Jan 30

Today’s News 30th January 2019

  • As Midwest Freezes, Aussie Heatwave Reaches Record Highs

    While Midwest America hunkers down for the coldest temperatures in a generation, temperature records have also tumbled across South Australia, with the city of Adelaide experiencing its hottest day on record.

    Life-threatening cold is sweeping across Chicago…

    As Australians face animal culls, mass fish deaths across the nation,  roads melting, and bats falling from trees…

    Adelaide hit 46.6C, the hottest temperature recording in any Australian state capital city since records began 80 years ago, sending homelessness shelters into a “code red”, and sparking fears of another mass fish death in the Menindee Lakes in the neighbouring state of New South Wales.

    In central and western Australia, local authorities were forced to carry out an emergency animal cull, shooting 2,500 camels – and potentially a further hundred feral horses – who were dying of thirst.

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    In Port Augusta, 300km north-west, an all-time record was also set, as the city hit 49.5C.

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    So, which is it? Global warming or global cooling?

  • America's Shameful War

    Authored by Eric Margolis,

    An ancient Hindu prayer says, ‘Lord Shiva, save us from the claw of the tiger, the fang of the cobra, and the vengeance of the Afghan.’

    The United States, champion of freedom and self-determination, is now in its 18th year of colonial war in Afghanistan. This miserable, stalemated conflict is America’s longest and most shameful war. So far it has cost over $1 trillion and killed no one knows how many Afghans.

    This conflict began in 2001 on a lie: namely that Afghanistan was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the US. These attacks were planned in Europe and the US, not Afghanistan, and apparently conducted (official version) by anti-American Saudi extremists. This writer remains unconvinced by the official versions.

    We still don’t know if Osama bin Laden instigated the attacks. He was murdered rather than brought to trial. Dead men tell no tales. However, Mullah Omar, leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, told my late friend journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave that bin Laden was not involved in 9/11. Who benefited? Certainly not the Afghans. They have been at war for the past 40 years.

    As I wrote in my first book, ‘War at the Top of the World,’ Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribal majority were fierce fighters and were incredibly brave. Their Taliban movement was a tribal-nationalist-Islamist force devoted to fighting communism, drug dealing and foreign influence. Taliban stamped out the Afghan opium trade and had just about crushed the drug-dealing Russian-backed Tajik northern alliance – until the US invaded in 2001. The Afghan drug lords quickly became US allies and remain so today.

    Taliban was not a ‘terrorist movement,’ as western war propaganda falsely claimed. Twenty years earlier their fathers were hailed ‘freedom fighters’ by President Ronald Reagan when they were fighting Soviet occupation. Taliban’s Pashtun warriors wanted all foreigners out of their nation and the right to run their own affairs according to Islamic principles.

    The US has savaged Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries. US B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers are razing tribal villages, predator killer drones attack most road movement, US-paid Afghan puppet forces, many former Communists, routinely torture and murder. All this while the US-installed yes-man regime in Kabul does nothing to halt massive drug dealing and human rights abuses.

    In fact, dealing in opium and morphine is the primary business of Afghanistan. This cash crop could not be exported to Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia without the connivance of the Kabul regime and its US military protectors. When the full truth about the war is finally written, the US will be in the deepest shame over involvement in the drug trade.

    Washington, which has done as much as the former Soviet invaders to ravage Afghanistan, has no clear idea what to do next. President Trump announced withdrawal of some of the 14,000 US troops (and large numbers of mercenaries) from Afghanistan. But then the pro-war neocons at State and the Pentagon sought to veto the president’s statement. Meanwhile, desultory talks are droning on in Doha, Qatar, between the US and Taliban, led by the US ‘special envoy’ (read proconsul) Zalmay Khalilzad, a neocon who played an important role in promoting the invasion of Iraq.

    Why is the US still at war in Afghanistan after 18 years?

    First, because the politicians and generals involved won’t accept responsibility for a defeat and its huge cost. There is nothing more wasteful than a lost war.

    Second, because imperial-minded circles want to keep bases in Afghanistan to menace China, Iran and Pakistan. There are huge profits to be made from this endless war with its $400 per gallon gasoline trucked in from Karachi and 24-hour on call air support. Plus the bases and fleet that support the war and promotion for the senior officers involved.

    To keep this useless war against lightly armed Pashtun tribesmen going, the US must massively bribe Pakistan to maintain the military’s supply routes into that isolated nation.

    The absurd waste of US money in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been fully documented by the US government’s audit agencies.

    President Trump is right to talk about ending this ignoble conflict. But the neocon fifth column he has foolishly helped install keeps thwarting his aspirations.

    Trump should order the fighting ended and all US troops out of Afghanistan within 90 days. End US involvement in the drug trade. Tell India to butt out of Afghanistan. That would be statesmanship. Afghanistan must be allowed to return to its former obscurity.

  • $1 Billion China-Financed LA Skyscraper Complex Mysteriously Halts Construction

    One of the biggest real estate development projects in downtown Los Angeles has suddenly stopped, potentially as a result of the project’s Chinese financing drying up – or an FBI investigation. The LA Times reports that Oceanwide Plaza, a $1 billion condominium/hotel/retail complex across the street from the Staples Center that is expected to be a key part of a revamped Figueroa Street, has stopped construction this month. 

    The property is being built by Oceanwide Holdings, a Beijing based publicly traded conglomerate that reported revenue of $2.37 billion in 2017. In a statement on Thursday, the company said that the delayis due to a re-capitalization of the project and that work should resume next month.

    Obviously, the fact that this is a Chinese-financed project has raised concerns that the construction halt more likely has something to do with Chinese government policies restricting the flow of money out of the country. These capital constraints that were put in place in 2016 sent shockwaves through numerous parts the real estate market in the United States and Canada, as Chinese citizens have looked for a way to get their money out of the country.

    At the same time, the FBI is also conducting a corruption probe at LA City Hall that is looking at possible kickbacks involving foreign real estate developers. According to the LA Times, “Federal agents have inquired about Oceanwide and other downtown development projects with foreign investors as they seek evidence of possible crimes including bribery, extortion, money laundering and kickbacks that could involve L.A. city officials and development executives.”

    The company responded that “Oceanwide has no comment regarding any investigation-related matters. In an effort to prioritize construction activity, and while we restructure capital for the project, interior construction at Oceanwide Plaza is temporarily on hold.”

    The development was already underway and was expected to be finished this year. The three towers were set to house more than 500 luxury condos and are supposed to be 55 stories high. As they stand now, partially completed, they are now sitting open, exposed to the elements.

    The general manager of the city Department of Building and Safety, Frank Bush said: “They said they were stopping work on the project at this time, and had no further explanation. It doesn’t have anything to do with any corrections we’ve given them or anything like that. It wasn’t at our direction.”

  • Amidst Global Warming Hysteria, NASA Scientists Expect Global Cooling

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    Those promoting CO2 as the reason for global warming are hucksters and those taken in by hucksters.

    Please consider NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity.

    “We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

    The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. SABER monitors infrared radiation from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a vital role in the energy output of our thermosphere, the very top level of our atmosphere.

    “The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.

    The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity. Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.

    If all of this seems as if NASA is contradicting itself, you’re right — sort of. After all, NASA also reported last week that Arctic sea ice was at its sixth lowest level since measuring began. Isn’t that a sure sign of global warming?

    All any of this “proves” is that we have, at best, a cursory understanding of Earth’s incredibly complex climate system. So when mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore breathlessly warn you that we must do something about climate change, it’s all right to step back, take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have the knowledge, skill or resources to have much effect on the Earth’s climate.

    Incredibly Complex Systems

    See the problem? Alarmists take one variable, CO2 that is only a tiny part of extremely long cycles and make projections far into to the future based off it.

    When I was in grade school, the alarmists were worried about global cooling. Amusingly, I recall discussing in science class the need to put soot on the arctic ice to melt it to stop the advance of glaciers.

    ​The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report said we have only 12 years left to save the planet. It triggered the usual frantic and ridiculous reactions.

    NBC News offered this gem: “A last-ditch global warming fix? A man-made ‘volcanic’ eruption” to cool the planet.” Its article proclaimed, “Scientists and some environmentalists believe nations might have to mimic volcanic gases as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from extreme warming.”

    Geo-engineering: Ignoring the Consequences

    Watts Up With That discusses Geo-Engineering: Ignoring the Consequences.

    From 1940 to almost 1980, the average global temperature went down. Political concerns and the alleged scientific consensus focused on global cooling. Alarmists said it could be the end of agriculture and civilization. Journalist Lowell Ponte wrote in his 1976 book, The Cooling.

    The problem then was – and still is now – that people are educated in the false philosophy of uniformitarianism: the misguided belief that conditions always were and always will be as they are now, and any natural changes will occur over long periods of time.

    Consequently, most people did not understand that the cooling was part of the natural cycle of climate variability, or that changes are often huge and sudden. Just 18,000 years ago we were at the peak of an Ice Age. Then, most of the ice melted and sea levels rose 150 meters (490 feet), because it was warmer for almost all of the last 10,000 years than it is today.

    During the cooling “danger,” geo-engineering proposals included:

    * building a dam across the Bering Straits to block cold Arctic water, to warm the North Pacific and the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere;

    * dumping black soot on the Arctic ice cap to promote melting;

    * adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere to raise global temperatures.

    “Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” as advocated by the IPCC in its October 8 news conference, is also foolish. Historic records show that, at about 410 parts per million (ppm), the level of CO2 supposedly in the atmosphere now, we are near the lowest in the last 280 million years. As plants evolved over that time, the average level was 1200 ppm. That is why commercial greenhouses boost CO2 to that level to increase plant growth and yields by a factor of four.

    The IPCC has been wrong in every prediction it’s made since 1990. It would be a grave error to use its latest forecasts as the excuse to engage in geo-engineering experiments with the only planet we have.

    ​Global Warming Errs Badly

    Next, please consider Extreme weather not proof of global warming, NASA on global cooling

    To understand the great confusion about global warming or climate change, my most lucid guide has been Dr. Richard Lindzen — a former Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT and member of the US National Academy of Sciences — and his now famous lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation last October 8.

    In just a number of segments of his lecture, Dr. Lindzen crystallized for me why the church of global warming errs so badly in its dogma.

    Global warming promoters fostered the popular public perception of the science of climate change as quite simple. It is that here’s one phenomenon to be explained (“global average temperature,” or GAT, which, says Lindzen, is a thoroughly unscientific concept). And there’s one explanation for it: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    GAT is only one of many important phenomena to measure in the climate system, and CO2 is only one of many factors that influence both GAT and all the other phenomena.

    CO2’s role in controlling GAT is at most perhaps 2 percent, yet climate alarmists think of it as the “control knob.”

    Most people readily confuse weather (short-term, local-scale temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind, cloudiness, and more) with climate (long-term, large-scale of each) and think weather phenomena are driven by climate phenomena; they aren’t.

    Consequently, as Lindzen says, the currently popular narrative concerning this system is this: The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1 to 2 percent perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable — carbon dioxide — among many variables of comparable importance.

    Big Chill

    Did You Know the Greatest Two-Year Global Cooling Event Just Took Place?

    Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era. All the data in this essay come from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/). This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global average temperatures.

    The 2016-18 Big Chill was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring global average temperatures below the 1980s average. February 2018 was colder than February 1998. If someone is tempted to argue that the reason for recent record cooling periods is that global temperatures are getting more volatile, it’s not true. The volatility of monthly global average temperatures since 2000 is only two-thirds what it was from 1880 to 1999.

    None of this argues against global warming. The 1950s was the last decade cooler than the previous decade, the next five decades were all warmer on average than the decade before. Two year cooling cycles, even if they set records, are statistical noise compared to the long-term trend.

    My point is that statistical cooling outliers garner no media attention. The global average temperature numbers come out monthly. If they show a new hottest year on record, that’s a big story. If they show a big increase over the previous month, or the same month in the previous year, that’s a story. If they represent a sequence of warming months or years, that’s a story. When they show cooling of any sort—and there have been more cooling months than warming months since anthropogenic warming began—there’s no story.

    Bombarded With Garbage

    Of course you did not know that unless you follow NASA, Real Clear Markets, or Watts Up With That.

    Meanwhile, everyone is constantly bombarded with total garbage like Al Gore’s claim Migrant Caravans are Victims of Global Warming.

    And of course, the media is fawning all over AOC’s “New Green Deal” hype as she too is a believer the World Will End in 12 Years if we don’t address climate change.

    The Guardian and the Intercept are both happy to promote this nonsense as of course the entirety of mainstream media.

    Alarm Bells

    When I was in grade school we had major alarm bells over global cooling. In high school it was population growth. Then came food shortages followed by peak oil.

    Now the crisis du jour is global warming.

    It’s always about something!

    CO2 Derangement Symptom

    Watts Up With That accurately labels global warming hysteria as the CO2 Derangement Syndrome.

    That’s an excellent synopsis of the current state of affairs so please give it a good look.

    Finally, even if you still believe global warming is a threat, please ponder the notion that governments will not do anything sensible about it.

  • China Test-Fires "Guam Killer" Dong-Feng Missile

    Beijing has test-fired its Dong-Feng 26 (DF-26) so-called “Guam killer” missile which can reportedly reach targets up to 3,500 miles away. While no specific threat has been made against Guam, experts cited by Chinese state media say the missiles can reach the Micronesian US island territory which houses several US military bases.

    Footage broadcast on state television showed the DF-26 missiles being launched into the air, while their experts claimed that the missiles were capable of hitting moving aircraft carriers according to ABC.

    They told the paper that the missile’s “double-cone structure”, as well as the “information network connected to the warhead” — which could include a variety of radar and satellite systems — would allow the moving target’s location to be constantly updated.

    China’s Ministry of National Defence has previously said the DF-26 missiles were capable of carrying conventional nuclear warheads.

    The missiles are believed to be able to strike targets up to 4,500 kilometres away, putting the Pacific island of Guam in range. The US territory hosts Air Force and Navy bases. –ABC

    The DF-26 missiles were first rolled out during a 2015 PLA parade. 

    The DF-26 is deployed on a transporter-erector-launcher and the US Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center estimates that as of June 2017, more than 16 launchers were operationally deployed along a number of coastal provinces from Zhejiang and Fujian all the way to Guangdong.

    There have also been rumors that the DF-26 may also have been installed on the Beijing-controlled Scarborough Shoal, also known as Huangyan Island, in the eastern portion of the South China Sea.

    Information on the DF-26 since its media debut at a 2015 military parade show that the versatile missiles can look for and lock onto moving targets onshore and offshore, such as an aircraft carrier, while cruising at a top speed of up to 18 times the speed of sound after re-entry into the atmosphere. –Asia Times

    Between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatening to hit Guam with “an enveloping fire” and China’s new “Guam killers,” residents of the tiny island nation have got to be at least a little nervous. 

  • Progressives Helped Pave The Way For These "Russian Asset" Bernie Smears

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    The other day I published an article saying we can expect to see more and more smear campaigns painting progressives as Kremlin agents and useful idiots of Putin as the 2020 election draws closer.

    Since the publication of that piece two things have happened: a report that Bernie Sanders is about to announce his 2020 presidential candidacy, and a sharp spike in centrist Democrats smearing him as a Kremlin agent.

    Take a gander at the following tweets for some examples:

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    Here’s where we can start: Why doesn’t Bernie ever vote against Russia? Let’s explore Tad Devine’s connection with Manafort. Who helped Bernie hack into Hillary’s data before the Iowa caucuses? Why did Bernie spend his honeymoon in Russia? https://t.co/y853IizKzq

     — @ClistonBrown

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    I’m flagging this spike not just because it’s an obnoxious trend we can expect to see used to as a murder weapon against any attempt to shift America’s corrupt political system even a single inch to the left, but also to point out the fact that American progressives have helped create this dynamic.

    Russiagate is pure narrative. Russia’s alleged interference in America’s elections and Trump’s alleged collusion with that interference have been treated with the same kind of intense, blanket news coverage and hawkish patriotic punditry that we saw in the wake of the September 11 attacks, except unlike 9/11 there are no dead bodies, no fallen buildings, nor indeed any actual, tangible sign that anything real happened at all. It’s an entire media class shrieking endlessly about a story that has no hard center that people can look at and see for themselves. It’s a crisis that is made entirely out of a narrative about a crisis.

    Since it has no basis in facts or reality, the only way to keep alive a crisis that is made of pure narrative is to keep feeding it with more narrative. Anyone who has helped do that is partly responsible for the frenzied, hysterical environment we now see before us in which a Bernie Sanders campaign which hasn’t even begun yet is already being undermined by completely baseless allegations of Kremlin collusion.

    Much of this frantic Russia hysteria has been created by the center, and also increasingly by Trump’s branch of the right wing as it strives to prove itself “tougher on Russia” than anyone else. But a lot of it has come from a leftish direction as well. Not so much from the proper leftists, the Marxists and the Greens (though their fervent opposition to right-wing governments does sometimes set them at odds with Russia in a way that can see them advancing similar narratives to the centrists), but from the more mainstream progressives who back Bernie Sanders but supported Hillary Clinton in the general election.

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    The most high-profile of these progressives, ironically, is Sanders himself. Sanders has been shamelessly endorsing the establishment Russia narrative and feeding into the fact-free collusion conspiracy theory for two years now, using his large social media platforms and in his appearances on the mainstream media as well. His many, many promotions of Russiagate have been instrumental in seeding the idea on the left, which is partly why I now routinely have Sanders supporters arguing with me on social media in favor of the CIA/CNN Russia narrative.

    This doesn’t mean that Sanders “deserves” the Russia smears that are now being heaped upon him or whatever, but it does mean that he helped build an environment in which mainstream media reporters like Virginia Heffernancan publicly level deranged, hysterical accusations of Kremlin servitude at him without it getting tossed out of the office as a crackpot conspiracy theorist.

    Progressives helped create this environment, and this needs to be acknowledged and corrected by the American political left, because it will only be used against them.

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    Another prominent voice which has been instrumental in marketing Russia hysteria to progressives and creating this toxic McCarthyite environment has been Cenk Uygur and his popular outlet The Young Turks. TYT has over four million subscribers on YouTube alone and exerts a tremendous amount of influence over the thinking of Americans who identify as progressive. The outlet isn’t all bad, and Uygur himself sometimes puts forward some very useful insights on the reality of oligarchy in America and mass media corruption, but they’ve also been aggressively foisting the establishment Russia narrative onto the political left for a long time, not just promulgating belief in it but harshly criticizing leftists who don’t.

    In May of 2017, for example, TYT aired a segment titled “Yes, The Russia Scandal Is Actually A Scandal” in which Uygur excoriated people on the left for refusing to subscribe to the CIA/CNN version of events without seeing hard evidence for them first. Not afraid to name names, he called out vocal Russiagate skeptic Michael Tracey, who was at the time a TYT reporter, mocking Tracey with his hands over his eyes yelling “I don’t see it! I don’t see it!” Tracey has since left TYT.

    There are many appalling examples of Cenk’s deranged facilitation of the longstanding agendas of the US intelligence community to subvert and isolate Russia, like when he and his TYT panel attacked Trump for holding an insufficiently aggressive nuclear posture toward Russia, suggesting that it was because the president is “in the pocket of another country.” Or the time he leveled an astonishingly sleazy McCarthyite insinuation at another Russiagate skeptic, Aaron Maté‏, suggesting that his refusal to accept opaque US government assertions on faith may have been due to some fealty to the Kremlin.

    Uygur has been consistently wrong about Russiagate, predicting in March of 2017 that Trump would be out of office within six months as a result of the imaginary scandal, and recently posting an embarrassing fit of joy about the “bombshell” BuzzFeed report on the Robert Mueller investigation titled “Trump’s Done. Here is the Evidence.”, which was refuted hours later by Mueller himself.

    These are the minds who have helped bog down America’s progressive movement with stupid, self-defeating hawkish and McCarthyite narratives which suck all the oxygen out of the room for the advancement of progressive issues, and which are now being used with increasing frequency to attack not Trump and the right, but Bernie Sanders and the left. The consequences of their idiotic behavior will go increasingly mainstream in the long, long lead-up to the 2020 election, and it will do incalculable damage to progressive agendas, unless it is thoroughly excised from the movement and flushed down the toilet where it belongs.

    *  *  *

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  • No CNN… The US Intelligence Chief Actually Vindicated Trump's Syria Exit

    America’s top intelligence chief has said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is set to retake the entire country in the near future. “President Bashar al-Assad has largely defeated the opposition and is now seeking to regain control over all of the Syrian territory,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said during a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday.

    And in comments that appeared to vindicate President Trump’s Syria withdrawal strategy predicated upon the Islamic State’s defeat, DNI Coats said that pro-Assad forces continue to “re-take territory” from what remains of ISIS while carefully avoiding war with US allies Israel and Turkey. “The regime will focus on retaking territory while seeking to avoid conflict with Israel and Turkey” DNI Coats testified. 

    This echoes a previous December statement of Trump’s wherein the president defended his Syria troop draw down based on the idea that American forces were fighting the enemies of Iran, Russia, and Syria for them (that is, fighting a jihadist insurgency that was simultaneously warring against Assad).

    “Russia, Iran, Syria & others are the local enemy of ISIS. We were doing there [sic] work. Time to come home & rebuild” — Trump had tweeted, with the implication that Damascus and its allies would inevitably finish off the dirty work of cleaning out the terror insurgency. 

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    It should be noted that Coats also deflated that most absurd of all conspiracy theories  — namely that ISIS’ prior growth was Assad’s fault and that the terror group can’t be defeated so long as he remains in power (a longtime favorite argument of uber-hawks like Senators Graham, Rubio, McCain, and others).

    Speaking on the new Worldwide Threat Assessment released by DNI Coats on Tuesday,  Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan also addressed the subject of ISIS’ defeat, saying ISIS has lost “99.5% plus” of the total territory it previously held in Syria and Iraq, and crucially added, “within a couple of weeks, it will be 100%.“

    “ISIS is no longer able to govern in Syria, ISIS no longer has freedom to mass forces,” Shanahan said, adding that: 

    “Syria is no longer a safe haven.” 

    However, this still didn’t stop CNN from seizing upon those sections of the report that speak to the potential of an underground ISIS insurgency looking to conduct global terror attacks. CNN’s commentary said: 

    Despite repeated claims by the Trump administration that ISIS has been defeated, US intelligence assesses that the terror group “very likely will continue to pursue external attacks from Iraq and Syria against regional and Western adversaries, including the United States.”

    Yet CNN’s interpretation contradicts the intelligence assessment’s findings that Assad remains at war with ISIS remnants and the terror insurgency. 

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    Contradicting the CNN report, CNS News has it right in simply concluding of the DNI’s testimony that “Assad will continue to fight ISIS, America’s enemy, while leaving America’s allies alone”:

    “The remaining pockets of ISIS and opposition fighters will continue, we agree — we assess, to stoke violence as we have seen in incidents happening in the Idlib province of Syria. The regime will focus on re-taking territory while seeking to avoid conflict with Israel and Turkey.”

    So, according to Coats, Assad will continue to fight ISIS, America’s enemy, while leaving America’s allies alone.

    Meanwhile both the hawks in Washington and mainstream media will always attempt to point out that ISIS terrorists exist somewhere on the globe — true enough given the proliferation of the jihadi “brand” that any loner or extremist movement can claim at any time.

    While acknowledging Assad and the Syrian Army’s intent to “regain control over all of the Syrian territory” DNI Coats’ comments reflected this permanent “war on terror” emphasis tirelessly touted by beltway hawks: “ISIS is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria,” he said as part of his Senate testimony. But acknowledging that ISIS is now an ‘underground’ phenomenon, he described the terror group as having “returned to its guerrilla warfare roots while continuing to plot attacks and direct its supporters worldwide.”

    But like the ever present, pervasive and much hyped al-Qaeda/bin Laden threat of the Bush administration years, the post-9/11 playbook has been to push indefinite military deployments in “forever wars” based on the mere possibility that a terror threat persists somewhere out there. It’s simply a formula for endless occupation of the Middle East and a runaway defense budget. 

    It seems based on recent polls showing a majority of Americans support Trump’s Syria withdrawal that voters are tired of this tactic, and can indeed increasingly see through it. 

  • 'Hitlers' Everywhere – Russia, America, Venezuela, & Catholic Youth?

    Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,

    Mister Charlie Told Me So

    Say what you will about the current zeitgeist, at least it’s often entertaining … albeit in a psychotic Charlie Manson kind of way. Last week, for example, when Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to support a coup against Venezuelan Hitler (i.e., Russian Hitler’s South American ally) to distract attention from Smirkboy Hitler and his acne-faced army of MAGA hat-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth. That was entertaining … or something.

    This Russian Hitler-backed American Hitler against Russian Hitler-backed Venezuelan Hitler attempted non-military military coup was one of the silliest attempted coups in the history of silly attempted coups. Basically, what happened was, a person by the name of Juan Guaidó (who many Venezuelans had never even heard of) declared himself President of Venezuela. Seriously, he just came out one day and announced that he was in charge of the country. He called on the Venezuelan military to back him. The Venezuelan military did not back him. The Venezuelan military laughed in his face.

    American Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler, who probably couldn’t find Venezuela on a map, nonetheless officially recognized Guaidó as the legitimate President of Venezuela, as did the majority of the Western corporate media, despite the fact that he had been elected by no one and did not have the backing of his country’s military (which, normally, when you’re staging a military coup, it’s kind of a good idea to have). The UK, France, Germany, Spain, and other members of the “international community” demanded that Venezuela hold new elections, or else they too will recognize Guaidó, or any other neoliberal puppet Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler decides is the President of Venezuela.

    The anti-Russian-intelligence-asset-Hitler Resistance® in the United States suspended their imaginary guerrilla war against Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler in solidarity with the Venezuelan people, who are being brutally oppressed by Venezuelan Hitler, who is a close personal friend of Russian Hitler, and who they reelected president in the spring of last year (i.e., Venezuelan Hitler, not Russian Hitler) against the advice of American Hitler, the deep state goons that are trying to destroy him, and assorted transnational oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Equinor, not to mention all the global financial institutions which are eager to help the Guaidó government democratically restructure and privatize the country.

    The weird thing is, Russian Hitler, who presumably ordered American Hitler to support this coup against Venezuelan Hitler, is now supporting Venezuelan Hitler.

    Which can only mean that this whole ridiculous attempted Hilter-on-Hitler coup thing is a ruse intended to distract our attention from MAGA hat-wearing Smirkboy Hitler and his Catholic high-school Hitler Youth army, who have clearly been “emboldened” by American Hitler to hunt down elderly Native Americans and attempt to literally smirk them to death.

    That, or possibly Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to orchestrate this coup against Venezuelan Hitler (which Russian Hitler had always intended to thwart) to distract attention from the latest explosive “bombshell” corporate media story about Washington sleazebag Roger Stone’s non-connection to Julian Assange, who American Hitler now wants to prosecute for helping to get him (i.e., American Hitler) elected president with those emails that Russian Hitler stole from Clinton’s campaign manager, and who, according to anonymous fictive sources is not a nice person and doesn’t smell too good (i.e., Assange, not Clinton’s campaign manager).

    Or maybe Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to back the coup against Venezuelan Hitler to distract our attention from Bernie Sanders, who apparently is also a Russian agent now, or an insidious Kremlin-Trump operation, or is working with Tulsi Gabbard to assemble an army of blood-drinking Hindu nationalists, genocidal Assadists, and American Nazis to help the Iranians (and the Russians, of course, and possibly also Jeremy Corbyn) frontally assault the State of Israel and drive the Jews into the sea!

    If all that sounds completely insane and impossible to follow, that’s because it is. We have reached a stage in the War on Populism where the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media are no longer even trying to appear to make sense, or address people on any kind of rational level. Reading the so-called “serious” press and watching corporate television news is like having a bunch of paranoid psychotics tripping monkey balls on DMT jabbering strangely familiar-sounding contradictory nonsense at you … which, apart from its entertainment value, happens to be a standard technique cults use to scramble the minds of new members.

    It’s a standard technique because it works.

    It doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence. Intelligent people make excellent cult members, primarily because they are given to trying to make sense out of apparent nonsense, which professional cult leaders understand and count on. Listen to Charlie Manson “rapping.” What might appear to be free associative gibberish is actually a calculated effort to short-circuit rational thought in the listener and force them to try to piece together the bits of truth sprinkled into the nonsense. (Of course, it helps if you listen to Charlie ripped out of your gourd on acid, but sheer repetition also works, especially if the people doing it look a little more “normal” than Charlie.)

    This mind-scrambling technique is what we are being subjected to, more or less around the clock, not by some Processean grifter, but by the so-called serious corporate media. The steps involved are relatively simple:

    (1) authoritative person or persons jabbers irrational nonsense at us, and behaves as if the nonsense were a rational argument;

    (2) our minds are faced with a choice – either accept the nonsense as a rational argument or challenge the authority of the authoritative person (which most of us are reluctant to do, because of negative social and financial consequences);

    (3) having chosen to believe that the nonsense the authoritative person is spewing at us must somehow amount to a rational argument, our minds begin to struggle to make sense out of the nonsense, which allows the authoritative person to provide us with some simplistic narrative revealing the “truth” and invariably featuring some evil enemy (i.e., Russians, Jews, Body Thetans, etc.), which relieves the acute discomfort we are feeling.

    In a cult (or, you know, a cult-like society), this process is repeated, over and over, and then reinforced by positive feedback from other members of the cult (or society). The process is designed to prevent us from ever achieving enough perceptual distance to accurately hear, and critically evaluate, the nonsense authoritative persons are feeding us. If we ever accidentally manage to do so, we are promptly serenaded by a chorus of voices shouting mind-numbing platitudes at us, and threatening us with ostracization, and so on. Over time, we learn to stop thinking critically and just trust whatever the authoritative persons we have surrendered our autonomy to are telling us. The official narratives of the cult (or society), no matter how irrational or totally psychotic, become our reality, or “just the way it is.”

    This is why it is relatively easy to recognize this process at work in cults (or social groups) we don’t belong to, but very difficult to perceive in those we belong to. For example, if you’re a creature of the left, as I am, it’s entertaining (or maybe horrifying) to listen to people on the right babbling about caravans of Mexican terrorists that the International Conspiracy of Jews is paying to assault our borders, or kill-crazy lesbians who are getting pregnant and waiting to abort their full-term pregnancies just to spit in the faces of good pro-life Christians. But is that stuff really any more insane than believing Donald Trump is a Russian agent, or that the United States is on the brink of fascism, or that a Catholic teenager in a MAGA hat poses some existential threat to democracy, or any of the other hysterical nonsense the liberal corporate media have been disseminating?

    If you seriously believe in any of that stuff, sorry, but I don’t know how to help you. I’m not a professional cult deprogrammer. Nor do I have any “truths” to offer you, except maybe beware of those who do. There are a lot of Mister Charlies out there, and they don’t all look like homicidal hippies with swastikas carved into their foreheads. Actually, most of them look … well, normal.

  • Exiled Venezuelan Colonel Arrested In Daring Cross-border Mission

    In what appears a wild and bizarre attempt to kick start an “arm the moderate rebels” campaign or establish a “Free Venezuelan Army” of sorts, a rogue Venezuelan colonel who’d been living in exile was arrested after he slipped back into the country as part of a clandestine operation to organize and arm the opposition. The arrest and detention of 54-year old retired Colonel Oswaldo Garcia Palomo was confirmed by his associates on Tuesday, and came after the former National Guard officer tipped off Bloomberg that some kind of secret mission was in the works last week with the cryptic words, “Pay attention to me in the coming days.”

    Retired Colonel Oswaldo Garcia Palomo, via Bloomberg.

    Garcia in a widely cited interview with Bloomberg last December had described that he was personally “working every day to combine international and national forces, and remove the government through the use of arms so the country doesn’t continue to bleed out and die.”

    For this reason the Maduro regime has long accused him of treason and conspiring against the government from neighboring Colombia, in some cases raiding homes of known associates accused of being in contact with the rogue officer. Garcia’s family is currently living in exile in Montreal, Canada. 

    “Wanted” posters have been circulated by Caracas authorities seeking Garcia Palomo’s whereabouts and arrest.

    He’s further been described as “actively and publicly seeking the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro” and has recently pledged military support to US-recognized “Interim President” and opposition National Assembly leader Juan Guaido. On Tuesday a group under his leadership called “Operación Constitución 2018” published via social media an “alert” saying he’s been detained inside Venezuela by military police. 

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    The group of supporters further called on Guaido to “act as our commander in chief” and take control of the armed forces while rally the international community to pressure Caracas into releasing Garcia. “We hold the regime responsible for his physical well-being,” one tweet said. 

    According to a report by Canadian Broadcast Company, which interviewed Oswaldo Garcia Palomo’s family members following news of his capture by military intelligence:

    He continued to reach out in exile to colleagues still inside Venezuela, and occasionally crossed the border personally.

    It was on one such cross-border mission that he was captured overnight Monday, in the Venezuelan state of Tachira, after crossing from the Colombian city of Cucuta. His family now fears for his life.

    “I did everything but get on my knees and ask him not to go back,” said his wife Sorbay de Padilla. “But he said, ‘I can’t think of just myself. There are kids starving and people dying without medicine. I have to think of my country.'”

    The organization calling itself Operación Constitución 2018 appears part of the same opposition in exile movement that attempted an officer-led coup last year, as Bloomberg describes:

    The retired colonel was among scores of officers and special-forces troops across all four branches of the Venezuelan armed forces who launched one of the most serious failed coups last year, known as Operation Constitution. The plan was infiltrated and dozens of his fellow plotters were arrested; he escaped and continued to agitate.

    But both last year’s coup attempt and this week’s “infiltration” stunt by Garcia were premature and could be a sign that both the internal and external opposition are interpreting Washington’s regime change rhetoric in an overly optimistic and impatient manner. 

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    One the one hand the White House continues to very vocally tout its commitment to a rapid and “peaceful transition of power” with “all options on the table” — yet on the other the National Bolivarian Armed Forces have clearly remained loyal to President Maduro even as a dozen countries have declared Maduro “illegitimate”.

    This appears a recipe for more false starts and premature “rebellion” attempts by an expectant opposition, likely to be easily crushed by pro-Maduro forces, who can further rally the people by pointing to the “foreign hand” and “imperial puppets” behind recent coup plotting. 

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