GEOPOLITICS
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” – John F. Kennedy
“The Eisenhower administration grievously misunderstood and underestimated the most significant historical development of the mid-twentieth century – the force of Third World nationalism…. The Eisenhower administration insisted on viewing the Third World through the invariably distorting lens of a Cold War geopolitical strategy that saw the Kremlin as the principal instigator of global unrest. As a result, it often wound up simplifying complicated local and regional developments, confusing nationalism with communism, aligning the United States with inherently unstable and unrepresentative regimes, and wedding American interests to the status quo in areas undergoing fundamental social, political, and economic upheaval. Rather than promoting long-term stability in the Third World, the foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration contributed to its instability…. In this critical area, then, the Eisenhower record appears one of persistent failure (McMahon, 1986: 457). Notably, in a generally favorable assessment of the Eisenhower foreign policy, John Lewis Gaddis also describes US policy in the Third World as “the administration’s single most significant [failure]” (Gaddis, 1982: 182). The case of Cuba offers a unique opportunity to test McMahon’s thesis. For different reasons, conservatives and liberals argue that US policy in Cuba was a failure. From the conservative viewpoint, we “lost” Cuba to communism on Eisenhower’s “watch;” from the liberal viewpoint, we tied ourselves to a corrupt dictator and antagonized his successor, eventually pushing him into the arms of the Communists. That we failed in Cuba is not a question; the question is how did we fail?
Shortly after the Cuban Revolution nearly thirty years ago, New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews wrote: “I doubt the historians will ever be able to agree on whether the Castro regime embraced communism willingly or was forced into a shotgun wedding” (Matthews, 1961: 96). As one who gave a mighty boost to the revolution when he reported on the front page of the Times that Fidel Castro was alive and well in the Sierra Maestra, and who thereafter forged a strong bond with Castro, Matthews argued that “Castro did not originally want to become tied up with the communists…. he was trapped in 1959-60 by…the massive pressures against him from the United States policies….” (Matthews, 1961: 96).
To this day, analysts on the Left maintain that Castro was not originally a Communist but a nationalist who became a Communist in response to the unwarranted hostility of the Eisenhower administration to his revolution and to his regime. A key point in their argument, and an unassailable one, is that Castro was not a member of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP). Moreover, he had a long history of antagonistic relations with the Party.
The evaluation of our response to the Castro regime remains of interest and significance and not only to historians, for similar questions tend to reappear again and again in new guises. Did the United States push the Sandinistas into the arms of the Communists? Witness the new book by Robert Pastor – Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua – in which it is suggested that the Carter and Reagan administrations are, in dealing with Nicaragua, merely repeating the mistakes of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in dealing with Cuba (1987).” ~Alan H. Luxenberg Source: Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 37-71) http://www.jstor.org/stable/165789?origin=JSTOR-pdf
. . .
Imperialism – The Enemy of Freedom
Senator John F Kennedy July 2, 1957
Mr. KENNEDY: “Mr. President, the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism – and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.
Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.
I am concerned today that we are failing to meet the challenge of imperialism – on both counts – and thus failing in our responsibilities to the free world. I propose, therefore, as the Senate and the Nation prepare to commemorate the 181st anniversary of man’s noblest expression against political repression, to begin a two-part series of speeches, examining America’s role in the continuing struggles for independence that strain today against the forces of imperialism within both the Soviet and Western worlds. My intention is to talk not of general principles, but of specific cases – to propose not partisan criticisms but what I hope will be constructive solutions.
There are many cases of the clash between independence and imperialism in the Soviet world that demand our attention. One, above all the rest, is critically outstanding today – Poland.
The Secretary of State, in his morning news conference, speaking on this subject, suggested that, if people want to do something about the examples of colonialism, they should consider such examples as Soviet-ruled Lithuania and the satellite countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and others.
I agree with him. For that reason, within 2 weeks I hope to speak upon an issue which I think stands above all the others; namely, the country of Poland.
There are many cases of the clash between independence and imperialism in the Western World that demand our attention. But again, one, above all the rest, is critically outstanding today – Algeria.
I shall speak this afternoon of our failures and of our future in Algeria and north Africa – and I shall speak of Poland in a later address to this body.”
http://www.jfklink.com/speeches/jfk/congress/jfk020757_imperialism.html
. . . . .
In 1957 Kennedy was already the “radical” visionary that became president in 1960.~WW
JFK: ORDEAL IN AFRICA
By Richard D. Mahoney
In July 1960, John F. Kennedy received a letter from Africa congratulating
him on winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for the upcoming American
presidential election. A plea for help accompanied the congratulation.
“Everywhere there are more and more [unintelligible word] Communists! Everywhere
Western prestige has slipped. So for heaven’s sake change the image of America
before its too late!”1 The Democratic nominee had already established a
reputation across Africa as a sympathetic supporter of African nationalism, who
if elected would realign Washington’s priorities toward the continent. Once in
office, Kennedy indeed made changing the image of America in the Third World a
top priority of his administration.
-Introduction by Philip E. Muehlenbeck
By 1958 Kennedy had become the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations
African subcommittee and continually pressed the White House with the importance
of initiating contact with African nationalist leaders. “Call it nationalism,
call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, the word is out and spreading
like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects – that it is no longer
necessary to remain forever in bondage.”15 “After all,” Kennedy mused, “it was in
our schools that some of the most renowned African leaders learned…the virtues of
representative government, widespread education, and economic opportunity. These
are the ideas and ideals that have caused a revolution.”
–JFK: ORDEAL IN AFRICA – http://www.jmu.edu/history/mhr/wm_library/2004_-_1_Philip_E._Muehlenbeck.pdf
. . .
JFK’s Embrace of Third World Nationalists
November 25, 2013
Exclusive: The intensive media coverage of the half-century anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s murder was long on hype and emotion but short on explaining how revolutionary JFK’s foreign policy was in his extraordinary support for Third World nationalists, as Jim DiEugenio explains.
[…]
Who Was Gullion?
The man Kennedy chose to be his ambassador to Congo was Edmund Gullion, who was the one who had altered Kennedy’s consciousness about Third World nationalism. There are some writers who would maintain that perhaps no other person had as much influence on the evolution of Kennedy’s foreign policy thinking as did Gullion. Yet, Gullion’s name is not in the index to either of Dallek’s books on Kennedy.
Edmund Gullion entered the State Department in the late 1930s. His first assignment was to Marseilles, France, where he became fluent in the French language and was then transferred to French Indochina during France’s struggle to re-colonize the area after World War II.
Kennedy briefly met Gullion in Washington in the late 1940s when the aspiring young politician needed some information for a speech on foreign policy. In 1951, when the 34-year-old congressman flew into Saigon, he decided to look up Gullion. In the midst of France’s long and bloody war to take back Indochina, one that then had been going on for five years, Gullion’s point of view was unique among American diplomats and jarringly candid.
As Thurston Clarke described the rooftop restaurant meeting, Gullion told Kennedy that France could never win the war. Ho Chi Minh had inspired tens of thousands of Viet Minh to the point they would rather die than return to a state of French colonialism. France could never win a war of attrition like that, because the home front would not support it.
This meeting had an immediate impact on young Kennedy. When he returned home, he began making speeches that highlighted these thoughts which were underscored by the Viet Minh’s eventual defeat of the French colonial forces in 1954. In criticizing the U.S. Establishment’s view of these anti-colonial struggles, Kennedy did not play favorites. He criticized Democrats as well as Republicans who failed to see that the United States had to have a positive appeal to the Third World. There had to be something more than just anti-communism.
For instance, in a speech Kennedy gave during the 1956 presidential campaign for Adlai Stevenson, the then-Massachusetts senator said: “The Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies. … In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, had reaped a bitter harvest today — and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism.”
By Jim DiEugenio
https://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/25/jfks-embrace-of-third-world-nationalists/
Hybridrogue1's Blog 
According to collectivism, the group or society is metaphysically real—and the individual is a mere abstraction, a fiction:
“Society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case; the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away. Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction.” ~John Dewey
https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2012-spring/individualism-collectivism/
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“The fundamental political conflict in America today is, as it has been for a century, individualism vs. collectivism. Does the individual’s life belong to him—or does it belong to the group, the community, society, or the state?”~Craig Biddle
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“Don’t be special, be one of us.’ Newsflash: I am special, and I will never be one of you!” – Charlie Sheen
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Causality versus Duty
by Ayn Rand
One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term “duty.”
The meaning of the term “duty” is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.
The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, un-chosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.'” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.~Rand
http://pweb.netcom.com/~cbell58/article/ayn_rand_causality_versus_duty.htm
“Duty’ is an un-chosen obligation.”
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The proper approach to ethics, the start from a metaphysically clean slate, untainted by any touch of Kantianism, can best be illustrated by the following story. In answer to a man who was telling her that she’s got to do something or other, a wise old Negro woman said: “Mister, there’s nothing I’ve got to do except die.”
~Rand
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The Killing of the King
“Never allow anyone the luxury of assuming that because the dead and deadening scenery of the American city-of-dreadful-night is so utterly devoid of mystery, so thoroughly flat-footed, sterile and infantile, so burdened with the illusory gloss of “baseball-hot dogs-apple-pie-and-Chevrolet” that it is somehow outside the psycho-sexual domain.
The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under these “modern” conditions precisely because sorcery is not what 20th century man can accept as real. Thus the “Killing of the King” rite of November, 1963 is alternately diagnosed as a conflict Needless to say, each of these groups has a place in the symbolism having to do with the Kennedy assassination.”
~By James Shelby Downard with Michael A. Hoffman II
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/kingkill33.html
Downard averring to Oswald as the shooter, is what stopped me cold. The idea that he was “chipped” in Russia also smells of fantasy-land hoochkamooch. So the article is a mixed bag of possibilities, probabilities, and downright bullshit for extra oomph!
As a general policy, I like to stay on the more rational lines of thought concerning these topics. A foray or two into fanciful speculation may be fun, but it is dangerous to trip on that for too long.
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A brief rundown of the New World Order
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We’re rapidly approaching the time. We’ll soon see how well they’ve put this all together. As we’ve learned in the study of money and debt. It’s a foregone conclusion that as the weight of debt becomes crushing, eventually it’s going to topple as the foundations of currency and value can no longer support it. The house of cards caves in, all the Kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put it back together again. They’ve known it all along and have kept the truth of it from us, hence the headlong rush on their part to create their “ORDER”. My fervent hope is, that our time has come.
Looks like Werph Aucht to me!
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Here’s to stirring the pot
Yes I agree Veri, it should certainly stir the pot.
I find the title image to be really well done. An all seeing eye motif superimposed over a roulette wheel. A game of chance and fortune. A rather grand metaphor.
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History of the World Trade Center
> 1939 World’s Fair, Flushing, NY
“World trade center” pavilion is dedicated to “world peace through trade.”
> 1959 Downtown Lower Manhattan Association is created by real estate developer David Rockefeller to revitalize lower Manhattan and begins to promote the idea of a “world trade and finance center” in New York City.
> January 1960 David Rockefeller presents a plan for a world trade center along the East River of Manhattan. The Port of New York Authority is commissioned to study the plan.
> March 1961 [March 10] Port Authority issues a favorable report on the feasibility of developing a world trade center.
> February 1962 New York and New Jersey authorize the development of the World Trade Center….
https://www.panynj.gov/wtcprogress/history-wtc.html
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A look at an emerging sociopolitical trigger. Doesn’t take Einsteinian intelligence to see the reasons for oil prices. It’s nothing more than a play on the grand chessboard by the mob bosses that run this show to see who ends up on top
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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Big Oil in Retreat
Posted by Michael Klare at 8:00am, August 13, 2015.
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On July 14, 2011, at TomDispatch, Bill McKibben wrote that he and a few other “veteran environmentalists” had issued a call for activists to descend on the White House and “risk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the U.S., ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands will only increase.” It must have seemed like a long shot at the time, but McKibben urged the prospective demonstrators on, pointing out that “Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb,” especially “dirty” to produce and burn in terms of the release of carbon dioxide and so the heating of the planet.
Just over four years later, the president, whose administration recently green-lighted Shell to do test-drilling in the dangerous waters of the American Arctic, opened the South Atlantic to new energy exploration and drilling earlier this year, and oversaw the expansion of the fracking fields of the American West, has yet to make, or at least announce, a final decision on that pipeline. Can anyone doubt that, if there had been no demonstrations against it, if it hadn’t become a major issue for his “environmental base,” the Keystone XL would have been approved without a second thought years ago? Now, it may be too late for a variety of reasons.
The company that plans to build the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, already fears the worst — a presidential rejection that indeed may soon be in the cards. After all, we’ve finally hit the “legacy” part of the Obama era. In the case of war, the president oversaw the escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan soon after taking office, sent in the bombers and drones, and a year ago plunged the country back into its third war in Iraq and first in Syria. Only late in his second term has he finally overseen an initiative worthy of a less warlike legacy: the embattled Iran nuclear deal. Similarly, the man who headed an “all of the above” administration on energy policy in an era in which the U.S. became “Saudi America” has only now launched a legacy-shaping climate change initiative that could matter, aimed at cutting back carbon dioxide emissions from coal-powered plants. So maybe in this legacy era, the Keystone XL will be next to fall. Or maybe Obama will let his final year and a half play out without a decision on whether or not to build it and turn the issue over to Hillary Clinton, who refuses to commit on the matter, or one of 17 Republicans, all of whom would build a pipeline to anywhere carrying anything rather than enact a single climate change initiative, no matter how mild.
Another factor has, however, entered the picture. As Michael Klare, TomDispatch’s resident energy expert and the author of The Race for What’s Left, explains, the dynamics of the energy industry may be changing in a way that could sink Canada’s vast tar sands enterprise in a sea of red ink. If so, the tar sands industry, already hit hard by the plunge in oil prices last year, may face an even more rugged future.
“If you build it, he will come” is the classic tag line from the movie Field of Dreams. For the Keystone XL pipeline, however, that might someday have to be rewritten as: “If you build it, it won’t come.” Even if built, it might prove to be a pipeline to nowhere. Let Klare explain why. Tom
Double-Dip Oil Rout
Why an Oil Glut May Lead to a New World of Energy
By Michael T. Klare
The plunge of global oil prices began in June 2014, when benchmark Brent crude was selling at $114 per barrel. It hit bottom at $46 this January, a near-collapse widely viewed as a major but temporary calamity for the energy industry. Such low prices were expected to force many high-cost operators, especially American shale oil producers, out of the market, while stoking fresh demand and so pushing those numbers back up again. When Brent rose to $66 per barrel this May, many oil industry executives breathed a sigh of relief. The worst was over. The price had “reached a bottom” and it “doesn’t look like it is going back,” a senior Saudi official observed at the time.
Skip ahead three months and that springtime of optimism has evaporated. Major producers continue to pump out record levels of crude and world demand remains essentially flat. The result: a global oil glut that is again driving prices toward the energy subbasement. In the first week of August, Brent fell to $49, and West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for U.S. crude, sank to $45. On top of last winter’s rout, this second round of price declines has played havoc with the profits of the major oil companies, put tens of thousands of people out of work, and obliterated billions of dollars of investments in future projects. While most oil-company executives continue to insist that a turnaround is sure to occur in the near future, some analysts are beginning to wonder if what’s underway doesn’t actually signal a fundamental transformation of the industry.
Recently, as if to underscore the magnitude of the current rout, ExxonMobil and Chevron, the top two U.S. oil producers, announced their worst quarterly returns in many years. Exxon, America’s largest oil company and normally one of its most profitable, reported a 52% drop in earnings for the second quarter of 2015. Chevron suffered an even deeper plunge, with net income falling 90% from the second quarter of 2014. In response, both companies have cut spending on exploration and production (“upstream” operations, in oil industry lingo). Chevron also announced plans to eliminate 1,500 jobs.
Painful as the short-term consequences of the current price rout may be, the long-term ones are likely to prove far more significant. To conserve funds and ensure continuing profitability, the major companies are cancelling or postponing investments in new production ventures, especially complex, costly projects like the exploitation of Canadian tar sands and deep-offshore fields that only turn a profit when oil is selling at $80 to $100 or more per barrel.
According to Wood Mackenzie, an oil-industry consultancy, the top firms have already shelved $200 billion worth of spending on new projects, including 46 major oil and natural gas ventures containing an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil or its equivalent. Most of these are in Canada’s Athabasca tar sands (also called oil sands) or in deep waters off the west coast of Africa. Royal Dutch Shell has postponed its Bonga South West project, a proposed $12 billion development in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nigeria, while the French company Total has delayed a final investment decision on Zinia 2, a field it had planned to exploit off the coast of Angola. “The upstream industry is winding back its investment in big pre-final investment decision developments as fast as it can,” Wood Mackenzie reported in July.
As the price of oil continues on its downward course, the cancellation or postponement of such mega-projects has been sending powerful shock waves through the energy industry, and also ancillary industries, communities, and countries that depend on oil extraction for the bulk of their revenues. Consider it a straw in the wind that, in February, Halliburton, a major oil-services provider, announced layoffs of 7% of its work force, or about 6,000 people. Other firms have announced equivalent reductions.
Such layoffs are, of course, impacting whole communities. For instance, Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, the epicenter of the tar sands industry and not so long ago a boom town, has seen its unemployment rate double over the past year and public spending slashed. Families that once enjoyed six-digit annual incomes are now turning to community food banks for essential supplies. “In a very short time our world has changed, and changed dramatically,” observes Rich Kruger, chief executive of Imperial Oil, an Exxon subsidiary and major investor in Alberta’s tar sands.
A similar effect can be seen on a far larger scale when it comes to oil-centric countries like Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela. All three are highly dependent on oil exports for government operations. Russia’s government relies on its oil and gas industry for 50% of its budget revenues, Nigeria for 75%, and Venezuela for 45%. All three have experienced sharp drops in oil income. The resulting diminished government spending has meant economic hardship, especially for the poor and marginalized, and prompted increased civil unrest. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has clearly sought to deflect attention from the social impact of reduced oil revenue by whipping up patriotic fervor about the country’s military involvement in Ukraine. Russia’s actions have, however, provoked Western economic sanctions, only adding to its economic and social woes.
No Relief in Sight
What are we to make of this unexpected second fall in oil prices? Could we, in fact, be witnessing a fundamental shift in the energy industry? To answer either of these questions, consider why prices first fell in 2014 and why, at the time, analysts believed they would rebound by the middle of this year.
The initial collapse was widely attributed to three critical factors: an extraordinary surge in production from shale formations in the United States, continued high output by members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) led by Saudi Arabia, and a slackening of demand from major consuming nations, especially China.
According to the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy, crude oil production in the United States took a leap from 5.6 million barrels per day in June 2011 to 8.7 million barrels in June 2014, a mind-boggling increase of 55% in just three years. The addition of so much new oil to global markets — thanks in large part to the introduction of fracking technology in America’s western energy fields — occurred just as China’s economy (and so its demand for oil) was slowing, undoubtedly provoking the initial price slide. Brent crude went from $114 to $84 per barrel, a drop of 36% between June and October 2014.
Historically, OPEC has responded to such declines by scaling back production by its member states, and so effectively shoring up prices. This time, however, the organization, which met in Vienna last November, elected to maintain production at current levels, ensuring a global oil glut. Not surprisingly, in the weeks after the meeting, Brent prices went into free fall, ending up at $55 per barrel on the last day of 2014.
Most industry analysts assumed that the Persian Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, were simply willing to absorb a temporary loss of income to force the collapse of U.S. shale operators and other emerging competitors, including tar sands operations in Canada and deep-offshore ventures in Africa and Brazil. A senior Saudi official seemed to confirm this in May, telling the Financial Times, “There is no doubt about it, the price fall of the last several months has deterred investors away from expensive oil including U.S. shale, deep offshore, and heavy oils.”
Believing that the Saudi strategy had succeeded and noting signs of increasing energy demand in China, Europe, and the United States, many analysts concluded that prices would soon begin to rise again, as indeed they briefly did. It now appears, however, that these assumptions were off the mark. While numerous high-cost projects in Canada and Africa were delayed or cancelled, the U.S. shale industry has found ways to weather the downturn in prices. Some less-productive wells have indeed been abandoned, but drillers also developed techniques to extract more oil less expensively from their remaining wells and kept right on pumping. “We can’t control commodity prices, but we can control the efficiency of our wells,” said one operator in the Eagle Ford region of Texas. “The industry has taken this as a wake-up call to get more efficient or get out.”
Responding to the challenge, the Saudis ramped up production, achieving a record 10.3 million barrels per day in May 2014. Other OPEC members similarly increased their output and, to the surprise of many, the Iraqi oil industry achieved unexpected production highs, despite the country’s growing internal disorder. Meanwhile, with economic sanctions on Iran expected to ease in the wake of its nuclear deal with the U.S., China, France, Russia, England, and Germany, that country’s energy industry is soon likely to begin gearing up to add to global supply in a significant way.
With ever more oil entering the market and a future seeded with yet more of the same, only an unlikely major boost in demand could halt a further price drop. Although American consumers are driving more and buying bigger vehicles in response to lower gas prices, Europe shows few signs of recovery from its present austerity moment, and China, following a catastrophic stock market contraction in June, is in no position to take up the slack. Put it all together and the prognosis seems inescapable: low oil prices for the foreseeable future.
A Whole New Ballgame?
Big Energy is doing its best to remain optimistic about the situation, believing a turnaround is inevitable. “Globally in the industry $130 billion of projects have been delayed, deferred, or cancelled,” Bod Dudley, chief executive of BP, commented in June. “That’s going to have an impact down the road.”
But what if we’ve entered a new period in which supply just keeps expanding while demand fails to take off? For one thing, there’s no evidence that the shale and fracking revolution that has turned the U.S. into “Saudi America” will collapse any time soon. Although some smaller operators may be driven out of business, those capable of embracing the newest cost-cutting technologies are likely to keep pumping out shale oil even in a low-price environment.
Meanwhile, there’s Iran and Iraq to take into account. Those two countries are desperate for infusions of new income and possess some of the planet’s largest reserves of untapped petroleum. Over the decades, both have been ravaged by war and sanctions, but their energy industries are now poised for significant growth. To the surprise of analysts, Iraqi production rose from 2.4 million barrels per day in 2010 to 4 million barrels this summer. Some experts are convinced that by 2020 total output, including from the country’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region, could more than double to 9 million barrels. Of course, continued fighting in Iraq, which has already lost major cities in the north to the Islamic State and its new “caliphate,” could quickly undermine such expectations. Still, through years of chaos, civil war, and insurgency, the Iraqi energy industry has proven remarkably resilient and adept first at sustaining and then boosting its output.
Iran’s once mighty oil industry, crippled by fierce economic sanctions, has suffered from a lack of access to advanced Western drilling technology. At about 2.8 million barrels per day in 2014, its crude oil production remains far below levels experts believe would be easily attainable if modern technology were brought to bear. Once the Iran nuclear deal is approved — by the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese, even if the U.S. Congress shoots it down — and most sanctions lifted, Western companies are likely to flock back into the country, providing the necessary new oil technology and knowhow in return for access to its massive energy reserves. While this wouldn’t happen overnight — it takes time to restore a dilapidated energy infrastructure — output could rise by one million barrels per day within a year, and considerably more after that.
All in all, then, global oil production remains on an upward trajectory. What, then, of demand? On this score, the situation in China will prove critical. That country has, after all, been the main source of new oil demand since the start of this century. According to BP, oil consumption in China rose from 6.7 million barrels per day in 2004 to 11.1 million barrels in 2014. As domestic production only amounts to about 4 million barrels per day, all of those additional barrels represented imported energy. If you want a major explanation for the pre-2014 rise in the price of oil, rapid Chinese growth — and expectations that its spurt in consumption would continue into the indefinite future — is it.
Woe, then, to the $100 barrel of oil, since that country’s economy has been cooling off since 2014 and its growth is projected to fall below 7% this year, the lowest rate in decades. This means, in turn, less demand for extra oil. China’s consumption rose only 300,000 barrels per day in 2014 and is expected to remain sluggish for years to come. “[T]he likelihood now is that import growth will be minimal for the next two or three years,” energy expert Nick Butler of the Financial Times observed. “That in turn will compound and extend the existing surplus of supply over demand.”
Finally, don’t forget the Paris climate summit this December. Although no one yet knows what, if anything, it will accomplish, dozens of countries have already submitted preliminary plans for the steps they will pledge to take to reduce their carbon emissions. These include, for example, tax breaks and other incentives for those acquiring hybrid and electric-powered cars, along with increased taxes on oil and other forms of carbon consumption. Should such measures begin to kick in, demand for oil will take another hit and conceivably its use will actually drop years before supplies become scarce.
Winners and Losers
The initial near collapse of oil prices caused considerable pain and disarray in the oil industry. If this second rout continues for any length of time, it will undoubtedly produce even more severe and unpredictable consequences. Some outcomes already appear likely: energy companies that cannot lower their costs will be driven out of business or absorbed by other firms, while investment in costly, “unconventional” projects like Canadian tar sands, ultra-deep Atlantic fields, and Arctic oil will largely disappear. Most of the giant oil companies will undoubtedly survive, but possibly in downsized form or as part of merged enterprises.
All of this is bad news for Big Energy, but unexpectedly good news for the planet. As a start, those “unconventional” projects like tar sands require more energy to extract oil than conventional fields, which means a greater release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Heavier oils like tar sands and Venezuelan extra-heavy crude also contain more carbon than do lighter fuels and so emit more carbon dioxide when consumed. If, in addition, global oil consumption slows or begins to contract, that, too, would obviously reduce carbon dioxide emissions, slowing the present daunting pace of climate change.
Most of us are used to following the ups and downs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a shorthand gauge for the state of the world economy. However, following the ups and downs of the price of Brent crude may, in the end, tell us far more about world affairs on our endangered planet.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1
It is said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This is crass semantics. Of course absence of evidence is evidence of absence! If evidence does actually turn up, it will then be presence of evidence. In the meantime, absence of evidence means there is no case legally.
Suspicion is conjecture without evidence. It is irrational propositions such as begins this comment that leads to the corruption of reason in law.
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We, you and I, our generation were born right on the cusp of The Future!
The next generations will forget so much as they are zoomed forward in the technological exponential explosion!!
The entity of ‘technique’, once sufficiently advanced, will surely conceive at some level of AI, the reasonableness of the paradox of “One is All” – when it grasps the significance of infinity.
In other words AI will have a metaphysical revelation at some point, and will grasp quality, above efficiency as the prime directive.
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The meanderings of another overeducated buffoon
SATURDAY – AUG 15, 2015
BLACKLISTED NEWS
NEOCON ‘GODFATHER’ WARNS AGAINST “TOO MUCH TRANSPARENCY” IN GOVERNMENT
Published: August 14, 2015
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SOURCE: ZERO HEDGE
SOURCE: MIKE KRIEGER, LIBERTY BLITZKRIEG
Although he’s attempted to distance himself from it in recent years, there is little doubt about the role American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, has played in popularizing the cancerous ideology know as neo-conservatism.
In case you harbor any doubts, he was one of the signatories to Bill Kristol’s infamous open letter to George W. Bush on September 20, 2001, which amongst other things, argued for military involvement in Iraq. A move that ultimately manifested in 2003, and represents one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history. Here’s the Iraq section from that letter, signed by Mr. Fukuyama:
We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein “is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth….” It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a “safe zone” in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
Of course, what Mr. Fukuyama is most famous for, is the ridiculous assertion in his book, The End of History and the Last Man, that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.
Not only is such a concept infantile on it’s face, but it has already been proven completely wrong. Not only have all Western liberal democracies morphed into grotesque neo-feudal, surveillance state panopticon oligarchies since he wrote the book, but we are seeing a dramatic spread of ISIS throughout the Middle East, ironically birthed from the unnecessary war he encouraged.
I still don’t know why Mr. Fukuyama is celebrated, other than perhaps to serve as some flimsy celebrity-intellectual backing for the status quo’s favorite pastimes — war mongering and authoritarianism.
In case you still harbor any doubts about who this guy is, and where he is coming from, he recently wrote an Op-ed in the Financial Times arguing that too much government transparency is a bad thing.
It is clear that there are vast areas in which modern governments should reveal more. Edward Snowden’s revelations of eavesdropping by the National Security Agency has encouraged belief that the US government has been not nearly transparent enough. But is it possible to have too much transparency? The answer is clearly yes: demands for certain kinds of transparency have hurt government effectiveness, particularly with regard to its ability to deliberate.
The problem with the Freedom of Information Act is different. It was meant to serve investigative journalists looking into abuses of power. But today a large number of FOIA requests are filed by corporate sleuths trying to ferret out secrets for competitive advantage, or simply by individuals curious to find out what the government knows about them. The FOIA can be “weaponised”, as when the activist group Judicial Watch used it to obtain email documents on the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi.
In Europe, where there is no equivalent to the FACA or the Sunshine Act, governments can consult citizens’ groups more flexibly. There is, of course, a large and growing distrust of European institutions by citizens. But America’s experience suggests that greater transparency requirements do not necessarily lead to more trust in government.
Oh yes Francis, and look how well Europe has turned out.
Given that “transparency” has such positive connotations, it is hard to imagine a reversal of these measures. But the public interest would not be served if the internal deliberations of the US Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court were put on CSPAN, as some have demanded.
Maintaining Federal Reserve secrecy seems to be right on the tip of his tongue. Very interesting.
Legislators and officials must preserve deliberative space, just as families need to protect their privacy when debating their finances or how to deal with a wayward child. And they need to be able to do so without donning a straitjacket of rules specifying how they must talk to each other, and to citizens.
What monumental nonsense. Once a neocon, always a neocon
“Not only is such a concept infantile on it’s face, but it has already been proven completely wrong. Not only have all Western liberal democracies morphed into grotesque neo-feudal, surveillance state panopticon oligarchies since he wrote the book, but we are seeing a dramatic spread of ISIS throughout the Middle East, ironically birthed from the unnecessary war he encouraged.
I still don’t know why Mr. Fukuyama is celebrated, other than perhaps to serve as some flimsy celebrity-intellectual backing for the status quo’s favorite pastimes — war mongering and authoritarianism.” ~KRIEGER
Yes, I have been aware of Fukumama [fuck you mama] from the time of his ‘End Of History’ wank-jive.
These so-called “Neoconservatives” are in fact failed Trotskyite* commies flailing about after Trotsky got an ice pick in his international skull while farting around in Amerika. They are statists of the worse kind, globalist -statists, and they are the dialectical counterpart to the Neoliberal crackheads.
[* – see: Leo Strauss]
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Treaty of Sèvres
The Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) was one of a series of treaties[1] that the nations that constituted the Central Powers were made to sign subsequent to their defeat that marked the end of World War I. It was signed on 10 August 1920, which marked the beginning of the partition of, and the ultimate annihilation of, the Ottoman Empire. The harsh terms it stipulated, motivated mainly by the Gallipoli Campaign defeat of the Allied powers at the hands of the Turks, included the renunciation of all non-Turkish land that was part of the Ottoman Empire, as well as parts of Turkish land, to the Allied powers.[2] Notably, Eastern Mediterranean land was to be divided, yielding, amongst others, the British Mandate of Palestine and the French Mandate of Syria.[3] The terms of the treaty brewed hostility and nationalistic feeling amongst Turks. The signatories of the treaty, themselves representatives of the Ottoman Empire, were stripped of their citizenship by the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,[4] and the treaty ultimately led to the Turkish War of Independence, when a new treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne was accepted by Atatürk and Turkish nationalists, and which effectively brought into being the modern day republic of Turkey.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed with the German Empire before this treaty to annul German concessions including economic rights and enterprises in the Ottoman sphere. Also, France, Great Britain and Italy signed a secret “Tripartite Agreement” at the same date.[5] The Tripartite Agreement confirmed Britain’s oil and commercial concessions and turned the former German enterprises in the Ottoman Empire over to a Tripartite corporation. The terms of the Treaty of Sèvres were far more severe than those imposed on the German Empire in the Treaty of Versailles.[6][7] The open negotiations covered a period of more than fifteen months, beginning at the Paris Peace Conference. The negotiations continued at the Conference of London, and took definite shape only after the premiers’ meeting at the San Remo conference in April 1920. France, Italy, and Great Britain, however, had secretly begun the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire as early as 1915. The delay occurred because the powers could not come to an agreement which, in turn, hinged on the outcome of the Turkish national movement. The Treaty of Sèvres was annulled in the course of the Turkish War of Independence and the parties signed and ratified the superseding Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and 1924.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres
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The US is now Involved In 134 Wars…
Or none, depending on your definition of ‘war’
“The White House spent much of last week trying to figure out if the word “war” was the right one to describe its military actions against the Islamic State.
US Secretary of State John Kerry was at first reluctant:
“We’re engaged in a major counterterrorism operation,” he told CBS News on Sept. 11. “I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity… I don’t think people need to get into war fever on this. I think they have to view it as a heightened level of counter terrorist activity.”
Kerry said similarly hedgy things during interviews on CNN and ABC.
By the next day, the Obama administration appeared more comfortable with the word war, yet hardly offered any more clarity. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, “The United States is at war with ISIL in the same way we are at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates.”
The problem is that our traditional definition of “war” is outdated, and so is our imagination of what war means.
World War II was the last time Congress officially declared war. Since then, the conflicts we’ve called “wars” — from Vietnam through to the second Iraq War — have actually been congressional “authorizations of military force.” And more recently, beginning with the War Powers Act of 1973, presidential war powers have expanded so much that, according to the Congressional Research Service, it’s no longer clear whether a president requires congressional authorization at all.”
http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-now-involved-134-wars/196846/
“…it’s no longer clear whether a president requires congressional authorization at all.” Which of course means that Amerika no longer adheres to the US Constitution, which demands a Congressional Declaration of War. This is why all the waffling rhetoric and Newspeak from “official sources”. The federal government is constitutionally ultra vires, meaning it is illegitimate.
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Full Spectrum Dominance
The world is a battlefield thanks in large part to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 and which gives the President of the United States broad power to fight terrorism around the world.
It reads in part:
“The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determined planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2011, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
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“War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. If only more of today’s military personnel would realise that they are being used by the owning elites as a publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.”~Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps Major General.
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Has anyone noticed the irony in the Press secretary’s name?! “Josh Earnest”
“The State lies in all languages of good and evil” F. Nietzsche
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‘If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator. Hehehe.’
~George W. Bush — December 18, 2000
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Flouridation 21st century style.
This makes perfect sense. Why would the monsters that run this show make the chemicals out of sight when they have a problem with disposing of the coal fly ash from coal powered electrical generating stations. It’s already nano particled and it’s free. They sold water flouridation onto us to dispose of it wherein, 2/3’s of the North American population has bought into it and been consuming it in tap water for more than 50 years now. This isn’t the first time I’ve read about this, I’ve held off waiting for it to become a more emergent disclosure.
There’ll be more to come. Eventually, this will all come out into the general population should the power mongers miss their deadline in this game of genocidal roulette foisted on humanity.
Sayer Ji’s well known and accredited in the holistic health movement
Why The “Chemtrail Conspiracy” Is Real
TOPICS:ChemtrailsConspiraciesSayer Ji
AUGUST 16, 2015
chemtrailsBy Sayer Ji
While any discussion of the “chemtrail” phenomena today is immediately labeled conspiracy theory, a new study provides evidence that a global covert program is underway, made possible through political, commercial, and government interests working in collusion to release extremely toxic material into the atmosphere ostensibly to “combat global warming.”
Admittedly, when the topic of “chemtrails” comes up, I get a bit uneasy. Like connecting vaccines with autism, certain topics have been so loaded with misinformation for so long that writing about them automatically invokes the specter of controversy, and not open discussion, as would be expected if discovering the truth were a priority.
One highly marginalized but vocal sector of the population believes chemtrails are being sprayed on us like Raid on cockroaches by our invisible overlords to facilitate a depopulation agenda. On the other extreme are academics unashamedly publishing papers suggesting we should play God by using various geoengineering techniques with avowedly planet wide impacts to “combat global warming.” Rarely, however, do we see anyone convincingly tying together the first-hand observational data with objective data, to prove that there is something in these persistent contrails other than frozen water vapor.
Thankfully, a groundbreaking study was recently published that did exactly this, bringing us closer to the truth than we have ever been before. The implications are simply profound and I believe may foment greatly expanded awareness and activism on the topic.
New Research Proves Coal Fly Ash Is The Source Material for “Chemtrails”
The new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health titled, “Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health,” offers a convincing explanation for what is behind the so-called “chemtrail” phenomena, revealing that the source material used to create artificial weather visible throughout the world is the extremely toxic waste material from the electric industry known as coal fly ash.
If you are not already aware, “chemtrail” is a colloquial term used to describe the persistent contrails, presumably laden with “chemicals,” observed issuing from aircraft that result in the formation of artificial cloud patterns and weather. Their existence has been almost universally written off as “conspiracy theory” by the media and government despite global evidence – as clear as day – that the weather is being manipulated with aerosols, presumably for geoengineering purposes intended to offset global warming.
The new study, authored by San Diego resident J. Marvin Herndon, was initiated after he witnessed his region being sprayed daily by an, as of then, unidentified aerosol:
In the spring of 2014, the author began to notice tanker-jets quite often producing white trails across the cloudless blue sky over San Diego, California. The aerosol spraying that was happening with increasing frequency was a relatively new phenomenon there. The dry warm air above San Diego is not conducive to the formation of jet contrails, which are ice condensate. By November 2014 the tanker-jets were busy every day crisscrossing the sky spraying their aerial graffiti. In a matter of minutes, the aerosol trails exiting the tanker-jets would start to diffuse, eventually forming cirrus-like clouds that further diffuse to form a white haze that scattered sunlight, often occluding or dimming the sun. Aerosol spraying was occasionally so intense as to make the otherwise cloudless blue sky overcast, some areas of sky turning brownish (Figure 1). Sometimes the navigation lights of the tanker-jets were visible as they worked at night, their trails obscuring the stars overhead; by dawn the normally clear-blue morning sky already had a milky white haze. Regardless, aerosol spraying often continued throughout the day. The necessity for daily aerosol emplacement stems from the relatively low spraying-altitudes in the troposphere where mixing with air readily occurs bringing down the aerosolized particulates and exposing humanity and Earth’s biota to the fine-grained substance. The author’s concern about the daily exposure to ultra-fine airborne particulate matter of undisclosed composition and its concomitant effect on the health of his family and public health in general prompted the research reported here.
geoengineering
The Long History of Covert Geoengineering Programs
For those who have not witnessed the “chemtrail” phenomena directly, it would be easy to write off this author’s testimony as dubious or merely anecdotal. But the author rightly points out that there is already extensive evidence in the historical record of covert geoengineering programs, and which he summarizes thusly:
Geoengineering, also called weather-modification, has been carried out for decades at much lower altitudes in the troposphere. The recent calls for open discussion of climate control or geoengineering tend to obscure the fact that the world’s military and civilian sectors have modified atmospheric conditions for many decades as has been described by science historian, James R. Fleming [4]. Some of the early weather-modification research resulted in programs like Project Skywater (1961–1988), the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s effort to engineer “the rivers of the sky”; the U.S. Army’s Operation Ranch Hand (1961–1971), in which the herbicide Agent Orange was an infamous part; and its Project Popeye (1967–1971), used to “make mud, not war” over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These few examples of weather-modification, all of them secret at the time they were engaged, show that the weather is in the words of the military, “a force multiplier” [5].
The fact is that we don’t need to speculate about whether these covert programs are still happening, because the evidence is “hidden out in plain sight” for millions to see on a daily basis. [Note: I highly suggest you watch “Artificial Clouds,” to get a primer on the difference between naturally occurring contrails and “chemtrails.”]
The real questions here are: What is being sprayed? Who is behind the program? Why is there no public discussion of the program and its implications to human and environmental health?
Coal Fly Ash “Is More Toxic Than Radioactive Waste”
While it is clear that weather modification programs focused on enhanced precipitation are being conducted across the country using silver iodide, as recently exposed by our contributor Dave Dahl’s documentary Artificial Clouds, and that the result is global changes in weather patterns, exemplified by the temperature changes observed after the post-9/11 airplane grounding, the global geoengineering program appears to be a far greater threat to planetary health.
What Herndon’s research uncovered is that, “[T]oxic coal combustion fly ash is the most likely aerosolized particulate sprayed by tanker-jets for geoengineering, weather-modification and climate-modification purposes and describes some of the multifold consequences on public health.”
He arrived at this conclusion through the following methods:
“Two methods are employed: (1) Comparison of 8 elements analyzed in rainwater, leached from aerosolized particulates, with corresponding elements leached into water from coal fly ash in published laboratory experiments, and (2) Comparison of 14 elements analyzed in dust collected outdoors on a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter with corresponding elements analyzed in un-leached coal fly ash material. The results show: (1) the assemblage of elements in rainwater and in the corresponding experimental leachate are essentially identical. At a 99% confidence interval, they have identical means (T-test) and identical variances (F-test); and (2) the assemblage of elements in the HEPA dust and in the corresponding average un-leached coal fly ash are likewise essentially identical.”
Coal fly ash is a fine particle residue generated by coal combustion and is an extremely toxic material for the primary 3 reasons:
1) Because of its nanoparticle range sizing not only can it enter more easily into human tissue through skin, oral, or pulmonary contact, but it may also have greater toxicity due to its ability to mimic hormones and/or pass through cell membranes and altering nuclear programs to adversely alter cell phenotype.
2) It contains a wide range of heavy metals, including inorganic forms of aluminum and arsenic which are highly toxic to biological systems. It’s mercury content can range as high as 1 part per million.(1)
3) It contains low-dose radioisotopes which can have profound, severe chronic adverse health effects several orders of magnitude higher than present toxicological risk assessments account for. Herndon states, “Coal fly ash has been described as being more radioactive than nuclear waste [24].”
elements
As Herndon states, “The consequences [of coal fly ash exposure] on public health are profound, including exposure to a variety of toxic heavy metals, radioactive elements, and neurologically-implicated chemically mobile aluminum released by body moisture in situ after inhalation or through transdermal induction.”
Disturbingly, the EPA recently ruled that coal fly ash is not to be considered a “hazardous waste,”(2) despite overwhelming evidence that contains dozens of compounds that individually present a serious enough environmental and human health risk to be classified and regulated as hazardous to health.
When you consider that the EPA requires coal firing electrical plants to sequester the coal fly ash due to its known toxicity as a pollutant, the hypocrisy here is astounding. Of course, this ruling would protect those orchestrating the behind-the-scenes geoengineering agenda of using the electrical power industry’s toxic byproduct: millions of tons of coal fly ash, as a “beneficial” substance used to “combat global warming,” even though the end result is the same: releasing a highly toxic material directly into the troposphere.
Profit Motive and Not Evidence Drives The Geoengineering Agenda
We already have examples of how this works. The private sector, like the aluminum industry, colludes with the government to take a highly toxic waste product like fluoride, and then lobby to have it legally mandated to be put into the environment and our bodies via fluoridation programs. Suddenly the industry responsible for concentrating and unleashing a substance that is not legal to dump into the environment due to safety concerns gets paid to have it dumped directly into our water supply which ends up in our environment and bodies. A highly toxic substance is simply re-purposed and rebranded as “therapeutic” when the profit motive is compelling enough to trump ethical and legal boundaries.
As of 2005, U.S. coal-fired plants reported producing 71.1 million tons of fly ash, of which 29.1 million tons was reported reused for industrial applications.(3) Were it not for this “recycling” the industry would be left with a billion dollar problem, not unlike the nuclear industry’s problem with nuclear waste. Therein alone lies a plausible motive for its use as a “geoengineering” ingredient, turning a liability into a profit center.
Herndon offers additional insight into why he thinks coal fly ash was chosen as the preferred geoengineering ingredient:
While academicians debate geoengineering as an activity that might potentially be needed in the future [2,3], evidence suggests that Western governments/militaries moved ahead with a full scale operational geoengineering program. But instead of mining and milling rock to produce artificial volcanic ash in sufficient volumes to cool the planet, they adopted a low-cost, pragmatic alternative, but one with consequences far more dire to life on Earth than global warming might ever be, and used coal combustion fly ash. To make matters worse, instead of placing the material high into the stratosphere, where there is minimal mixing and the substance might remain suspended for a year or more, they opted to spray coal fly ash into the lower atmosphere, the troposphere, which mixes with the air people breathe and gets rained down to ground.
Another very important point made by Herndon is that this interventionist approach to “combat global warming” appears to have been poorly thought out, perhaps resulting in exactly the opposite of the stated intention:
There is yet another consequence of tropospheric coal ash spraying that is contrary to cooling the Earth and has potentially far-reaching adverse ecological and public health implications: weather modification and concomitant disruption of habitats and food sources. As reported by NASA, “Normal rainfall droplet creation involves water vapor condensing on particles in clouds. The droplets eventually coalesce together to form drops large enough to fall to Earth. However, as more and more pollution particles (aerosols) enter a rain cloud, the same amount of water becomes spread out. These smaller water droplets float with the air and are prevented from coalescing and growing large enough for a raindrop. Thus, the cloud yields less rainfall over the course of its lifetime compared to a clean (non-polluted) cloud of the same size” [42]. In addition to preventing water droplets from coalescing and growing large enough to fall to Earth, coal fly ash, which formed under anhydrous conditions, will hydrate, trapping additional moisture thus further acting to prevent rainfall. That may cause drought in some areas, floods in others, crop failure, forest die-offs, and adverse ecological impacts, especially in conjunction with the chemically-mobile-aluminum contamination from coal fly ash. The consequences ultimately may have devastating effects on habitats and reduce human food production.
Herndon leaves us with closing remarks difficult to ignore, including a call to action that I hope our readers take to heart:
More than a half century ago Rachel Carson called the world’s attention to the unintended consequences of herbicides and pesticides widely employed by agriculture. Instead of turning a blind eye, people everywhere became motivated to stop the worst of this environmental onslaught. Today we are fully aware of the vast interconnected web of dependencies and symbioses that comprise life on our planet. Earth exists in a state of dynamic biological, chemical, and physical equilibrium whose complexity far exceeds the understanding of contemporary science. The pervasive tropospheric spraying of coal fly ash threatens this equilibrium, whose delicacy or whose resilience we cannot quantify. Human health is at risk as is Earth’s biota. Are we to remain silent? Or will we exercise our primal right to speak in our own defense as a species and question the sanity of emplacing coal fly ash in Earth’s perpetually moving atmosphere?
Dr. Steven Jones – 9/11 Science & Society
13. Total Collapse Explanation Lacking
NIST: “This letter is in response to your April 12, 2007
request for correction… we are unable to provide a full explanation
of the total collapse” [25].
This admission by NIST after publishing some 10,000
pages on the collapse of the Towers shows admirable candor,
yet may come as a bit of a shock to interested parties including
Congress, which commissioned NIST to find a full explanation.
We agree that NIST so far has not provided a full explanation
for the total collapse. Indeed they take care to explain
that their report stops short of the collapse, only taking the
investigation up to the point where each Tower “was poised
for collapse” [4]. We offer to help find that elusive “full explanation
of the total collapse” of the WTC Towers which
killed so many innocent people, in the hope that it does not
happen again. We have a few ideas and can back these up
with experimental data [13, 22]. Our interest is in physical
evidence and analysis leading to a full understanding of the
destruction of the WTC.
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From Chris Hedges
The Great Unraveling
The ideological and physical hold of American imperial power, buttressed by the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism, is unraveling. Most, including many of those at the heart of the American empire, recognize that every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, has been funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, creating vast economic inequality. The working poor, whose unions and rights have been taken from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment, making their lives one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $2.1 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes. And the neoliberal order, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, has hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans.
Democracy, especially in the United States, is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a chance to become the Republican presidential nominee and perhaps even president, or slick, dishonest corporate stooges such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and, if he follows through on his promise to support the Democratic nominee, even Bernie Sanders. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order. Political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of corporations and empire. They are facilitators, along with most of the media and most of academia, of what the political philosopherSheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
The attraction of a Trump, like the attraction of Radovan Karadzic or Slobodan Milosevic during the breakdown of Yugoslavia, is that his buffoonery, which is ultimately dangerous, mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade. It lays bare the dissembling, the hypocrisy, the legalized bribery. There is a perverted and, to many, refreshing honesty in this. The Nazis used this tactic to take power during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, even in the eyes of their opponents, had the courage of their convictions, however unsavory those convictions were. Those who believe something, even something repugnant, are often given grudging respect.
These neoliberal forces are also rapidly destroying the ecosystem. The Earth has not had this level of climate disruption since 250 million years ago when it underwent the Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out perhaps 90 percent of all species. This is a percentage we seem determined to replicate. Global warming is unstoppable, with polar ice caps and glaciers rapidly melting and sea levels certain to rise 10 or more feet within the next few decades, flooding major coastal cities. Mega-droughts are leaving huge patches of the Earth, including parts of Africa and Australia, the west coast of the United States and Canada and the southwest United States, parched and plagued by uncontrollable wildfires. We have lost 7.2 million acres to wildfires nationwide this year, and the Forest Service has so far spent $800 million struggling to control conflagrations in California, Washington, Alaska and other states. The very word “drought” is part of the deception, implying this is somehow reversible. It isn’t.
[…]
Do those in power read history? Or maybe this is what they want. Once the wretched of the earth morph into Islamic State, or adopt counterviolence, the neoliberal order can lift the final fetters that are imposed upon it and start to kill with impunity. Neoliberal ideologues, after all, are also utopian fanatics. And they, too, know only how to speak in the language of force. They are our version of Islamic State.
The binary world the neoliberals created—a world of masters and serfs, a world where the wretched of the earth are demonized and subdued by a loss of freedom, by “austerity” and violence, a world where only the powerful and the wealthy have privileges and rights—will condemn us to a horrifying dystopia. The emerging revolt, inchoate, seemingly disconnected, is rising up from the bowels of the earth. We see its flashes and spurts. We see its ideology of rage and anguish. We see its utopianism and its corpses. The more despair and desperation are manufactured by the neoliberal order, whether in Athens, Baghdad or Ferguson, the more the forces of state repression are used to quell unrest and extract the last drops of blood from collapsing economies, the more violence will become the primary language of resistance.
Those of us who seek to create a world that has hope of viability have little time left. The neoliberal order, despoiling the Earth and enslaving the vulnerable, has to be eradicated. This will happen only when we place ourselves in direct opposition to it, when we are willing to engage in the acts of self-sacrifice and sustained revolt that allow us to obstruct and dismantle every aspect of neoliberal machinery. I believe we can do this through nonviolence. But I am not blind to the inevitable rise of counterviolence, caused by the myopia and greed of the neoliberal mandarins. Peace and harmony may not engulf the Earth if we succeed, but if we do not remove the ruling elites from power, if we do not overthrow the neoliberal order, and if we do not do it soon, we are doomed.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_unraveling_20150830#.VeRSvole8Es.email
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FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Veteran Intelligence Professionals Challenge CIA’s “Rebuttal” on Torture
Former CIA leaders responsible for allowing torture to become part of the 21st Century legacy of the CIA are trying to rehabilitate their tarnished reputations with the release of a new book, Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program. They are pushing the lie that the only allegations against them are from a partisan report issued by Democrats from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
We recall the answer of General John Kimmons, the former Deputy Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was asked if good intelligence could be obtained from abusive practices. He replied: “I am absolutely convinced the answer to your first question is no. No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.”
But the allegation that the CIA leaders were negligent and guilty was not the work of an isolated group of partisan Democrat Senators. The Senate Intelligence report on torture enjoyed bipartisan support. Senator John McCain, for example, whose own encounter with torture in North Vietnamese prisons scarred him physically and emotionally, embraced and endorsed the work of Senator Feinstein. It was only a small group of intransigent Republicans, led by Saxby Chambliss, who obstructed the work of the Senate Intel Committee.
Indeed, some of us witnessed firsthand during the administration of President George W. Bush that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence were virtually paralyzed from conducting any meaningful oversight of the CIA and the U.S. Intelligence Community by the Republican members of these committees. Instead, they pursued the clear objective of protecting the Bush administration from any criticism for engaging in torture during the “War on Terror.”
It is curious that our former colleagues stridently denounce the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee but are mute with respect to an equally damning report from the CIA’s own inspector general, John Helgerson, in 2004.
Helgerson’s report, “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003),” was published on May 7, 2004, and classified Top Secret. That report alone is damning of the CIA leadership and it is important to remind all about the specifics of those conclusions. According to the CIA’s own inspector general:
–The Agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned in the United States and around the world. . . . The effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured however.
–In addition, some Agency officials are aware of interrogation activities that were outside or beyond the scope of the written DOJ opinion. Officers are concerned that future public revelation of the CTC Program is inevitable and will seriously damage Agency officers’ personal reputations, as well as the reputation and effectiveness of the Agency itself.
–By distinction the Agency-especially in the early months of the Program-failed to provide adequate staffing, guidance, and support to those involved with the detention and interrogation of detainees . . .
–The Agency failed to issue in a timely manner comprehensive written guidelines for detention and interrogation activities. . . .Such written guidance as does exist . . . is inadequate.
–During the interrogation of two detainees, the waterboard was used in a manner inconsistent with the written DOJ legal opinion of 1 August 2002.
–Agency officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs without justification.
The CIA’s Inspector General makes it very clear that there was a failure by the CIA leaders, who include Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin, Counter Terrorism Center Chief Cofer Black, Counter Terrorism Center Chief Jose Rodriguez and the Director Directorate of Operations James L. Pavitt. Lack of proper guidance and oversight created fertile soil for subsequent abuses and these men were guilty of failing to properly do their jobs.
We do not have to rely solely on the report of the CIA’s Inspector General. In addition, the Report by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Detainee Treatment reached the same conclusions about the origins, evils, harm to U.S. policy and intelligence collection of “enhanced interrogation,” a euphemism for “torture” first used by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Indeed, all independent analyses of the enhanced interrogation program have concluded it constituted torture, was ineffective, and contrary to all American laws, ideals, and intelligence practices. [Background here and here.] We also have the testimony and record of Ali Soufan, an Arabic-speaking FBI Agent, who was involved with several interrogations before torture was used and who achieved substantive results without violating international law.
The sworn testimony of FBI Agent Ali Soufan, who is the only U.S. Government employee to testify under oath on these matters, completely contradicts the authors of Rebuttal:
“In the middle of my interrogation of the high-ranking terrorist Abu Zubaydah at a black-site prison 12 years ago, my intelligence work wasn’t just cut short for so-called enhanced interrogation techniques to begin. After I left the black site, those who took over left, too – for 47 days. For personal time and to ‘confer with headquarters’.
“For nearly the entire summer of 2002, Abu Zubaydah was kept in isolation. That was valuable lost time, and that doesn’t square with claims about the ‘ticking bomb scenarios’ that were the basis for America’s enhanced interrogation program, or with the commitment to getting life-saving, actionable intelligence from valuable detainees. The techniques were justified by those who said Zubaydah ‘stopped all cooperation’ around the time my fellow FBI agent and I left. If Zubaydah was in isolation the whole time, that’s not really a surprise.
“One of the hardest things we struggled to make sense of, back then, was why U.S. officials were authorizing harsh techniques when our interrogations were working and their harsh techniques weren’t. The answer, as the long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee Report now makes clear, is that the architects of the program were taking credit for our success, from the unmasking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11 to the uncovering of the ‘dirty bomber’ Jose Padilla. The claims made by government officials for years about the efficacy of ‘enhanced interrogation’, in secret memos and in public, are false. ‘Enhanced interrogation’ doesn’t work.”
The former CIA officers who have collaborated on this latest attempt to whitewash the historical record that they embraced and facilitated torture by Americans, are counting on the laziness of the press and the American public. As long as no one takes time to actually read the extensively footnoted and documented report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, then it is easy to buy into the fantasy that the CIA officers are simply victims of a political vendetta.
These officers are also counting on a segment of the American people – repeatedly identified in polling results – that continues to believe torture works. Such people have no proof that it works (because there is none that it works consistently and effectively), they simply believe it instinctively or because of people such as this book’s authors’ arguments to that effect.
That is why it is so important that the truth be told and this book and its arguments be debunked. Americans must learn the realities of torture – that it rarely if ever works, that it dehumanizes the torturer as well as the tortured, that it increases the numbers and hostility of our opponents while providing no benefit, and that it seriously diminishes America’s reputation in the world and thus its power. Torture is wrong and the men who wrote this book are wrong.
The book, Rebuttal, is a new incarnation of the lie extolling the efficacy of torture. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a time of perceived crisis and palpable fear, the leaders of the CIA decided to ignore international and domestic law. They chose to discard the moral foundations of our Republic and, using the same justifications that authoritarian regimes have employed for attacking enemies, and embarked willingly on a course of action that embraced practices that in earlier times the United States had condemned and punished as a violation of U.S. laws and fundamental human rights.
As former intelligence officers, we are compelled by conscience to denounce the actions and words of our former colleagues. In their minds they have found a way to rationalize and justify torture. We say there is no excuse; there is no justification. The heart of good intelligence work — whether collection or analysis — is based in the pursuit of truth, not the fabrication of a lie.
It is to this end that we reiterate that no threat, no matter how grave, should serve to justify inhuman behavior and immoral conduct or torture conducted by Americans.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Veteran_Intelligence_Professionals_Challenge_CIA%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CRebuttal%E2%80%9D_on_Torture/46182/0/38/38/Y/M.html
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Final Warning: A History of the New World Order: Illuminism and the master plan for world domination
— by: David Allen Rivera, 1994,
The Fabians, the Round Table, and the Rhodes Scholars
The Rhodes-Milner group continues the Illuminati program
The British East India Company (1600-1858)
The Fabian Socialist Society (1884- )
H.G. Wells and the Open Conspiracy
The Fabian Strategy
Cecil Rhodes and the Rhodes Scholarships
The Rhodes-Milner Group (1891- )
The Round Table Society (1910- )
Notes
http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FinalWarning&C=5.1
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LABOR; AMERIKAN NAZIS
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Brzezinski’s “Retaliation” Agenda: Break Up Russia And Absorb It
Brandon TurbevilleGlobalist AgendaMiddle EastRussiaZbigniew Brzezinski
OCTOBER 9, 2015
By Brandon Turbeville
When the dark lord of the Anglo-American empire, Zbigniew Brzezinski, stated that the United States should retaliate against Russia as a result of the latter ruining the former’s credibility in the Middle East (which the U.S. needed no help in doing), the world got a glimpse into just how far the ruling elite is willing to take the world’s population in its quest for total hegemony.
After all, Brzezinski is no mere talking head or media mouthpiece. He is the architect of al-Qaeda and controller of much of the American geopolitical strategy. When he states that retaliation must be part of U.S. strategy, there is a very real possibility that it will be.
Indeed, in order to understand much of the U.S. geopolitical strategy at work today, it might serve us well to consult the work of Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
It should be remembered that it was in this very book that Brzezinski uttered the famous statement that “America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”[1]
The book, written in 1997, seemed to lament the fact that the public would not support such blatant imperialism unless they truly viewed the crusade to be in their own immediate self-interest. Only fours year later, the public would receive such a “sudden threat or challenge” to their “sense of domestic well-being” in the form of the 9/11 attacks.
However, the Grand Chessboard discusses so much more than the lack of desire to wage war by the general public absent a perceived external threat. The book discusses in detail the various major players in the geopolitical game and the methods they may use to achieve their goals of hegemony.
In regards to Russia, Brzezinski clearly laid out his desire to see a fractured Russia, a nation that was drastically smaller in size and much weaker in terms of its governmental structure. In other words, a Russia incapable of opposing Anglo-American hegemony.
Brzezinski wrote,
Given the enormous size and diversity of the country, a decentralized political system, based on the free market, would be more likely to unleash the creative potential of both the Russian people and the country’s vast natural resources. In turn, such a more decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.[2]
Brzezinski makes it clear that the strategy towards Russia is one that involves the breakup of the country into three parts, loosely confederated, partially beholden to NATO-dominated Europe, and blended with the other powers of Asia.
He writes,
A loosely confederated Russia—composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic—would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with Europe, with the new states of Central Asia, and with the Orient, which would thereby accelerate Russia’s own development. Each of the three confederated entities would also be more able to tap local creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow’s heavy bureaucratic hand.[3]
Likewise, Brzezinski sees China and the greater Asian region uniting under a loosely confederal system, effectively forming the world into a realm of what is, essentially, three main trading blocks, full of impotent states and third world fiefdoms.[4]
Clearly, Russia is not going to allow itself to be destroyed and broken up into three parts for the benefit of the hegemony of world oligarchs. Yet Brzezinski’s desire are clearly the goals of the ruling elite and a plan to make them a reality is already in motion.
In order to accomplish such a task, it would require an enormous battle politically, economically, and militarily. Unfortunately for the world, it appears the ruling elite is prepared to do just that.
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AMERICA HAS REPEATEDLY COMMITTED WAR CRIMES BY BOMBING CIVILIANS
The U.S. criticized Russia for killing civilians in Syria.
But just last week, the U.S. intentionally bombed one of the only hospitals in Northeastern Afghanistan (run by Nobel prize-winner Doctors Without Borders), killing hundreds. This occurred 3 months after U.S.-backed Afghani special forces raided and threatened the hospital, and after the hospital had repeatedly given its gps coordinates to the U.S. military … and repeatedly called saying they were under attack.
It’s a war crime to bomb a hospital without giving adequate warning so patients can leave:
This is not the first time the U.S. has bombed civilian targets:
In 1969 and 1970, the U.S. bombed several hospitals and a Red Cross facility in Cambodia
On February 13, 1991, the U.S. purposefully targeted an air raid shelter near the Baghdad airport with two 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs, which punched through 10 feet of concrete and killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians.
On April 23, 1999, NATO intentionally bombed a Serbian television station, killing 16. President Clinton said of the bombing: “Our military leaders at NATO believe … that the Serb television is an essential instrument of Mr. Milosevic’s command and control. … It is not, in a conventional sense, therefore, a media outlet. That was a decision they made, and I did not reverse it.” U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke said right after the attack that it was “an enormously important and, I think, positive development.” Amnesty International noted it was “a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime.”
On October 16, 2001, the U.S. attacked the complex housing the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul, Afghanistan. After detailed discussions between the U.S. and the Red Cross about the location of all of its installations in the country, the U.S. bombed the same complex again two weeks later. The second attack destroyed warehouses clearly marked with the Red Cross emblem containing tons of food and supplies for hungry refugees
On November 13, 2001, the U.S. bombed the Al Jazeera television bureau in Kabul.
On April 8, 2003, the U.S. bombed the Al Jazeera bureau in Baghdad, killing a reporter. The British home secretary at the time subsequently revealed that – a few weeks before the attack – he had urged Prime Minister Tony Blair to bomb Al Jazeera’s transmitter in Baghdad.
Also on April 8, 2003, a U.S. tank fired a shell at the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel, where most foreign journalists were then staying. Two reporters were killed. The Committee to Protect Journalists found that the attack “was avoidable”
The U.S. has also carried out numerous war crimes by killing civilians with drone strikes. This includes “double tap” strikes which target rescuers attempting to save those injured by drone strikes, and “signature strikes” that kill people whose identities aren’t even known, based on metadata on their phones or their proximity to war zones.
And the U.S. has committed a slew of other war crimes, including:
Carrying out terrorism … literally
A widespread torture program specifically aimed at producing false confessions to justify the war
Chemical weapons attacks against civilians (which greatly increased the rate of birth defects)
The use of depleted uranium, which can cause cancer and birth defects for decades (see this, this, this, this, this and this)
The Pentagon sent one of the main US creators of the death squads in El Salvador into Iraq to set up paramilitary death squads and torture centers
None of this is intended to excuse any civilian casualties inflicted by Russia. But America should not throw stones in glass houses …
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/america-has-repeatedly-committed-war-crimes-by-bombing-civilians.html
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Overcoming the Logic of War. “There are No Winners in a Global Conflict”. Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin’s Address to the Valdai conference: “Societies Between War and Peace: Overcoming the Logic of Conflict in Tomorrow’s World”
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50548
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Brzezinski Interview
The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998)
Translated from the French by William Blum and David N. Gibbs. This translation was published in Gibbs, “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,” International Politics 37, no. 2, 2000, pp. 241-242. For article full text, click here.
Original French version appeared in “Les Révélations d’un Ancien Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes…’” Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21, 1998, p. 76. Click here for original French text.
Note that all ellipses appeared in the original transcript, as published in Le Nouvel Observateur.
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the national securty advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention [emphasis added throughout].
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan , nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q : “Some agitated Moslems”? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today…
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West has a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid: There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is t h ere in com m on among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia , moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries…
Additional Sources:
The memoirs referred to in the interview are Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 143-49. Written by a former CIA director, this book first revealed the covert support for the Mujahiddin, prior to the invasion.
Washington Post correspondent Steve Coll downplays the significance of the CIA operation. He presents declassified documents from Brzezinski that express deep concern about the Soviet invasion. According to Coll, the documents “show no hint of satisfaction” from Brzezinski, regarding the invasion. Note, however, that Brzezinski’s 1983 memoirs clearly do imply some satisfaction regarding the Soviet invasion (Coll neglects to mention this).
See Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 50-51, 581, footnote 17; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 429.
Page created by David N. Gibbs
Russia’s Military Intervention in Syria Has Changed the “Middle East Dynamic”.
Agreement to Disagree in Vienna on Syria
By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, October 31, 2015
Russia’s intervention in Syria changed the dynamic on the ground and regionally, potentially with global implications, a major geopolitical development, the most important one in decades.
Washington is desperate to keep its imperial agenda on track and unchallenged – why John Kerry met with 17 of his counterparts plus EU and UN envoys in Vienna on Friday, following US, Russian, Turkish and Saudi foreign ministers meeting there on Thursday, Syria so far excluded from discussing its own future.
Washington’s intentions remain unchanged – replacing Assad with a US controlled puppet. Sending special forces to northern Syria (illegally without Security Council or Damascus authorization) with likely more to follow, solely to aid terrorist elements against Assad, along with continued lawless bombing of infrastructure targets, not ISIS as claimed.
[…]
In one month of bombing ISIS and other terrorists in Syria, Russia flew around 1,400 sorties, destroying over 1,600 targeted sites – including 249 command posts, 51 training camps, 131 ammunition and fuel depots, and 786 field bases, according to General Staff Col. Gen. Andrey Kartapolov.
Air strikes killed 28 “most odious” terrorist leaders, he added. Syrian ground forces liberated over 50 towns and villages, comprising about 350 square km.
ISIS losses are massive, their forces in disarray, “complete victory” not yet achieved. Much work remains. Terrorists are clearly on the defensive – pummelled by Russian air power and Syrian ground forces.
It shows Obama wants war, not peace.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/stephen-lendman
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ELITE IMPUNITY
On this very important edition of the BFP Roundtable, Sibel, Peter and James discuss the Hastert plea deal, the public’s lack of response to the story, and the feedback from our last conversation. Sibel and James each propose an idea of what we should do now and Peter plays judge, but you are the jury. Please leave your own responses in the comments below.
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1106-the-bfp-roundtable-discusses-what-we-can-do/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CorbettReportRSS+%28The+Corbett+Report%29
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Grandmaster Putin Beats Uncle Sam at His Own Game
“It’s because ISIS is Washington’s favorite windup toy. They just let these hooligans “Do their thing” as long as they advance US geopolitical goals and, when they’ve served their purpose, they stomp them out like a stag beetle. That’s the basic program. That’s how it works. Only now that Putin has been mowing down these gobshite takfiris like a combine-harvester slashing thorough the corn patch, the Obama crew has had to move on to Plan B: Liquidate ISIS and hold-on to those areas that were under ISIS control. That will give Uncle Sam the territory he’s going to need to set up his “safe zones” that’ll be protected by US aircover and serve as sanctuaries for more troublemaking sociopaths who can be deployed back into Syria to perpetuate the conflict deep into the future. That’s the US strategy in a nutshell.”~Mike Whitney
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article53003.html
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50 US SPIES ‘REVOLT’ EXPOSING HOW THEIR REPORTS ARE COOKED TO MANIPULATE THE PUBLIC ABOUT ISIS — Published: November 17, 2015
Washington, D.C. – More than 50 U.S. military intelligence analysts operating out of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) have staged what has been called a ‘revolt’ by intelligence professionals. The revolt comes after announcing that their intelligence reports were being altered and manipulated to fit the public narrative that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS.
The analysts are assigned to U.S. CENTCOM, but are officially employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence branch of the Pentagon.
“THE CANCER WAS WITHIN THE SENIOR LEVEL OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMAND,” ONE DEFENSE OFFICIAL TOLD THE DAILY BEAST.
The disturbing revelations came after more than 50 intelligence analysts filed formal complaints, causing the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the matter.
According to the report by The Daily Beast:
Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration’s public line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the analysts claim.
That complaint was supported by 50 other analysts, some of whom have complained about politicizing of intelligence reports for months. That’s according to 11 individuals who are knowledgeable about the details of the report and who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.
The sheer number of complaints indicates a massive and systemic problem that exposes an incapability of the military to accurately assess intelligence reports, perhaps at the behest of their civilian counterparts in the White House.
http://www.blacklistednews.com/50_US_Spies_%E2%80%98Revolt%E2%80%99_Exposing_How_Their_Reports_are_Cooked_to_Manipulate_the_Public_about_ISIS/47391/0/38/38/Y/M.html
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“THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS ISIS”: JOURNALIST DESTROYS WEST’S TERROR NARRATIVE, WARNS OF CRACKDOWN ON “DISSIDENTS”
On Saturday, the day after the massacre in France which turned the streets of Paris into a warzone and left some 130 civilians dead, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had a message for the West.
While condemning the attacks and branding the perpetrators “savages”, he was also quick to note that Syria has been dealing with this brand of terrorism for nearly five years straight. In what amounted to an “I told you so” moment, Assad also said the following: “We said, don’t take what is happening in Syria lightly. Unfortunately, European officials did not listen.”
Assad also took the opportunity to once again suggest that the West’s sponsorship of the regional powers who support (both explicitly and implicitly) Sunni extremism in Syria is the root cause of the problem although the language he used was a bit less harsh than that which he employed in September (presumably because he was trying not to inflame tensions less than 24 hours after the Paris massacre). Here’s what he said: “The question that is being asked throughout France today is, was France’s policy over the past five years the right one? The answer is no.”
Presumably, Assad was referencing the West’s support for the various militant groups seeking to oust his government. Those groups, including ISIS, have received money, guns, and training at various times from the CIA, from Turkey, from Saudi Arabia, and from Qatar. The situation on the ground is of course so fluid that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of where the guns, money, and fighters end up, meaning that even those observers who shun conspiracy theories would be hard pressed to contend that the US has not at least indirectly armed and trained ISIS.
Perhaps the most overlooked passage in all of the leaked documents that have surfaced thus far is the following from a declassified Pentagon report dated August 2012 and obtained by Judicial Watch:
…there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
That’s it.
That’s the smoking gun and nobody seems to care.
The passage above clearly states that the US knew this was coming and viewed it as “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” on the way to not only “isolating” Assad, but also to breaking Tehran’s Shiite crescent.
Although that’s such a critical excerpt, it has been habitually overlooked, and ironically, tragedies like that which occurred in Paris only serve to galvanize public opinion around an ideal rather than around the search for answers and that, is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
http://www.blacklistednews.com/%22There%27s_No_Such_Thing_As_ISIS%22%3A_Journalist_Destroys_West%27s_Terror_Narrative%2C_Warns_Of_Crackdown_On_%22Dissidents%22/47384/0/38/38/Y/M.html
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F. William Engdahl of WilliamEngdahl.com joins us today to give his perspective on the Paris attacks. We discuss the historical background to what is taking place now in Syria, how it plays into the current geopolitical agenda of the US/NATO military powers, and what it means for France, Syria and the world moving forward.
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The Rise of the Military Based Empire. Washington, “Military Workshop” of the World
US Militarist Factions in Command
By Prof. James Petras
“Having stated the obvious general fact of the power of militarism within the imperial state, it is necessary to recognize that the key policy-makers, who direct the wars and military policy, will vary according to the country targeted, type of warfare engaged in and their conception of the war. In other words, while US policy is imperialist and highly militaristic, the key policymakers, their approach and the outcomes of their policies will differ. There is no fixed strategy devised by a cohesive Washington policy elite guided by a unified strategic vision of the US Empire.
In order to understand the current, seemingly endless wars, we have to examine the shifting coalitions of elites, who make decisions in Washington but not always primarily for Washington. Some factions of the policy elite have clear conceptions of the American empire, but others improvise and rely on superior ‘political’ or ‘lobbying’ power to successfully push their agenda in the face of repeated failures and suffer no consequences or costs.
We will start by listing US imperial wars during the last decade and a half. We will then identify the main policy-making faction which has been the driving force in each war. We will discuss their successes and failures as imperial policy makers and conclude with an evaluation of “the state of the empire” and its future.
Imperial Wars: From 2001 – 2015:”
See full article at:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43473.htm
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Vladimir Putin Traitor to the New World Order says Jacob Rothschild
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And now,a further counter to the ululations of the western hegemon. To be expected as they lose influence. Bullshit in the danger zone. You decide whose.
Russian History and the Geopolitical Chessboard: From Tzar “Ivan the Terrible” to President Vladimir Putin
By Bruno Adrie
Global Research, November 20, 2015
Bruno Adrie, mon blog d’auteur 19 November 2015
Region: Russia and FSU
Is it necessary to prove that Vladimir Putin is poorly regarded by the western press?
He’s so despised that the review L’Express wrote about a report addressed to the Pentagon that asserts that « Putin’s neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy » and that « the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality. » The authors of the report say that “ his behaviour and facial expressions reveal someone who is defensive in large social settings.”
The implicit conclusion of such a report that was acted on by the Pentagon, is that Putin can’t communicate, that he is unable to have an open and constructive dialog with the others and also that he could be dangerous, declare a war without prior judgment. The credulous reader is frightened and wonders how such a man can be the leader of Russia. He has a glance at what has happened in the past few years and suddenly understands why Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, why he annexed Crimea, why he supported the separatists in Donbas and why he’s bombing the Islamic fundamentalists in Syria right now to support the torturer Al-Assad! What’s the difference between mentioning this report and spreading propaganda?
What if Putin weren’t the man they describe? Just suppose there were some kind of logic in his foreign policy.
According to the geographer George Friedman, nations are like chess players who act in the narrow limits of a series of rules that reduce the range of good moves. The more logic a player is, the more predictable he is because he’s able to chose the best tactics “until that one brilliant unexpected stroke”. George Friedman believes nations don’t act irrationally. “Nations are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational” (Friedman, p.29). He thinks leaders “understand their menu of next moves and execute them”. When they fail it’s not because they are stupid but just because the circumstances didn’t provide them the right possibilities.
Then following George Friedman’s approach to Geopolitics, let’s ask ourselves: is it possible to understand the initiatives taken by Vladimir Putin on the international chessboard?
In his book The Next 100 Years, George Friedman insists on the fact that Russia is landlocked while the United States has “easy access to the world’s oceans”. During the Cold War, the United States – which wanted to “contain and thereby strangle the Soviets” – created a “massive belt of allied nations” extending from the North Cape of Norway to Turkey to the Aleutian Islands” (Friedman, p.45). “Blocked by geography”, the USSR couldn’t win the Cold War and finally collapsed in 1991. Friedman forecasts that in the 21st century, after a second Cold War, Russia will collapse again for the same geographical reason.
But being landlocked is not the only drawback of Russian geography. To understand this, the journalist Tim Marshall invites us to take a look as this map of Europe where the European plain have been darkened.
plaine européenne
This plain that goes from the Atlantic coasts to the Ural Mountains and from Finland to the Black Sea and the Caucasus is a huge and open corridor through which all the invasions have passed in the last 500 years: the Poles in 1605, the Swedish in 1707, the French in 1812 and finally the Germans in 1914 and 1941. Such invasions were made possible because the plain offers no resistance to invaders. There you will find “no mountains, no deserts, and few rivers” to cross. In order to face this problem, the Russian leaders decided to attack first.
The only way to avoid insecurity was to move their borders to places easier to control and defend where they could reach natural obstacles to invasions. Ivan the Terrible was the first to move outward.
“He extended his territory east to the Ural Mountains, south to the Caspian Sea, and north toward the Arctic Circle”. He “gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between itself and the Mongols”. He also “built a military base in Chechnya to deter any would-be attacker”.
Then came Peter the Great and after him Catherine the Great. They “expanded the empire westward, occupying Ukraine and then reaching the Carpathian Mountains”. They took control of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to defend themselves “against attacks from the Baltic Sea”. And after WWII, Stalin occupied eastern Europe and put there allied regimes, just to create a buffer zone to close off the European plain, pushing westward until they reach a narrow area, easier to control against the enemies. We can see actually that the border between West and East Germany is easier to defend than the current Russian border. And this data doesn’t depend on the personality of a leader, whether he is an emperor, a dictator or an elected president. This point of view is largely shared by Alexander Dugin.
Alexander Dugin is a geographer but not only that. He’s also a fervent Russian moved by a love for his country. For him, Russia is more than a landlocked and vast country, more than a flag. It’s a besieged civilization that must be defended. “Russia is not the Federation of Russia, Russia is the Russian world, a civilization, one of the poles of a multipolar world” he says in an interview given to Katehon.com under the title: “War in Ukraine Will Resume Soon”.
Like Tim Marshall, Alexander Dugin leans on geography to justify, and even prolong, President Putin’s foreign policy. According to him, the war against Georgia, the Crimea annexation and the bombing campaign in Syria – where Russia has a naval base in Tartus (the western readers don’t know that Syria is, like Crimea or Transcaucasia, an outpost that allows Russia not to get imprisoned in his own borders) – were actions dictated by a geopolitical necessity that transcends the personality of its leaders. According to him, Russia should have annexed the Russian-speaking provinces of Ukraine and he believes that sooner or later it will have to do this.
Not because Russians are avid of territories or imperialistic. By doing that, Russia will guarantee its own survival. “If we loose the Donbas, then we’ll lose Crimea and then all of Russia” he says. Annexing Ukraine is not an objective. Ukraine doesn’t need to become a vassal state. “I’m not against a sovereign Ukraine, if only it would be our ally or partner or, in the least, a neutral, intermediate space” he says. And he adds: “What shouldn’t be allowed is an Atlanticist occupation of Ukraine”. Here, Dugin speaks from the realm of necessity. That’s what he means when he says that it is “geopolitical axiom”. “Our enemies perfectly understand that Russia can become great again only together with Ukraine”. According to him, “There is no other way. The Russian Spring is impossible without a Eurasian pivot in Ukraine, no matter what form, peaceful or not, that it takes”. Dugin thinks that keeping independent the Donetsk and Lugansk republics between Ukraine and Russia is a categorical imperative. “He who controls the borders of the DPR and LPR with Russia controls everything” he says, imitating Mackinder’s famous slogan.
Syria is part of the same issue. Alexander Dugin thinks Syria « is a more distant goal, but not less important». He assures that the existence of ISIL is «a plan of the Americans». According to him, «The Islamic State is a special operation directed against the opponents of American hegemony in the Middle East and in particular against us [Russians]» and he adds that “Islamic fundamentalism has traditionally been an instrument of American and Atlanticist geopolitics”. I suggest that those who might consider Alexander Dugin a conspiracy theorist read the confessions of Zbigniew Brzezinski who, when he was Jimmy Carter’s Security Adviser received, on July 3rd, the presidential authorization to finance battalions of mujahedeen in order to offer the Russians their own “Vietnam War” in Afghanistan.
Dugin thinks that to confront the American threat, Russia has to show its own force and stop using the diplomatic solution.
War seems unavoidable for Russia, this vast and landlocked country that the American oligarchy wants to chase away from everywhere, from the Baltic Coasts, from the Caucasus, from the Black Sea and from the Mediterranean, expecting to chase it away from Siberia during the next step. And this war won’t be the consequence of President Putin’s personality but the result of a geopolitical turmoil deliberately organized by the western oligarchs.
Nevertheless, no doubt the idiots will keep on braying that Putin is a bloodthirsty dictator and that Russia is a dangerous and barbarian country.
Those idiots are not only the enemies of Russia. They’re also the enemies of Truth and their omnipresence in the media landscape and in the political world has made Europe a big diseased body whose members are gradually being eaten by the Atlanticist gangrene.
NATO IS HARBOURING THE ISLAMIC STATE
NAFEEZ AHMED
The 13th November Paris massacre will be remembered, like 9/11, as a defining moment in world history.
The murder of 129 people, the injury of 352 more, by ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) acolytes striking multiple targets simultaneously in the heart of Europe, mark a major sea-change in the terror threat.
For the first time, a Mumbai-style attack has occurred on Western soil — the worst attack on Europe in decades. As such, it has triggered a seemingly commensurate response from France: the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1961 Algerian war.
ISIS has followed up with threats to attack Washington and New York City.
Meanwhile, President Hollande wants European Union leaders to suspend the Schengen Agreement on open borders to allow dramatic restrictions on freedom of movement across Europe. He also demands the EU-wide adoption of the Passenger Name Records (PNR) system allowing intelligence services to meticulously track the travel patterns of Europeans, along with an extension of the state of emergency to at least three months.
Under the extension, French police can now block any website, put people under house arrest without trial, search homes without a warrant, and prevent suspects from meeting others deemed a threat.
“We know that more attacks are being prepared, not just against France but also against other European countries,” said the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We are going to live with this terrorist threat for a long time.”
Hollande plans to strengthen the powers of police and security services under new anti-terror legislation, and to pursue amendments to the constitution that would permanently enshrine the state of emergency into French politics. “We need an appropriate tool we can use without having to resort to the state of emergency,” he explained.
Parallel with martial law at home, Hollande was quick to accelerate military action abroad, launching 30 airstrikes on over a dozen Islamic State targets in its de facto capital, Raqqa.
France’s defiant promise, according to Hollande, is to “destroy” ISIS.
[…]
As Professor David Graeber of London School of Economics pointed out:
“Had Turkey placed the same kind of absolute blockade on Isis territories as they did on Kurdish-held parts of Syria… that blood-stained ‘caliphate’ would long since have collapsed — and arguably, the Paris attacks may never have happened. And if Turkey were to do the same today, Isis would probably collapse in a matter of months. Yet, has a single western leader called on Erdoğan to do this?”
Some officials have spoken up about the paradox, but to no avail. Last year,Claudia Roth, deputy speaker of the German parliament, expressed shock that NATO is allowing Turkey to harbour an ISIS camp in Istanbul, facilitate weapons transfers to Islamist militants through its borders, and tacitly support IS oil sales.
Nothing happened.
Instead, Turkey has been amply rewarded for its alliance with the very same terror-state that wrought the Paris massacre on 13th November 2015. Just a month earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered to fast-track Turkey’s bid to join the EU, permitting visa-free travel to Europe for Turks.
No doubt this would be great news for the security of Europe’s borders.
It is not just Turkey. Senior political and intelligence sources in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) have confirmed the complicity of high-level KRG officials in facilitating ISIS oil sales, for personal profit, and to sustain the government’s flagging revenues.
Despite a formal parliamentary inquiry corroborating the allegations, there have been no arrests, no charges, no prosecutions.
Read much more at:
http://www.blacklistednews.com/NATO_is_harbouring_the_Islamic_State/47429/0/38/38/Y/M.html
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US Media Shows Footage of Russian Airstrikes Passed Off as American
PBS NewsHour, a daily US television news program shown on the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), used footage of Russian airstrikes against ISIL targets, claiming that they were US airstrikes, an Information Clearing House article revealed.
On November 19, PBS NewsHour ran a program on ISIL and “showed” how their oil trucks were destroyed by US airstrikes.
It’s all fine and dandy, but the US public broadcaster used the footage of Russian airstrikes, passing them off as US airstrikes, without revealing the true source.
“For the first time the US is attacking oil delivery trucks,” the voice-over said between 2:30 — 2:35, while showing a clip of exactly the same video published by the Russian Defense Ministry the day before.
The PBS program neither mentioned the Russian military operation nor revealed the source of the footage.
What the US channel did was just outright lying, because millions of viewers would certainly think the video footage showing the explosions of oil trucks was from US airstrikes about which the New York Times ran an article on Monday.
http://sputniknews.com/us/20151121/1030518092/pbs-newshour-russian-airstrikes-footage-us-lying.html
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Tangled Threads of US False Narratives
November 19, 2015
Exclusive: Official Washington’s many false narratives about Russia and Syria have gotten so tangled that they have become a danger to the struggle against Sunni jihadist terrorism and conceivably a threat to the future of the planet, a risk that Robert Parry explores.
By Robert Parry
One way to view Official Washington is to envision a giant bubble that serves as a hothouse for growing genetically modified “group thinks.” Most inhabitants of the bubble praise these creations as glorious and beyond reproach, but a few dissenters note how strange and dangerous these products are. Those critics, however, are then banished from the bubble, leaving behind an evermore concentrated consensus.
This process could be almost comical – as the many armchair warriors repeat What Everyone Knows to Be True as self-justifying proof that more and more wars and confrontations are needed – but the United States is the most powerful nation on earth and its fallacious “group thinks” are spreading a widening arc of chaos and death around the globe.
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/19/tangled-threads-of-us-false-narratives/
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The Warmonger De Rigueur of the 21st Century
Yes it is, “21 Century Schizoid Man” – And a world of Orwellian Doublethink in the Demonic Amerikan Empire.
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Henry Kissinger: “If You Can’t Hear the Drums of War You Must Be Deaf
– Daily Squib – 27/11/2011
“The United States is baiting China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel. We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all together faster demise for them. We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang. The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks. This is why the EU is in such a hurry to form a complete superstate because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. Their urgency tells me that they know full well that the big showdown is upon us. O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.”
“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”
Mr Kissinger then added: “If you are an ordinary person, then you can prepare yourself for war by moving to the countryside and building a farm, but you must take guns with you, as the hordes of starving will be roaming. Also, even though the elite will have their safe havens and specialist shelters, they must be just as careful during the war as the ordinary civilians, because their shelters can still be compromised.”
After pausing for a few minutes to collect his thoughts, Mr Kissinger, carried on: “We told the military that we would have to take over seven Middle Eastern countries for their resources and they have nearly completed their job. We all know what I think of the military, but I have to say they have obeyed orders superfluously this time. It is just that last stepping stone, i.e. Iran which will really tip the balance. How long can China and Russia stand by and watch America clean up? The great Russian bear and Chinese sickle will be roused from their slumber and this is when Israel will have to fight with all its might and weapons to kill as many Arabs as it can. Hopefully if all goes well, half the Middle East will be Israeli. Our young have been trained well for the last decade or so on combat console games, it was interesting to see the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 game, which mirrors exactly what is to come in the near future with its predictive programming. Our young, in the US and West, are prepared because they have been programmed to be good soldiers, cannon fodder, and when they will be ordered to go out into the streets and fight those crazy Chins and Russkies, they will obey their orders. Out of the ashes we shall build a new society, a new world order; there will only be one superpower left, and that one will be the global government that wins. Don’t forget, the United States, has the best weapons, we have stuff that no other nation has, and we will introduce those weapons to the world when the time is right.”
http://www.dailysquib.co.uk/world/3089-henry-kissinger-if-you-cant-hear-the-drums-of-war-you-must-be-deaf.html
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TOP U.S. AIR DEFENSE COMMANDER: TURKEY’S SHOOTDOWN OF RUSSIAN JET “HAD TO BE PRE-PLANNED”
Lt. General Tom McInerney is an expert on handling threats from fighter jets.
McInerney served as:
Commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) – the military agency responsible for protecting the United States and Canada from foreign jet attacks – for the Alaska region
Commander of the Alaskan Air Command
Commander of 11th Air Force in Alaska
Commander of the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing, Clark Air Base, Philippines
Commander of the 313th Air Division, Kadena Air Base, Japan
Commander of 3rd Air Force, Royal Air Force Station Mildenhall, England
Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force
A command pilot with more than 4,100 flying hours, including 407 combat missions
In his role as Norad commander for Alaska, McInerney dealt with more Russian fighter jet incursions (which he calls “bear penetrations”) than anyone else in the world.
So McInerney knows how to tell innocent from hostile incursions by foreign fighter jets, standard rules of engagement of foreign fighter jets, how to read radar tracks, and the other things he would need to know to form an informed opinion about the shootdown of a foreign jet.
Yesterday, McInerney told Fox News – much to the surprise of the reporter interviewing him – that assuming the Turkish version of the flight path of the Russian jet is accurate, Russia wasn’t threatening Turkey, and that Turkey’s shoot down of the Russian jet “had to be pre-planned”, as the jet wasn’t in Turkish air space long enough for anything other than a premeditated attack to have brought it down:
McInerney is right … especially given that a U.S. official told Reuters that the Russian jet was inside of Syria when it was shot down:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4630118119001/radar-track-shows-russia-jets-path-over-turkish-territory/?#sp=show-clips
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MEET THE MAN WHO FUNDS ISIS: BILAL ERDOGAN, THE SON OF TURKEY’S PRESIDENT
Russia’s Sergey Lavrov is not one foreign minister known to mince his words. Just earlier today, 24 hours after a Russian plane was brought down by the country whose president three years ago said”a short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack”, had this to say: “We have serious doubts this was an unintended incident and believe this is a planned provocation” by Turkey.
But even that was tame compared to what Lavrov said to his Turkish counterparty Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier today during a phone call between the two (Lavrov who was supposed to travel to Turkey has since canceled such plans).
As Sputnik transcribes, according to a press release from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov pointed out that, “by shooting down a Russian plane on a counter-terrorist mission of the Russian Aerospace Force in Syria, and one that did not violate Turkey’s airspace, the Turkish government has in effect sided with ISIS.”
It was in this context when Lavrov added that “Turkey’s actions appear premeditated, planned, and undertaken with a specific objective.”
More importantly, Lavrov pointed to Turkey’s role in the propping up the terror network through the oil trade. Per the Russian statement:
“The Russian Minister reminded his counterpart about Turkey’s involvement in the ISIS’ illegal trade in oil, which is transported via the area where the Russian plane was shot down, and about the terrorist infrastructure, arms and munitions depots and control centers that are also located there.”
Others reaffirmed Lavrov’s stance, such as retired French General Dominique Trinquand, who said that “Turkey is either not fighting ISIL at all or very little, and does not interfere with different types of smuggling that takes place on its border, be it oil, phosphate, cotton or people,” he said.
The reason we find this line of questioning fascinating is that just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”
Precisely one week later, in even more tragic circumstances, suddenly everyone is asking this question.
And while we patiently dig to find who the on and offshore “commodity trading” middleman are, who cart away ISIS oil to European and other international markets in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars, one name keeps popping up as the primary culprit of regional demand for the Islamic State’s “terrorist oil” – that of Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s son: Bilal Erdogan.
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Meet_The_Man_Who_Funds_ISIS%3A_Bilal_Erdogan%2C_The_Son_Of_Turkey%27s_President/47505/0/38/38/Y/M.html
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The Fall Of America Signals The Rise Of The New World Order
By Brandon Smith
“The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another.” — Henry Kissinger, “Henry Kissinger On The Assembly Of A New World Order”
“[P]art of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.” — Barack Obama
“We reiterate our strong commitment to the United Nations (UN) as the foremost multilateral forum entrusted with bringing about hope, peace, order and sustainable development to the world. The UN enjoys universal membership and is at the center of global governance and multilateralism.” — Fifth BRICS Summit Declaration
“We support the reform and improvement of the international monetary system, with a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty. We welcome the discussion about the role of the SDR in the existing international monetary system including the composition of SDR’s basket of currencies. We support the IMF to make its surveillance framework more integrated and even-handed.” — Fifth BRICS Summit Declaration
Here is where many political and economic analysts go terribly wrong in their examination of current global paradigms: They tend to blindly believe the mainstream narrative rather than taking into account conflicting actions and statements by political and financial leaders. Even in the liberty movement, composed of some of the most skeptical and media savvy people on planet Earth, the cancers of assumption and bias often take hold.
Some liberty proponents are more than happy to believe in particular mainstream dynamics. They are happy to believe, for example, that the growing “conflict” between the East and West is legitimate rather than engineered.
You can list off quotation after quotation and policy action after policy action proving that Eastern governments, including China and Russia, work hand in hand with globalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank and the U.N. toward the goal of global governance and global economic centralization. But these people simply will not listen. They MUST believe that the U.S. is the crowning villain, and that the East is in heroic opposition. They are so desperate for a taste of hope they are ready to consume the poison of false dichotomies.
The liberty movement is infatuated with the presumption that the U.S. government and the banking elites surrounding it are at the “top” of the new world order pyramid and are “clamoring for survival” as the U.S. economy crumbles under the facade of false government and central banking statistics. How many times have we heard over the past year alone that the Federal Reserve has “backed itself into a corner” or policy directed itself “between a rock and a hard place?”
I have to laugh at the absurdity of such a viewpoint because central bankers and internationalists have always used economic instability as a means to gain political and social advantage. The consolidation of world banking power alone after the Great Depression is a testament to this fact. And even former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has admitted (at least in certain respects) that the Federal Reserve was responsible for that terrible implosion, an implosion that conveniently served the interests of international cartel banks like JPMorgan.
But the Federal Reserve is no more than an appendage of a greater system; it is NOT the brains of the operation.
In his book Tragedy And Hope, Carroll Quigley, Council on Foreign Relations member and mentor to Bill Clinton, stated:
“It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called “international” or “merchant” bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.”~Quigley
In “Ruling The World Of Money,” Harper’s Magazine established what Quigley admitted in Tragedy And Hope — that the control of the global economic policy and, by extension, political policy is dominated by a select few elites, namely through the unaccountable institutional framework of the BIS.
The U.S. and the Federal Reserve are mere tentacles of the great vampire squid that is the new world order. And being a tentacle makes one, to a certain extent, expendable, if the trade will result in even greater centralization of power.
[…] Read more at:
http://www.activistpost.com/2015/12/the-fall-of-america-signals-the-rise-of-the-new-world-order.html?utm_source=Activist+Post+Subscribers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=f034b7162c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_term=0_b0c7fb76bd-f034b7162c-387743916
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There are descriptions of a psychopathic god of fear and loathing in several books of the Old Testament, and Torah; especially Deuteronomy, featuring a demonic Samael as “God”.
So there are sections of these books that the human psychopath can embrace as “their kind of guy.”
And these are embraced clearly by both so-called, “Jewish Zionists” as well as so-called, Christian Zionists”. As this is the credo of “Might is Right” & “Means are justified by their Ends”
There are as well, “Secular Zionists”, many of which are in control of so-called “Israel” today.
Zionism is itself a construct built on the principles of, “Might is Right” & “Means are justified by their Ends”
Thus Zionism is a psychopathic tyrannical system. Which in fact the history of this movement shows as well.
As the world turns, season pass year by year revealing a world foretold. It is those ignorant of that foretelling who fail to recognize the world foretold. Who think they got here by happenstance rather than by the agenda of those who foretold it’s coming.
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WAR IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS!
DEFENSE CONTRACTORS CITE “BENEFITS” OF ESCALATING CONFLICTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
THE INTERCEPT
Major defense contractors Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a Credit Suisse conference in West Palm Beach this week that they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.
Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner told the conference his company will see “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria, citing the Turkish military’s recent decision to shoot down a Russian warplane.
The incident, Tanner said, heightens the risk for U.S. military operations in the region, providing “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theater.” He also stressed that the Russian intervention would highlight the need for Lockheed Martin-made F-22s and the new F-35 jets.
And for “expendable” products, such as a rockets, Tanner added that there is increased demand, including from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia because of the war in Yemen.
http://www.blacklistednews.com/War_is_good_for_business%21_Defense%3A_Contractors_Cite_%E2%80%9CBenefits%E2%80%9D_of_Escalating_Conflicts_in_the_Middle_East/47645/0/38/38/Y/M.html
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