex with never-ending death merchandise contracts—while putting finishing touches on the surveillance and police state at home. The latter will make sure another Trump doesn’t rock the boat. 

Meanwhile, we should not underestimate how the Trump Derangement Syndrome is capable of creating sectarian violence, or at least fairy-tale level frenzied delusions that may result in real-world—or world-ending—violence. 

For the indoctrinated, it’s not Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad blackmailing representatives of the corporate state, it’s Putin. 

Clinton’s Plan B to finally capture the throne—where she can do more damage than a Tiberius or Domitian to her rivals and enemies—relies on the outrageous Russian Lie. It is, of course, an entirely illogical and dangerous lie, but it’s all Hillary and the war party Democrats have to wage battle in the upcoming race (minus impeachment) of the regrettable Trump. 

Clinton’s attacks on rivals both inside and outside of the one-party state will intensify prior to her reentry into presidential politics. Like Trump, Clinton understands the power of invective—and the Big Lie as perfected by Hitler—and this will be her weapon of choice. Lies and conspiracy theories about Russia and Ukraine will propel her into summer of next and undermine what is already a rickety ship taking on water: the new “left” side of the one party state touting identity authoritarianism at home and a continuation of neocon wars and occupations in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

The other Democrat candidates—with the exclusion of Tulsi Gabbard—will jump at the chance to be Hillary’s running mate in the upcoming battle to get rid of Trump and put down the deplorables. Not Biden. He’s been there, done that. 

Of course, I could be totally wrong on all of this. Trump may defeat the latest national security state coup (FBI, CIA) against a sitting president, following Kennedy and Nixon. He might follow through on his half-ass promise to drain the swamp and close down US military bases around the world and bring the troops home. 

Then again, he might not. 

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Sandy Hook and the Murder of the First Amendment

Your life will be ruined if you deviate from the state’s script.

Let me begin by saying I have no idea what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. 

However, since 9/11, I have questioned the veracity of many news reports and claims issued by officialdom about terrorism and mass shootings. The government and its media have been caught hundreds of times lying about or twisting news stories, so I believe skepticism is entirely warranted. 

That said, I am now convinced the First Amendment is a dead letter. I have felt that way for some time. Recent events put a capstone on my previous arguments that much of the Bill of Rights is dead. This was recently underscored by the persecution of activist and author Jim Fetzer for writing a book that claims the massacre at Sandy Hook never happened. 

On Thursday, Rolling Stone reported:

A Wisconsin jury has ruled that James Fetzer, a retired professor from the University of Minnesota Duluth, must pay [Leonard] Pozner $450,000 for accusing him of forging his son Noah’s death certificate. Fetzer is the coauthor of Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, which alleges that Pozner faked his son’s birth certificate and that the Obama administration staged the shooting in an effort to pass legislation on gun control.

The ruling and “award” granted to the plaintiff will undoubtedly drive Fetzer to financial ruin if it is not overturned on appeal—and I predict it will stand. This court case is a pivotal moment for those who work to eradicate free speech, a right granted to those who make controversial statements or write books some people find objectionable. 

From Digital Media Law:

The right to speak guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution includes the right to voice opinions, criticize others, and comment on matters of public interest. It also protects the use of hyperbole and extreme statements when it is clear these are rhetorical ploys. Accordingly, you can safely state your opinion that others are inept, stupid, jerks, failures, etc. even though these statements might hurt the subject’s feelings or diminish their reputations. Such terms represent what is called “pure opinions” because they can’t be proven true or false. As a result, they cannot form the basis for a defamation claim.

It is Fetzer’s opinion Pozner lied about the death of his son and falsified his death certificate. The incident has a number of unanswered questions, including Facebook posts about the shooting that appeared the day before the event. The corporate media narrative on the shooting was changed several times. Military experts claimed it would have been impossible for a skinny 19-year old Adam Lanza to have shot so many people in such a short period of time. 

If the government really wanted to put the entire case to rest and dispel what it calls malicious conspiracy theories, it would explain why, as Dr. Wayne Carver, the medical examiner overseeing the case, said during a news conference parents were not allowed to identify their murdered children. They were shown photographs instead. This is highly unusual and suspicious. 

I’m not saying Lanza isn’t responsible. I’m saying there are numerous unanswered questions swept neatly into the memory hole by the government and its media. In short, the government is responsible for engendering conspiracy theories by not resolving key issues in this case and many others. 

Getting to the bottom of Sandy Hook, however, is not the point here. The point is: as a citizen born with inalienable natural rights including speech, you will not be permitted to propose theories on certain topics the state has demarcated as off-limits and punishable if a “tinfoil hate conspiracy theorist” deviates from official narratives, many which are lies designed to emotionally manipulate people and gain consensus under false pretense to further degrade your right to speak and write on crucial issues. 

The Fetzer trial is a big win for the ruling elite. For years now, it has worked tirelessly to characterize investigative journalism outside limits imposed by the government as criminal—and now, according to the FBI, as terrorism. 

Jim Fetzer and Alex Jones are the first to be subjected to Soviet-like show trials for the crime of disagreeing with the state. More will follow in due course. 

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Syria and the Kurds: Trump Demonstrates Ignorance of History and Geography

Stable ignoramus pontificates. 

According to the stable genius, the Kurds are similar to violent children playing in a bloody sandbox. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with,” he said, once again displaying his remarkable ignorance and monosyllabic arrogance. 

The areas claimed by the Kurds are to the northwest and northeast along the Turkish border. The latter is east of the Euphrates and is anything but a sandy desert—it is a fertile region known as Jazira located on the eastern plateau. It is often referred to as the “breadbasket” of Syria. 

Trump went on to characterize the people of the Middle East as violent and intractable because that’s “what they do.” 

Under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, much of the Middle East remained largely free of war and violence. Autonomous communities were organized as millets along religious and tribal lines, thus ensuring peace. This stability, which began to erode during the nineteenth century, came to an end with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. 

The current situation in the Middle East is a direct result of Britain and France carving up the region under colonial “spheres of influence” put forth in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Britain promised the Arabs autonomy if they helped defeat the Ottoman Empire during the war. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) promised a united Arab kingdom of greater Syria, encompassing present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Iraq and Jordan. The British never intended to follow through on this promise and subsequently betrayed the Arabs. 

 Sumaia N. Masoom writes:

Western governments arbitrarily drew lines dividing up the land forming the remains of the Ottoman Empire, ignoring traditional ethnic, religious, and tribal divisions. To add insult to injury, however, Sykes-Picot… double-crossed the Hashemites, who had been promised their own kingdom in return for helping the Western forces take down the Ottomans from the inside. Rather than becoming stewards of one of the greatest kingdoms the Middle East had ever seen, the Hashemites were instead thrown out of Syria, the new French protectorate… In the words of one historian, the agreement was “greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity.” 

The current conflict between the Kurds and Turkey is a result of British and French colonialism, violence, and treachery. Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 promised the Kurds a homeland, but the promise was never implemented, primarily due to the response on the part of Turkish nationalists. The fate of the Kurds was sealed with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. 

“Today, more than 30 million Kurds, and millions of Assyrians, Yezidis and other stateless ethnicities straddle the makeshift borders originally created by Mark Sykes and Francois Picot 100 years ago,” notes The Kurdish Project. 

It’s true the Kurds fighting Turkey are not “angels,” as Trump said. For instance, Amnesty International has accused the Kurds of ethnic cleansing of non-Kurds. 

“By deliberately demolishing civilian homes, in some cases razing and burning entire villages, displacing their inhabitants with no justifiable military grounds, the Autonomous Administration is abusing its authority and brazenly flouting international humanitarian law, in attacks that amount to war crimes,” Lama Fakih, Senior Crisis Advisor at Amnesty International, said in October 2015. 

Additionally, the establishment of the state of Israel, made possible under the Balfour Declaration, has fueled wars and conflicts in the Middle East. Israel has a long history of subverting and attacking its neighbors, most recently Syria. 

According to Adeyinka Makinde:

After the establishment of Israel in 1948, a national policy of weakening Arab and Muslim states, balkanizing them, or keeping them under a neo-colonial state of affairs has persisted. The prevailing logic was and always has been that any stable, nationalist government in the Arab world poses an existential threat to Israel… The deliberate and calculated intervention in the affairs of the Arab world is something which [Oded Yinon, author of “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”] is content to admit is unnecessary given the artificiality of the states which are the product of imperial draughtsmen.”

Considering the short reach of Trump’s intellectual ability and his refusal to consult history and geography before making simplistic declarations—to say nothing of his emotional attachment to Israel—the tumultuous state of affairs in the Middle East will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future. All Democrat political candidates to date have promised to maintain the present status quo with the Jewish state. The House of Representatives, dominated by Democrats, overwhelmingly signed off on a resolution calling for US troops to remain illegally in Syria. 

Finally, I have no hope for the return of US troops from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the short and even the long term. Forever war in the Middle East will continue so long as the ruling elite control US foreign policy from behind the scenes and control what is fallaciously called “democracy” in the United States. 

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Democrat “Debate” Ignores War Crimes of the State

Forever war omitted from scripted “debate.”

Did you watch the Democrat debate? I didn’t. I haven’t had cable television and access to the alphabet propaganda networks for well over a decade. I suppose I could have watched it on the web, but why bother? The outcome was predictable. 

For instance, it was predictable the candidates had no intention of addressing the forever wars engineered by the ruling elite. That is a strict no-go zone. Ask Tulsi Gabbard what happens when a hopeful dwells too closely on war and its consequences. The war party propaganda media have relentlessly attacked her. 

And yet, we can’t trust Tulsi to follow through. On Wednesday, virtually every member of the House of Representatives, both Republican and Democrat, supported a resolution to condemn Trump’s decision to move troops out of Syria. Here is the final roll call. 

Scroll down to the bottom of the document. Those not voting include Gabbard and Elijah Cummings. Mr. Cummings had an excuse—he was in the hospital, awaiting death. But what about Tulsi? She didn’t vote “nay” on this bill, more than likely due to its deceptive wording—manufactured outrage over Turkey’s decision to invade northern Syria and massacre an unknown number of Kurds. 

Do you really think the Demopublican war party cares about the Kurds? Of course not. The resolution is another anti-Trump stunt designed to tarnish the self-proclaimed stable genius as we slip and slide into the election season. 

Tulsi opted out, realizing if she voted against the bill she would be ruthlessly pilloried by the war propaganda media, not that it really matters—they have gone after her for months now, even though she carts around the same identity demagoguery as her fellow Democrats.

If we really want to know what the Dem side of the Demopublican party favors, it might be instrumental to read a Julian Zelizer op-ed posted at CNN. 

Mr. Zelizer enumerates what he considers top priorities for the red and blue serpentine hydra navigating the murky water of the swamp. 

What should immigration policy look like in the 21st century? How would they define the limits of presidential power? Will internationalism continue to be a priority—in terms of policy and institutions—over the next decade? What are the steps that need to be taken to curb the devastating effects of climate change? How can the federal government start to reverse the growing economic inequality that defines our country? How can we begin a new phase of the civil rights movement that deals with institutional racism? What are the key goals in the pursuit of women’s full equality? How can we do more to ensure that people are not discriminated against because of their sexuality? What is the proper role of government in taxing and regulating the economy?

Did you see anything in there about ending the wars? Neither did I. Instead, we are subjected to unabashed veneration of war crimes. 

The history of great leadership revolves around moments when US presidents have been able to tackle these sorts of challenges. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman defeating the forces of fascism and participating in the establishment of institutions such as the United Nations and NATO that entrenched liberal alliances…

Nazism—not fascism per se, which is alive and well within the state—was primarily defeated by Russia, not FDR (who, it can be argued, lied America into a war it overwhelmingly wanted nothing to do with) or Truman (who is the only human to have presided over nuking hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians). 

As a nation, it is clear that we are in desperate need of great leaders. We face an enormous number of problems and crises that keep going unaddressed from one administration to the other. The debates should offer a first forum for voters to hear what a potential president has to say about how we can get out of these messes.

No, as a nation, we need to reject what the ruling corporate elite designates as “great leaders,” modeled on the aforementioned war criminals. 

The reason “problems and crises… keep going unaddressed from one administration to the other” is simple—first, there is very little difference between leaders selected by the state, and second the ruling elite thrive on crises, most manufactured in Hegelian ordo ab hoc (order out of this) fashion, a very effective method of emotionally manipulating the plebs and gaining consensus for war, torture, mass surveillance, and rampant violations of international law.

Finally, and somewhat comically, liberal Democrats are expressing their outrage that supposed liberal lesbian Ellen DeGeneres yucked it up with “conservative” war criminal George W. Bush during an NFL game in Texas. 

Of course, as framed by the corporate media, this incident had nothing to do with Bush’s neocon wars of mass destruction, but rather LGBT issues that are of far more importance to liberals than the ongoing wars that have killed well over a million innocent people and destroyed entire nations. 

DeGeneres would have us follow her “lessons in kindness.” However, her version of soft and squishy (and highly selective) kindness seems to be tailored for those who sit in exclusive boxes at football games played in stadiums paid for by taxpayers. She can forgive Bush for his support of anti-LGBT legislation while completely ignoring he is one of the vilest war criminals in recent memory. 

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Israel’s Mistress of Sex Entrapment Escapes Justice

Ghislaine is laughing from a manse on the Brazilian Rivera.

According to the New York Post, two of the supposedly late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators in the rape of minor girls—Ghislaine Maxwell and Jean-Luc Brunel—are hiding out in the Brazilian Rivera of Santa Catarina. 

A former cop traced the pair through their phones to the posh resort, according to the New York newspaper. 

The lurid front-page story of sex with children and Mossad blackmail has slipped largely from the news. Investigations into the disgusting entrapment scheme appear to be going nowhere. Both Maxwell—a documented Mossad operative—and Brunel have nothing to fear. It is unlikely they will be arrested and sent to the United States to face justice for their roles in the molestation of an unknown number of girls. 

Maxwell was allegedly photographed at an In-N-Out fast-food joint in California back in August. I say “allegedly” because researchers, relying on photo metadata, say the photos are fake. 

Regardless, a message was sent when the photos appeared in the media—Ghislaine Maxwell is untouchable. The farce was punctuated by a book Ghislaine was supposedly reading—“The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives,” by Ted Gup. 

Here’s the takeaway from the sordid affair—Israel’s Mossad is free to do whatever it decides necessary to protect its special status. From stealing state secrets, pilfering uranium to build atomic bombs, dancing before the backdrop of a burning WTC where 3,000 innocents died, and killing US sailors without consequence, Israel can do pretty much whatever it wants in the United States and the West. 

Every member of Congress knows you don’t call out the racist state of Israel for its crimes (ethnic cleansing, the murder of journalists, medics, and the torture of children).

In fact, our “representatives” are expected to ignore murderous and racist Israeli settlers killing  Palestinians and flooding schools with raw sewage, among other despicable crimes. This ongoing cruelty and inhumanity are rarely if ever reported by a corporate media celebrating Israel’s “democracy” ad nauseam. 

Instead of justice and punishment for crimes against humanity, Israel receives billions of dollars every year from oblivious American taxpayers (or, more accurately, their children and grandchildren because the state now operates in deficit fashion, borrowing trillions the unborn will be obliged to pay). 

As I wrote earlier this year, the culprits in this execrable political blackmail scheme will never face a judge and a jury, and will certainly never see the inside of a prison cell. 

Ghislaine is laughing in your face from her manse on the Brazilian Rivera. She is an asset cherished by the criminal and pariah state of Israel and will be protected, so long as she doesn’t make the same mistakes made by her double agent father (Mossad, British intelligence), MP Robert Maxwell. 

Finally, it should be noted Ghislaine’s father was given a state funeral in Israel. After all, Robert Maxwell “was behind… [Mossad’s] successful attempt to install a trapdoor in software intended for government use, allowing the Israelis a direct pipeline into a vast network of computers installed with undetectable malware,” writes Jennifer Matsui. 

His daughter’s service is of equal if not greater importance—keeping pedophile influencers and “representatives” on the zionist reservation through blackmail. 

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Stable Ignoramus Trump: Kurds Didn’t Help US Win WWII

Trump’s decisions change with the wind.

It is a strange experience witnessing The Donald fumble his way through foreign policy, which he knows almost nothing about. In the awkward press conference below, Trump stumbles his way through history. His explanation for abandoning the Kurds? They didn’t help “us” win the Second World War.  

Undoubtedly, there were Kurds fighting during that completely avoidable carnage that killed more than 70 million people, 25 million of that debated number in Russia alone. Trump does not know if soldiers of Kurdish ancestry died at Normandy. The stable ignoramus is famous for not doing his homework and talking off the top of his coiffured head. 

Moreover, the United States did not single-handedly “win” the Second World War—that achievement should be credited to Stalin and the Soviet Union. Ditto Syria. It was Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah that beat back the CIA and Saudi Arabia’s murderous jihadi proxies, not Trump and his neocons. 

Abel Cohen writes: 

America shouldn’t mythologize a war against the Nazis we didn’t wage until the last minute. Like Truman said: “If Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” America waited as long as it could to join the war—and ended it by firing the first shots of the next one.

Truman’s final homicidal act was to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and traumatizing millions of others. He then inaugurated the Cold War, founded the national security state, and set the stage for the military-industrial complex which, incidentally, Trump mentioned during his press conference. Since taking office, Trump has acted as salesman-of-the-month for the MIC, selling death merchandise far and wide. This is just about the only growth industry in a crumbling America. 

The Kurds probably knew Trump would betray and leave them at the mercy—and, if news reports are accurate, mercy is in short supply—of Turkey with its resurgent form of Sunni Islam exploited by President Tayyip Erdogan. 

“Uniting around our common Islamic identity is the only way to solve the Kurdish problem,” a leader of Justice and Development party told The Economist. “Islam bound us in Ottoman times and during the war of independence, why not today?”

Left out of the discussion is the fact two-thirds of Kurds follow the Shafi‘i madhhab, which distinguishes them from Arabs and Turks in the region who are primarily Hanafi. In Islam, like any religion, divergent sects rarely make peace. For example, consider the death count attributed to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe (instrumentally, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, responsible for more than 30,000 dead in France).

Erdogan’s solution to the “Kurdish problem” is to invade Syria and Iraq and kill as many Kurds as possible. 

Trump’s response is to move US troops—illegally in Syria in violation of its national sovereignty—out of harm’s way, which is, of course, the sensible thing to do, never mind the ranting criticism of neocons and their Republican and Democrat fellow travelers. 

However, it is impossible to hold this president to anything. He changes with the wind, following the weathervane of his outsized ego. 

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Tulsi and Rigged Elections

An almost transparent blip on the political radar screen.

Tulsi Gabbard, who has at best minimal support by Democrats (around one percent), and zero from the corporate DNC, posted the following video earlier today.

There are so many of you who I’ve met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be.

This, of course, is nothing new, but thanks to Tulsi for reminding us of how “elections” are conducted. In fact, the state long ago corrupted the process and has selected candidates for long as anybody can remember. 

How is it possible a cognitively challenged and corrupt hack like Joe Biden is number one in the running—or was until Elizabeth Warren took that spot away from him? It’s possible because Biden is a trusted asset eager to do whatever he is told, same as Obama, Bush the lesser, Clinton (a “brother by another mother”), Bush the elder, Reagan… on and on, down the line. Like Hillary Clinton, the Democrat establishment believes it is Biden’s “turn” to read the teleprompter. All the others, well, they’re spoilers. 

They are attempting to replace the roles of voters in the early states, using polling and other arbitrary methods which are not transparent or democratic, and holding so-called debates which are not debates at all but rather commercialized reality television meant to entertain, not inform or enlighten.

That replacement happened decades ago. Trump won the election because our rulers left the election process intact, arrogantly confident their handpicked candidates will win because only those who have come up through the system are permitted to run. It’s left intact as a public relations gimmick designed to fool the proles who are, regrettably, all too easy to control—or were until Trump appeared on the scene. 

Tulsi is spot on about the “debates,” which are nothing of the sort. Indeed, they are a form of televised bread and circuses—bread because most Americans receive some kind of support from the government, and a circus because all circuses are comical, theatrical, and well-scripted. 

As for being informed, that’s the last thing the ruling elite want. They have us believe in fantasies so absurd they may as well be props in a Luis Buñuel film—for instance, killing people in foreign lands is humanitarian and the economy is doing great (never mind the unemployed, the homeless, and record debt, both governmental and personal). 

In order to bring attention to this serious threat to our democracy, and ensure your voice is heard, I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate on October 15th. I will announce my decision within the next few days. With my deepest aloha, thank you all again for your support.

This is commendable, although, sadly, an almost transparent blip on the political radar screen. Big corporate media will certainly not take notice, and if they perchance do it will be with snide commentary. 

The soft totalitarian machine rejects the socialist palliatives of Elizabeth Warren. She appears to be anti-corporatist, and that is inexcusable. Many of our political and social problems are related to the domination of corporations, most of the crony variety. 

Elizabeth Warren will be unable to break the corporate stranglehold on America. It is pure insanity to believe otherwise. The Democrat and Republican parties—one party disguised as two—will not savage corporations with taxation and redoubled punitive regulation, not if they wish to remain in Congress and receive money to run obscenely expensive campaigns. 

Warren will be overshadowed by the Hildabeast, Hillary Clinton, who is determined to be president. She will enter the race sometime next year, overturning the apple cart of other hopefuls, all spouting the same wealth distribution nonsense because, after all, a well-trained and ceaselessly indoctrinated public, most on a modern version of the Roman Cura Annona grain dole, love free stuff (stolen from others).

No way will the DNC accept Elizabeth Warren as the nominee. She will be subverted, the same way Bernie Sanders was. 

Most Americans don’t trust or like Hillary, but that hardly matters. 

The days of Trump may soon be over. If he’s not impeached on spurious grounds, he will enter the race under a toxic cloud of accusation and unproven high crimes and misdemeanors greatly amplified by a propaganda media. Polls consistently show he is losing traction, and the MAGA crowd is increasingly disillusioned, unable to realize its populist agenda. 

I’m sorry, Tulsi. Your effort to unmask the subversion of the election system will largely fall on deaf ears. As of this morning, the above video garnered a mere 800 views.

It will take more than a “debate” boycott to send the message. It will take a revolution to finally drain Trump’s swamp, end the endless wars, and force transnational corporations and foreign governments (most egregiously Israel) out of the bed they have shared for so long with our “representatives,” who are largely nothing more than self-seeking sociopaths on short leashes. 

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