- Former CIA Officer: "The Intelligence Confirms The Russian Account On Syria"
Authored by Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,
President Trump earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” moment.
Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.
The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations while in the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ford Williams)
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.
There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.
But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.
One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.
The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.
White House Infighting
In this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser and this week’s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump presidency. The strange personalities and ideological extremism of Flynn and Bannon made their ousters easier, but they were obstacles that the neocons wanted removed.
Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration’s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a “false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’ similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident.
Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to judgment blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday night’s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from a Russian covert operation.
If changing the narrative was Trump’s goal, it achieved some initial success with several of Trump’s fiercest neocon critics, such as neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, praising the missile strike, as did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The neocons and Israel have long sought “regime change” in Damascus even if the ouster of Assad might lead to a victory by Islamic extremists associated with Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State.
Wagging the Dog
Trump employing a “wag the dog” strategy, in which he highlights his leadership on an international crisis to divert attention from domestic political problems, is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s decision to attack Serbia in 1999 as impeachment clouds were building around his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky.
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press conference on Feb. 15. 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
Trump’s advisers, in briefing the press on Thursday night, went to great lengths to highlight Trump’s compassion toward the victims of the poison gas and his decisiveness in bombing Assad’s military in contrast to Obama’s willingness to allow the intelligence community to conduct a serious review of the evidence surrounding the 2013 sarin-gas case.
Ultimately, Obama listened to his intelligence advisers who told him there was no “slam-dunk” evidence implicating Assad’s regime and he pulled back from a military strike at the last minute – while publicly maintaining the fiction that the U.S. government was certain of Assad’s guilt.
In both cases – 2013 and 2017 – there were strong reasons to doubt Assad’s responsibility. In 2013, he had just invited United Nations inspectors into Syria to investigate cases of alleged rebel use of chemical weapons and thus it made no sense that he would launch a sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, guaranteeing that the U.N. inspectors would be diverted to that case.
Similarly, now, Assad’s military has gained a decisive advantage over the rebels and he had just scored a major diplomatic victory with the Trump administration’s announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking “regime change” in Syria. The savvy Assad would know that a chemical weapon attack now would likely result in U.S. retaliation and jeopardize the gains that his military has achieved with Russian and Iranian help.
The counter-argument to this logic – made by The New York Times and other neocon-oriented news outlets – essentially maintains that Assad is a crazed barbarian who was testing out his newfound position of strength by baiting President Trump. Of course, if that were the case, it would have made sense that Assad would have boasted of his act, rather than deny it.
But logic and respect for facts no longer prevail inside Official Washington, nor inside the mainstream U.S. news media.
Intelligence Uprising
Alarm within the U.S. intelligence community about Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.
Former CIA officer Philip Giradi. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
Giraldi told Scott Horton’s Webcast: “I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.”
Giraldi said his sources were more in line with an analysis postulating an accidental release of the poison gas after an Al Qaeda arms depot was hit by a Russian airstrike.
“The intelligence confirms pretty much the account that the Russians have been giving … which is that they hit a warehouse where the rebels – now these are rebels that are, of course, connected with Al Qaeda – where the rebels were storing chemicals of their own and it basically caused an explosion that resulted in the casualties. Apparently the intelligence on this is very clear.”
Giraldi said the anger within the intelligence community over the distortion of intelligence to justify Trump’s military retaliation was so great that some covert officers were considering going public.
“People in both the agency [the CIA] and in the military who are aware of the intelligence are freaking out about this because essentially Trump completely misrepresented what he already should have known – but maybe he didn’t – and they’re afraid that this is moving toward a situation that could easily turn into an armed conflict,” Giraldi said before Thursday night’s missile strike. “They are astonished by how this is being played by the administration and by the U.S. media.”
One-Sided Coverage
The mainstream U.S. media has presented the current crisis with the same profound neocon bias that has infected the coverage of Syria and the larger Middle East for decades. For instance, The New York Times on Friday published a lead story by Michael R. Gordon and Michael D. Shear that treated the Syrian government’s responsibility for the poison-gas incident as flat-fact. The lengthy story did not even deign to include the denials from Syria and Russia that they were responsible for any intentional deployment of poison gas.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross fires a tomahawk land attack missile from the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Robert S. Price)
The article also fit with Trump’s desire that he be portrayed as a decisive and forceful leader. He is depicted as presiding over intense deliberations of war or peace and displaying a deep humanitarianism regarding the poison-gas victims, one of the rare moments when the Times, which has become a reliable neocon propaganda sheet, has written anything favorable about Trump at all.
According to Syrian reports on Friday, the U.S. attack killed 13 people, including five soldiers at the airbase.
Gordon, whose service to the neocon cause is notorious, was the lead author with Judith Miller of the Times’ bogus “aluminum tube” story in 2002 which falsely claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program, an article that was then cited by President George W. Bush’s aides as a key argument for invading Iraq in 2003.
Regarding this week’s events, Trump’s desperation to reverse his negative media coverage and the dubious evidence blaming Assad for the Idlib incident could fit with the “Wag the Dog” movie from 1997 in which an embattled president creates a phony foreign crisis in Albania.
A fake war scene in the dark 1997 comedy “Wag the Dog,” which showed a girl and her cat fleeing a bombardment in Albania.
In the movie, the White House operation is a cynical psychological operation to convince the American people that innocent Albanian children, including an attractive girl carrying a cat, are in danger when, In reality, the girl was an actor posing before a green screen that allowed scenes of fiery ruins to be inserted as background.
Today, because Trump and his administration are now committed to convincing Americans that Assad really was responsible for Tuesday’s poison-gas tragedy, the prospects for a full and open investigation are effectively ended. We may never know if there is truth to those allegations or whether we are being manipulated by another “wag the dog” psyop.
- Confused Leftists Slam 'Trumpmageddon' Despite Hillary's Call For Direct Strikes On Syrian Airfields Hours Earlier
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
With Russian warships now moving towards U.S. Navy Destroyers off the Syrian coast, liberal supporters of Hillary Clinton are freaking out about the possibility of a Trumpmaggedon nuclear war.
Before pointing fingers at President Trump, however, it is important to note that just hours before Trump launched missile strikes against Syrian airfield targets it was none other than Hillary Clinton herself who said she would have done the same thing:
Speaking to the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Mrs Clinton said she believed the US had been wrong not to have previously launched such an offensive.
She said: “Assad had an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of the civilian deaths, as we have seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days.”
“And I really believe that we should have and still should take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop Sarin gas on them.“
Source: Independent
Let’s not pretend that Donald Trump did anything Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have done.
If Trump’s Syrian strikes lead to further tension between the United States and Russia, or even widespread military conflict, it has nothing to do with a Republican or Democrat being in office, but rather, a pre-planned agenda.
As Ron Paul highlighted this week, it’s the neo-cons who benefit most, and that includes Hillary Clinton.
War is very good business for the military industrial complex, bank financiers, energy magnates and politicians.
- ALERT: JFK Murder Conspiracy SOLVED, but who cares
(GLOBALINTELHUB) – 4/09/2017 Support solid intelligence visit our sponsor www.splittingpennies.com
While the world wonders about President Trump, 54 years ago, a US President was murdered in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas; John Fitzgerald Kennedy – the only Irish Catholic President, and possibly one of the only US Presidents that was not a Freemason. To this day, the facts surrounding this event remain clouded. The ‘official’ Warren Commission report presents fanciful theories about a “Magic Bullet” that was able to go in and out of JFK’s body multiple times, and other wild fantasies. But this official report is ‘official’ and any other explanation of the events of that day are ‘conspiracy theories.’ As time has passed, and secondary information surfaces, there are indications of the true power of the information that was kept secret for so long.
The murder of JFK is perhaps one of the most significant events of the 20th century. In the past 10 years, new information has surfaced that portends to a major re-investigation into the issue. As well, a generation has passed since the event which took place 1963. This article presents two unique viewpoints, previously unpublished, as well as looking at some recently released evidence:
- Dr. Arthur Charloff “Art”, Special Agent FBI Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- The book titled Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination
- Finally, we’ll examine new evidence that has surfaced since the making of Oliver Stone’s “JFK” in 1991
We will begin with 1. – Art’s involvement in JFK was relatively en-passant. The FBI was called in because the Dallas police couldn’t be trusted to run a clean investigation. Art was running the OK office (and has admitted, his station in OK was the reason he left the FBI). Dr. Charloff is an impeccably fact-based intellectual who was a university professor and Dean of Northwood University; as well as serving as a major financial executive for corporations like Burger King Corporation and others. For those who don’t know, most FBI recruits are from financial services, especially because the FBI investigates financial crimes.
When I asked Dr. Charloff point blank who killed JFK he said “We’ll never know, because they killed all the witnesses!” Art was a guy doing his job, a young man at that time, who was not part of any ‘conspiracy’ and certainly wasn’t part of a committee to whitewash something the government or a group inside the government had done. He did however, reveal things about the FBI, that may have greater meaning and implications, than his investigation of JFK. First let’s look at where he pops up in the Warren Commission, see the full file here: 105-29WarrenCommissionFileArthurCharloff and WH26_CE_2809
One page highlighted:
This is, for the record, a copy of Art’s CV: arthur-charloff-ph-d-1979-s-w-palm-city-road-d-772
Art’s FBI stories range from the mundane, such as the agent partner that used to iron the crease in his boxer shorts, to the Hollywood-esque tales of how the Russian embassy brought him tea and cookies one night on a stakeout (while they were performing surveillance on them); “We see you guys sitting there watching us for many hours and thought you might be hungry or thirsty” and even came back to collect the silver tray when they were finished.
Dr. Arthur Charloff was born in Maine, but grew up in Miami, Florida. He obtained his PhD from University of Organizational Sciences in Belgrade, Serbia. His genetic origins can be traced back to a town in Rovno, present day Ukraine (former USSR) – a pogrom town where all his relatives were slaughtered (those who didn’t migrate to USA.) So, Art’s father Morris and Art were both flag waving jingoists. Morris was a meat inspector who worked for the USDA. When he applied for the FBI his Russian origins were an issue and he had to go through special clearances other agents avoided, to prove that he wasn’t a Russian sleeper spy. Although not practicing, Dr. Arthur Charloff is Jewish (hence the family escaping the pogroms for the safety of America).
What Art said about the FBI is that the FBI never ‘solves’ crimes, in a traditional sense. It was more of a business negotiation, relying mostly on Confidential Informants (CIs) and for example in a drug bust, getting street dealers to rat out higher ups and so on up the chain. He said that the FBI very rarely, if ever – solves crimes like you see in the films. CIs can work with the FBI for years, even on cases not involving them (for example, a drug related CI may sit in on an organized crime case).
Global Intel Hub interviewed Dr. Charloff telephonic-ally on March 29th, 2017 for the purposes of research for this article, and to confirm what we had previously thought about Dr. Charloff’s accounts while working for the FBI and after.
Before getting into any detail about UFOs, Dr. Charloff stated point blank that there was a “rumor” in ‘the bureau’ as they refer to FBI, at the time, that the CIA assassinated JFK. JFK had a lot of enemies, and wanted to dump the CIA “shit can the whole operation” as well, his brother Robert wanted to usurp the power of the CIA placing them under the DOJ (Department of Justice) of which he was in charge. Dr. Charloff said his brother (referring to Robert Kennedy) was a ‘tough dude’ and both the Kennedy brothers were very unhappy with the CIA, and especially after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Also, the CIA had kept JFK out of the information circle, as we shall see later, about a number of topics (at this point, we had not revealed the discoveries presented in the book about UFOs to Dr. Charloff – that was knowledge at the time). He said that JFK really didn’t even want to be President, all of these issues seemed to bother his brother more than Jack.
Finally he also stated this was the common opinion of FBI agents at the time, they all looked at each other and said “Something else is going on here” – but continued to do their jobs.
I asked Dr. Charloff if he noticed anything interesting during the investigation of the murder, he said ‘no’ but later admitted that his bosses (Hoover) had forced them to wrap up the investigation early and without doing their normal due diligence as they would on a high profile murder, which the FBI had experience investigating many. Dr. Charloff said the ‘higher ups’ simply wanted the investigation shut down and everyone was re-assigned to other cases quickly, out of the area. They wanted to ‘get this thing closed up as soon as possible, and have no more trouble, no more discussion, about this topic.”
Bear in mind that Dr. Charloff is a straight arrow kind of guy especially being an agent for the FBI investigating the murder of a sitting President. Later asked about his opinion of what happened, he said the whole thing ‘stinks’ and the story about Oswald was ridiculous, how did Oswold get out of the military, why did he go to Russia, why did he do it all from the book depository – it just didn’t add up. Finally Oswald basically threw himself into the arms of police by allowing himself to be arrested.
The Warren Commission came up with nonsensical conclusions he said, such as the “Magic Bullet” and the lone assassin theory, that Oswald did it by himself. No one took it seriously, at the time, but what could anyone do? It was obviously much bigger than one agency, even bigger than the office of the President, so whatever power lurking in the shadows – was not one to mess with!
But who did it? In an ironic twist to this testimony, Dr. Charloff’s brother worked at the famous Area 51 military base in the Nevada desert – that’s the base that the military claims doesn’t exist.
He said that before working there his brother had to surrender ALL of his documents, IDs, social security card, and all else. He wasn’t allowed to talk about what he did or saw there. After 6 months a new ‘shift’ comes in and they rotate people there like that. At least that was how they did it back in the day.
Why this anecdotal account from someone who is not a critical witness? Because Dr. Arthur Charloff is a real person – who can attest to the events as they transpired, from another perspective, just an FBI special agent doing his job.
Part 2: The Book
Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination – This is a must read, for those interested in the topic of ‘information’ and ‘informatics’ even if you’re not interested in the subject of UFOs. The point here is that documentary evidence regarding the UFO conspiracy is real and comes from the top. A group so powerful (MJ-12) they shut out the President (Eisenhower) who overcame them only by threatening to invade Area 51 with the Army. In the past 20 years, new evidence has surfaced, some of which is presented in the book. Most significantly, the book points a paper trail right to the top of the CIA and beyond.
Small background on UFO phenomenon as it pertains to this story; UFOs were first discovered by the military over Los Angeles during World War 2. It was alarming because the Army believed that it was the enemy Japanese attacking, all they saw were ‘airships’ shooting down from the sky; the idea of Aliens or UFOs wasn’t common knowledge at the time. See a brief summary of the “Battle of Los Angeles”:
The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as The Great Los Angeles Air Raid, is the name given by contemporary sources to the rumored enemy attack and subsequent anti-aircraft artillery barrage which took place from late 24 February to early 25 February 1942 over Los Angeles, California. The incident occurred less than three months after the United States entered World War II as a result of the Japanese Imperial Navy‘s attack on Pearl Harbor, and one day after the bombardment of Ellwood on 23 February. Initially, the target of the aerial barrage was thought to be an attacking force from Japan, but speaking at a press conference shortly afterward, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox called the incident a “false alarm.” Newspapers of the time published a number of reports and speculations of a cover-up.
Some contemporary ufologists and conspiracy theorists have suggested the targets were extraterrestrial spacecraft. When documenting the incident in 1949, The United States Coast Artillery Association identified a meteorological balloon sent up at 1:00 am that “started all the shooting” and concluded that “once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in”. In 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of “war nerves” triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries.
After this ‘battle’ UFOs were on the radar of the military – literally. Military planners, practically, incorporate every kind of potential attack into their strategy planning. UFOs were not looked at scientifically by the military – simply as a potential threat, whether from Hitler or another planet they didn’t care.
The second event that marked this age was the Roswell crash, still a big mystery to this day. Apparently, there were 2 crashes, one with actual biological bodies, and the press release was designed to take the focus away from the more sensitive site. According to the book, everything was taken to Area 51 for review, where the facility was placed under the security of the CIA and managed by a group formed by Truman known as MJ-12. A lot of this is not science fiction when considering Nazi scientists developed rockets that NASA still uses to this day via Project Paperclip. Remember that all of this happened around a time when USA was becoming a superpower, the CIA was just formed, along with the military industrial complex – including its corporate technology arm, still in use today (Silicon Valley).
Where did the explosion of scientific developments come from such as Kevlar, the Microprocessor, fiber optics, stealth, weather modification, and other technologies come from? Many of these developments came out by the hundreds month after month by research labs like PARC:
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated), formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California,[1][2][3] with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems.
Founded in 1970 as a division of Xerox Corporation, PARC has been in large part responsible for such developments as laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.
This all shortly after the Roswell incident. Looking at all this from a technology standpoint is not so sensational. The fact that the Roswell crash was in fact a UFO possibly operated by a ‘robot’ or ‘drone’ from another planet or another timeline is not so far fetched. If the reader could be transported back to the middle ages of Europe equipped with a laser pointer, iPhone 7, automatic handgun, and other wizard’s tools, certainly the people would think that the user is a “God” who practices “Magic”.
The interesting twist in this book is how JFK wanted to unmask all this, use it for the good of the world (in partnership with Russia) and how the group who operates above the US Government, in this case MJ-12, ordered the hit via a secretive assassination directive:
An Mj-12 directive to kill JFK
The most dramatic directive, likely drafted by Dulles (MJ-1), Director of CIA under JFK and apparently approved by six other MJ-12 members was a cryptic assassination directive. In full, this states: see last memo in series in link below.
http://www.majesticdocuments.com/pdf/burnedmemo-s1-pgs3-9.pdf
Draft – Directive Regarding Project Environment – When conditions become non-conducive for growth in our environment and Washington cannot be influenced any further, the weather is lacking any precipitation … it should be wet.
The term “it should be wet” is a coded command to kill someone.
Detractors of this book will say that the author is reaching to connect the dots, and this cryptic message is not ‘clearly’ the smoking gun evidence that everyone is looking for. But is it? Have a deeper look through these documents here:
To the less educated researcher, documents such as the letter from respected scientists Oppenheimer and Einstein regarding the UFO issue, and the letter from the anonymous CIA leaker re: James Angleton; may be of more significance, as the authenticity of these documents is more verifiable, and anecdotally more believable. Einstein for example published thousands of public essays and letters on various important topics of the day; this was a time when the power Elite relied on high IQ scientists.
There is no alternative paper trail, with a more powerful suggestion – solving the JFK murder. Most of the files have been released in a searchable archive, which you can find here: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk
It is not likely that in the next 20 years another ‘smoking gun’ document will be discovered, although it’s possible (it could be in some relatives attic, next to baseball cards and grandpas pipe saved from last century). So it’s reasonable to conclude that 95% of relevant information regarding the JFK scenario is out there, somewhere – in the ether. With the speed and velocity of the internet sleuth community, if there was such a relevant document such as photo (right) – it would have been distributed and redistributed, analyzed and discussed, ad nauseum.
What is the significance of this event, you ask? It’s a singularity, as they describe in physics (a point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole). From one perspective, it was simply a power grab by ‘faction 2’ from ‘faction 1’ as some describe big power politics. The Kennedy clan were outsiders, they were social climbers, they went against the power structure of the haves – case closed. But Kennedy or someone else – something more meaningful happened here. A group called the “Shadow Government” stopped Kennedy from exercising the powers granted to him by the Constitution and by the voters. It puts the entire system into question, proving basically that the United States operates by Mob Rule not so much different than a banana republic. A group of rich families and companies with deep pockets control the country through their trained surrogates. The continuation of this can be seen with political families such as Bush and Clinton who have a statistically unusual amount of deaths of associates, friends, and workers surrounding them. Some were even afraid to work for the Clinton camp due to the high number of workers who ‘suicided’, disappeared, had heart failure, or stabbed themselves in the back 10 times.
Let’s thread through the irony of the power structure for the last 30 years with this interesting photo, and comparison, of a figure outside the Texas School Book Depository:
The photo on right, comparing the posture of a figure standing in a suit and tie is striking. George H.W. Bush Sr. later went on to be the director of the CIA, only for 2 years, under Gerald Ford. But Bush’s impact on the establishment would be large, as he would later be Reagan’s Vice President (and rumored that was more of a ‘President’ during this time than Reagan ever was) and eventually President of the United States, and father of a future president, George W. Bush (his son).
What kind of ‘organization’ is out of the public view, has the means to organize such an assassination, and the motive? All points to one organization, really the only capable organization of organizing such a project. Look at some evidence, such as this list compiled by Wikispooks, of attempted or successful assassination attempts on foreign leaders organized by the CIA since World War 2: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/US/Foreign_Assassinations_since_1945 And here’s “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders” as compiled by the US Senate in 1975: CIA_Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders
With such overwhelming evidence of the CIA’s involvement in foreign assassinations, if only one of these ‘plots’ is true it’s reasonable to assume they all are true because after all, the CIA is a spy agency, not an overt military operation, so most of this is done with the clandestine service. And, if the CIA really does have a ‘hit squad’ trained to topple and kill foreign dictators, then it is reasonable to assume this same operative group inside the CIA could potentially use this same group domestically. In fact, it is the only group in the world capable of assassinating a US President so successfully, including the use of insiders to change the course of the motorcade, for example.
Or to use another analogy as a means of deductive logic, 95% of hackers are inside jobs – in other words, hackers very rarely breach security from the ‘outside’ – they rely on a rogue employee, security expert, or insider to provide key information such as passwords or other details needed to complete the job. This must have been the case with the murder of JFK because without those on the inside, such an epic target would not have been possible to hit. It was for this reason the ‘higher ups’ at the FBI wanted this case closed and not discussed, because there clearly were insiders working against JFK who provided key info and modifying security protocols leading to the assassination.
As referenced by NY Times, the peak of outrage against the CIA for such plots was in the mid 1970s:
The peak of outrage against government-sponsored assassination was the mid-1970s, when the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations — better known as the Church committee — spent more than 60 days questioning 75 witnesses about C.I.A. plots of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Back in the darkest days of the cold war, the agency had devoted significant resources and creativity to devising unhappy ends for unsavory or inconvenient foreign leaders. Among those listed for assassination were Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and, most famously, Fidel Castro of Cuba, who survived no fewer than eight C.I.A. assassination plots. The senators on the committee were intent on divining the full extent of the government’s role in these plots. How much direct authority, for example, did Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy exert over them? The committee’s conclusions were vague at best. The truth was that neither president would have allowed his hand to show in such affairs. Times have changed. Our president now interrupts regularly scheduled broadcasting to announce the news of an assassination himself.
Perhaps the details of the JFK murder, public coverage, and FBI investigation would have been different had it happened in 2010. Certainly it was a different time, before the internet, and at a time of much happiness and prosperity. Since “JFK” we’ve had “911” which is another game changer event that put the US on a different path as it was during the 90s. Perhaps every generation needs such an event to ‘remind’ them of who is in charge? (Dr. Tony Blanton from Pine Crest Prep School is ringing in my ears ‘history is a struggle between the haves and the have nots and you are the movers and the shakers who are going to change society’)
What secrets are the ‘shadow government’ protecting or are they simply exercising their power to show the have nots that their ownership of the planet is above any government, any nation state, religion, or other entity? The UFO issue is concerning, particularly due to security concerns; because the information we do know is only bits and pieces from whistle-blowers and a few encounters that are not well documented. There are rumors that Eisenhower himself made a deal with the Aliens to keep them a secret in exchange for technology transfer through the military and corporate America. Maybe it was a good deal, maybe it never happened – who knows? The point is that, until real discovery and disclosure is achieved, we will be in the dark regarding important issues that can impact daily life on planet earth. Some important questions we need to ask beyond the shock value of understanding we are not alone in the universe:
- Who are these aliens, what do they want? What has been ‘agreed’ with them, if anything, and what current involvement do they have with US Military operations?
- What of the stories that some of these creatures are multi-dimensional, or from another ‘timeline’ (that they aren’t aliens from other planets but beings that live in many dimensions)?
- How can we address issues of exo-politics if the CIA was dethroned as the sole security to Area 51 and ultimately, controlling the diplomacy between such aliens, if any?
- Is there any truth to the stories they are abducting humans for purposes of experimentation, whether it be biological or genetic? What about the ‘hybrid’ projects? If there is truth to it, how to stop it?
- Do aliens have any current business arrangements with US corporations, US politicians, or are involved in major conflicts in any way? If so, this urgently needs to be addressed, and contracts re-evaluated. For example there are many accounts that UFOs were seen when nuclear warheads went dead (if even for a test).
- Are there any secret government ‘libraries’ or ‘archives’ where files about aliens are kept, if so – where are they and in what format?
What’s interesting about this issue that it seems to be a wealth of information right here under our own desert. It’s like the metaphor about exploring space when we know less about our deep oceans. There again, rumors of alien bases under the deep seas. The amount of information regarding the veracity of such stories is immense, and it has gone parabolic in the last years as many who were alive and working during these times before modern security protocols and training were in place, are retired, dying, or have passed information onto children.
Part 3: The New Evidence
1963 was a long time ago. New facts and evidence have surfaced, most interestingly – we are on the precipice of a major data dump by the US Government still to be determined, scheduled for ‘sometime’ in 2o17. See explanation from http://2017jfk.org :
In 1992, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act mandated that in 2017 all remaining JFK records and redactions be released. However, the National Archives has recently informed federal agencies that if they intend on maintaining secrecy over these records they should begin preparing appeals to the next president of the United States. We are working to ensure that the law is upheld. We are calling on you, fellow Americans, to come together and ensure that our government upholds the law.
The parallel of the information secrecy both for the JFK murder and the UFO issue, and their purported interconnection, is interesting. If state secrets or a modern political organization were not at stake, why the hold up to release information about JFK? Everyone mostly already believes it was the CIA, a group we have shown capable of organizing assassinations of many foreign leaders, and recently (2016) was caught meddling in a US domestic election. The UFO issue can be the motive to cover up the JFK murder for so long, so deeply. And the less obvious, more subtle ‘can of worms’ argument, that if the US Government lied and hid the facts about JFK, of course – everything else including the 9/11 investigation would be open for re-investigation. This is another reason for waiting for so long because there’d be no one to ‘blame’ as those who orchestrated the conspiracy / cover-up would all be dead by now (or so the thinking of this strategy goes).
A recording of radio communications to and from Air Force One on November 22,1963, discovered in 2011, is among the most important new pieces of JFK evidence to emerge in recent years,
The tape, an edited excerpt from a longer recording, captures some of the communications of the leaders of U.S. national security agencies as they learned about the assassination of a sitting president.
I wrote about the importance of the Air Force One tape in the fall of 2013:
“Audio engineer on the trail of a long-lost JFK tape” (JFK Facts, Nov. 6, 2013)
“Enhanced Air Force One tape captures top general’s response to JFK’s murder” (JFK Facts, Oct. 19, 2013)
You can listen to it here.
Where was the Air Force One tape found?
This old-fashioned reel of analog tape surfaced at Philadelphia auction house in 2011. The recording was found in the estate of the family of Gen. Chester Clifton, a military aide to JFK. Clifton died in 1991. His children put the estate up for auction.
Bill Kelly, a JFK researcher, enlisted Primeau Forensics, a Michigan audio engineering firm, to produce a cleaned-up version of the tape.
What is significant in this piece of information, as far as data analysis is concerned, is the source. It was an unclassified transcript of a non-essential to the JFK operation (Project Environment). It only ‘suggests’ through information via what was said and not said, and as such, is not a ‘smoking gun’. But much like the UFO phenomenon, in a similar thread – it seems that it’s simply IMPOSSIBLE to keep such a high profile operation secret for so long. The analogy to the UFO issue is Dr. Steven Greer’s “Disclosure Project” available at www.disclosureproject.org; in summary:
Beginning in 1993, I started an effort that was designed to identify firsthand military and government witnesses to UFO events and projects, as well as other evidence to be used in a public disclosure. From 1993, we spent considerable time and resources briefing the Clinton Administration, including CIA Director James Woolsey, senior military officials at the Pentagon, and select members of Congress, among others. In April of 1997, more than a dozen such government and military witnesses were assembled in Washington DC for briefings with Congressmen, Pentagon officials and others. There, we specifically requested open Congressional Hearings on the subject. None were forthcoming.
These materials are, as you can now discern, only the tip of the iceberg of what we have recorded on digital videotape. That is, from over 120 hours of testimony by over 100 witnesses we transcribed only 33 hours and then further edited materials down to a fraction of that amount. Moreover, the full archive represents the testimony of only 100 witnesses of the more than 400 identified to date. The edited testimony will be appearing in book form. A portion of it appears in The Disclosure Project Briefing Document and only small excerpts and summary bios of testimony appear in this Executive summary. We hope in the future to secure funding for a 5-6 part broadcast quality video documentary series to be made from the videotaped testimony we have as the impact of hearing and seeing these witnesses speak is very moving.
This then brings me to my last point: The witnesses who have given testimony to date are extraordinarily brave men and women – heroes in my eyes – who have taken great personal risks in coming forward. Some have been threatened and intimidated. All are risking the ever-present ridicule that attends this subject. Not a single one of them has been paid for his or her testimony: It has been given freely and without reservation for the good of humanity. I wish to personally thank them here and extend to them my personal, highest respect and gratitude.
This summary is focusing on the testimony of important first-hand witnesses. We have thousands of government documents, hundreds of photographs, trace landing cases and more, but it is impossible to include them in a summary of this length. These materials will be made available for any serious scientific or Congressional inquiry.
These 2 issues are interrelated on so many levels, it’s only fitting that both have strong nonclassified, civilian groups dedicated to identifying, collecting, archiving, sorting, and classification of all relevant information on the topics. They are after all, significant issues, with implications on all sciences. These 2 topics may even be more important than recent scientific discoveries. For example, as hundreds of high level government witnesses have testified in the disclosure project, one of the technologies kept under lock and key by the CIA (as reverse engineered from ET) are several energy technologies including but not limited to ‘zero point’ energy which would literally, instantly end our dependence on oil, coal, and nuclear. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as hundreds of ground breaking tech has been leaked from ET such as thorium ‘clean’ nuclear technology, Kevlar, nanotechnology, advanced long distance energy communication, the ability to manipulate space time (or at least, to pass through a ‘wrinkle’ in time), and hundreds of others. The business element of this provides a solid motive alone, without religious, social, or political implications. There would be no need for 90% of the Fortune 500, the stock market would crash and the entire economic system as we know it would be immediately restructured (who would pay for gas when free energy is available?).
The public stated reason, for locking away the JFK files for 75 years, which plausibly is also the reason of keeping UFO information secret; is that the public ‘cannot handle the truth’ – that it would be ‘too much to handle’ – the first implication being some embarrasing political facts, such as the fact that the CIA with the help of insiders like LBJ were critical to the murder or completely organized it themselves. But that’s not hard to swallow, generations of hardened Americans watching real-time cameras on missiles bombing and maiming brown people (mostly) have become desensitized to such emotional dribble. But the elephant was in the room all along – this ‘shocking’ fact really is shocking, because it would change every aspect of life on our planet – quite literally (not figuratively). For example, having free energy would change manufacturing, transportation, computing – just about everything. It would change war, it would have implications into governance, we can skip religious implications and take the lead from the Catholic Church who is ahead of the information curve on this issue (for obvious reasons).
So there we have it, the JFK murder has been solved.
WHO – It was a sub-set of the Intelligence aparatus, MJ12/CIA under the direction of Allen Dulles operated by Jesus James Angleton, involving multiple CIA agents including but not limited to George H.W. Bush Sr.
WHAT – The murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) US President, Elite leader, representative of the powerful Kennedy clan, Irish Catholic, father, patriot, and civil servant
WHERE & WHEN – Dallas, Texas November 22, 1963
HOW – A fine tuned machine prepared the ultimate kill scene, which involved extensive research and planning, significant funding, resources, highly skilled and trained soldiers, and a ‘cover-up’ scenario which had to involve LBJ and others around JFK.
WHY – To maintain the big Illuminati secret – that the US Government has obtained technology from other worlds, given to us directly and reverse engineered, and this transfer of tech continues to this day – and that the revelation of what happened to JFK regarding the UFO issue would start a chain of events that would finally lead to the complete disclosure of this technology, and thus – change the entire global political and economic system forever.
Research Links
BOOKS – Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination
An interesting leaked email from Edgar Mitchell to John Podesta
The New Starting Point – Another look at JFK with new research
Mark the Date – List of classified documents to be released regarding JFK
7 Key Facts we’ll learn with release of JFK files
Was JFK shot for his interest in UFOs?
Short list of investigative groups, information sources, and other JFK related material sources:
- Doug Casey On The Coming Holy War
Today, we have another brand-new Conversations with Casey to share with you. In the interview below, Doug Casey and I discuss holy wars in Europe.
I’m not talking about the Crusades, either. I’m talking about a modern-day holy war.
Some folks will think I’m crazy for even entertaining this idea. But a few weeks ago, Turkey’s foreign minister said that “wars of religion” are coming to Europe.
That’s a major warning. You have to take it seriously.
So, I recently sat down with Doug to discuss this matter. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Justin: Doug, Turkey’s foreign minister recently said that “wars of religion” are coming to Europe. Do you think this could actually happen?
Doug: Well, human nature hasn’t changed in many thousands of years. And religion is important to the human animal. Perhaps it’s always been something that people were prone to fight about, but the historical record shows that religious wars only started with the invention of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Of course, these religions—which have always been at war with each other, and all other religions—are similar in that they believe in one god. Pagan religions were and are accepting of other people’s gods and beliefs.
The question is, which god is the right one? Should you believe in Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah? Because it appears to me that they’re all very different, based upon what they say and what they have their followers believe. Islam and Christianity have been duking it out since the 7th century, and that’s unlikely to change. They both claim to have the one and only true god, but they’re very different gods—not at all the same one. So it’s an irreconcilable difference.
Justin: So, the ingredients for a holy war have always been there?
Doug: Yes. Up to about 100 years ago, Christians felt a moral obligation to convert everyone, including other misguided Christians. Now it’s mostly just the Muslims who feel that way. It’s entirely possible, even likely, we’re going to have an outright war of religion. Although, in the highly Politically Correct West, it will have to be called something else.
The ongoing invasion of Europe by Muslims is one aspect of it—although that’s not so much a religious thing per se. That’s partly because the Muslims are migrating mostly for economic reasons. And because religion is a dead duck in Europe today. Europe is a post-Christian society. Very few people go to church or take Christianity seriously in Europe, it’s a very secular society. Which is a bit of a problem, because they’ve taken the State for their new god.
But the State doesn’t promise anybody an afterlife. So, in my opinion, Europeans are actually ripe for conversion to Islam. It’s a serious problem, because Islam is incompatible with, and antithetical to Western Civilization.
Justin: Why should the average American care about this?
Doug: It’s part of the gradual destruction of Western culture. Lots of termites—including socialism, cultural Marxism, gender warfare—have been eating away at the foundations of Western Civilization for decades. Islam, in itself, isn’t a real threat. The Koran, which PC types love to treat with respect, is just poorly written medieval sci-fi. It’s living proof that humans are capable of believing absolutely anything.
That said, Islam is a threat to the West because tens of millions of migrants are being invited to come and live at the expense of the current residents. Europe will collapse from within, as did Rome. The average European believes in nothing—except that his civilization not only isn’t worthy, but is actually evil. No wonder the migrants treat them with contempt.
The Mohammedans—although I’ll note it’s now very un-PC to call them that—are technologically and economically backward. As long as they put the Koran at the center of their lives—and they have to, because it is the direct, incontrovertible word of Allah—they’ll remain backward. If, through an accident of geology, there wasn’t a lot of low cost oil in places they live, the West would have no reason to care what they think, say, or do. They’d be no more than an interesting tourist attraction.
The good news is that, over the next 100 years, most Muslims will fall away from their primitive beliefs. But that’s another story… And a lot is going to happen in the meantime.
- US Sends Aircraft Carrier Toward North Korea "In Response to Recent Provocations"
One day after NBC reported that the National Security Council had presented Trump with three options vis-a-vis North Korea, namely i) put American nukes in South Korea , ii) kill Kim Jong-un or iii) use the CIA to infiltrate North Korea to sabotage or take out key infrastructure, a US carrier group has departed Singapore and is headed for North Korea.
According to Reuters, a U.S. Navy strike group will be moving toward the western Pacific Ocean near the Korean peninsula, a U.S. official told Reuters on Saturday, as concerns grow about North Korea’s advancing weapons program. The strike group, called Carl Vinson, includes an aircraft carrier and will make its way from Singapore toward the Korean peninsula.
The move of the USS Carl Vinson “is in response to recent North Korean provocations”, an official told CNN. “We feel the increased presence is necessary,” the official said, citing North Korea’s worrisome behavior.”
Harry Harris, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, directed the USS Carl Vinson strike group to sail north to the Western Pacific after departing Singapore on Saturday, Pacific Command announced.
The Vinson strike group will operate in the Western Pacific rather than executing previously planned port visits to Australia, Pacific Command said. The group will remain under the operational control of the Third Fleet.
This year North Korean officials, including leader Kim Jong Un, have repeatedly indicated an intercontinental ballistic missile test or something similar could be coming, possibly as soon as April 15, the 105th birthday of North Korea’s founding president and celebrated annually as “the Day of the Sun.”
At the end of March, satellite images collected by 38 North suggested that North Korea was actively preparing for a nuclear test.
Late last week, President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Florida, where Trump pressed his counterpart to do more to curb North Korea’s nuclear program. Trump’s national security aides have completed a review of U.S. options to try to curb North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. These include economic and military measures but lean more toward sanctions and increased pressure on Beijing to rein in its reclusive neighbor
Last weekend, Trump told the FT in an interview, that “if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”
Although the option of pre-emptive military strikes on North Korea is not off the table, the review prioritizes less-risky steps and de-emphasizes direct military action. Then again, nobody thought that Trump would launch a cruise missile strike against Syria less than a week after Rex Tillerson said Assad’s fate lies with his people and not some foreign aggressor.
In other words, as we predicted yesterday, “with Syria down, it’s now North Korea’s turn.” Considering recent developments, Kim Jong-Un would be well advised to keep a lower profile for the next few weeks.
Finally, for a real-time breakdown of where US Carrier and amphibious ready groups can be found at this moment, here is a handy map courtesy of Stratfor.
- 'Out Of This World' – NASA's Budget Is Without Parallel
The budget afforded NASA is far and away the largest on earth…
You will find more statistics at Statista
With 19 billion dollars to play with each year, Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes the U.S. space agency can outspend the ESA, Rocosmos, CNSA, ISRO, and JAXA combined. It is important to note however, that the figure for CNSA is an estimate due to the lack of comprehensive information from the Chinese government.
- Is This The Beginning Of The End For U.S. Empire?
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to revisit something I wrote back in January.
From the post, Very Powerful People in the U.S. Government Want War – This is Their Sales Pitch:
We need to understand that those who want this war will be absolutely relentless. The sales pitch will not end until they get exactly what they want. This is where all of us critical thinkers need to play a key role. We must be prepared to diligently analyze all unsubstantiated official claims, and push back against the war-mongers, because we know for certain the oligarch-owned corporate media won’t. We must be prepared to inform our fellow citizens about what’s happening so that we don’t fall victim to a cheap sales pitch with devastating consequences. Unfortunately, we must also be prepared for a possible deep state false flag if the current sales tactic falls on deaf ears.
America cannot win a global war of such a scale if it is based on false pretenses and in the absence of exceedingly strong public support. This support does not exist. Will this serve as a necessary restraint against the masters of war and their devious plans? It’s too early to tell, but I do know that if we are unnecessarily pushed into a global conflagration, it will not end well for us. If this is the road our twisted status quo insists on taking us down, let us never forget who they are and the self-serving motivations behind their actions.
Four months later, the deep state got exactly what it wanted. Trump’s weaknesses have been identified and exploited, and he’s successfully been manipulated into neocon foreign policy like George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him. I’ve spent much of the past several months warning about exactly what happened last night, but the die is now cast. There’s no turning back from the path we’re on.
And don’t give me this garbage about Trump playing “4D chess.” Trump’s a brilliant salesman, and that’s about it. There’s nothing special or superior about Donald Trump intellectually, and he’s one of the most unwise people to ever become President. There was a hope he meant what he said about non-interventionism during the campaign, but that hope should be entirely extinguished at this point. Trump is a very weak man desperately looking for praise from those he claims to hate.
The purpose of today’s post is not to discuss what happened last night. All of you have read the news by now. My intent today is to explain what I think this means for the years ahead. I believe last night’s strike represents the beginning of the end for U.S. empire. Although the U.S. has been declining domestically for this entire century, America has still been calling all the shots on the international front. This makes sense in late-stage empire, as the focus of the fat and happy “elite” becomes singularly obsessed with domination and power, while the situation back home festers and rots.
Trump won on an “America first” platform that promised to emphasize the well-being of American citizens over geopolitical adventurism. We now know for certain he’s been manipulated into the imperial mindset, and his recklessness will merely accelerate U.S. decline on the world stage, and in turn, back home.
If anyone’s playing 4D chess it’s Russia. Russia is anti-fragile at this point, as has been proved by Putin’s survival in the face of economic sanctions, a collapsing ruble and a plunge in oil prices. Putin is still standing and arguably as powerful as ever. Not to mention the fact that the USSR completely disintegrated and collapsed within the past 30 years. They’ve been through a lot as a people. Meanwhile, the U.S. is extraordinarily fragile and weak by comparison, a distinction that will become quite obvious to us all in the years ahead. I don’t say this with any hint of glee or schadenfreude, I’m just stating the facts as I see them.
None of this implies that Russia’s leadership are a bunch of good people by any means. What I am saying is that they are a thousand times more strategic and intelligent compared to U.S. leadership.
To prove the point, this would be a good time to review a post I published back in 2014, Tensions Between the U.S. and Russia Are Worse Than You Realize – Remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Here’s some of what I noted:
There are two reasons I think the following remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are so important.
First, as someone who spends much of his time analyzing and critiquing the many destructive policy decisions made by American “leaders,” I was shocked to find how accurate his description of the U.S. power structure’s mindset seems to be. He gets it, and he is more or less trying to warn the world that America’s leaders are basically power-drunk children. I concur.
Second, Lavrov also describes the negative impact that this behavior has had on the Russian psyche generally. He expresses dismay that the U.S. status quo sees the world as unipolar, and attempts to tackle every problem from the perspective that might is right. In no uncertain terms, Lavrov makes it clear that Russia will not stand for this. I don’t think the Russians are bluffing, so this is a very dangerous situation.
If there was actually someone in the U.S. State Department capable of such introspective and clear thinking, we might actually defuse this situation. Don’t hold your breath.
You should really read the entire post to see Lavrov’s comments for yourself in order to truly understand why I came to the above conclusions.
U.S. leadership is an absolute joke and will drive this entire country into a brick wall in the years ahead. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chucky Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, are you kidding me? They remind me of George Armstrong Custer, and we all know how that turned out.
The media is even worse. In what Glenn Greenwald accurately called “one of the sickest things ever to appear on US television,” MSNBC’s Brian Williams gushed about the “beauty” of U.S. cruise missiles.
good thing we don't have govt-controlled media in this country pic.twitter.com/fLkt9lQZa6
— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) April 7, 2017
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Here’s another sign of imperial collapse, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a war zone calling the shots.
The Endless War Collection by J. Crew pic.twitter.com/LgiRSzXAux
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) April 6, 2017
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This is not the sort of thing you see in a confident, brave, and civilized nation, it’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to see toward the end. It’s the stuff of craven war-mongers, of dishonest cowards, of a totally deranged and very dangerous media. The signs are everywhere; imperial decline is set to accelerate rapidly in the coming years.
Fine, but how is all this going to play out? Obviously nobody really knows, but I do think we’ve entered a new period in American history. I think it’s basically a crossing of the Rubicon moment for the American empire. Personally, I don’t expect a strong and visible military response from Russia in the near-term. I don’t think Putin wants to give the U.S. media and newly minted neocon Donald Trump an excuse to do anything truly crazy, which they can blame on Russia in the court of public opinion. I think Putin is too smart for that. Rather, what I think he’ll do is make all sorts of moves behind the scenes to weaken America’s economic power, while at the same time engaging in minor provocations to tempt the imbeciles in charge of U.S. foreign policy to make further mistakes abroad, to which they’ll emphatically oblige.
In other words, Russia will attempt to make the U.S. extend itself further in a region where no real success is possible, at the same time that the American economy deteriorates further. Recall that the current very weak economic “recovery” has been going on for nearly a decade. This cycle is very long in the tooth, and all Russia really needs to do is sit back, make some moves behind the scenes and allow the U.S. to collapse upon itself in its hubris and stupidity. This is precisely what I think is going to happen.
Finally, let’s not forget the following.
Since 9/11:
1) Non-stop war.
2) Destruction of U.S. middle class.
3) Banker bailouts
4) Death of civil liberties.
We showed 'em terrorists.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) April 6, 2017
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Expect more of all the above as the U.S. empire enters its most devastating phase of collapse. Think about what it might mean for you and your family and prepare accordingly.
- Has Middle Class America Been Fleeced?
Authored by Hunter Lewis via The Mises Institute,
Noah Smith, writing in Bloomberg, says that middle class America has indeed been fleeced by our national economic policies. We agree. But which policies have been responsible?
Smith mentions and immediately dismisses trade, immigration, economic regulation, and welfare policies.
The real villain in his view is an alleged turn toward managing the economy on free market lines: “Your prosperity was taken by the very people who promised to ensure and enhance it. The decades from 1980 through 2008 were the age of neoliberalism — the ideology of the free market.”
This is a story that we hear more and more. Neoliberals, the favorite new epithet on the left for free market exponents, have ruled the roost for decades ( note how the Obama administration is simply ignored in the preceding quote), and have left the poor and middle class far worse off than they were.
The truth is that the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama era had much in common, and it was not free market principles. It was an era of unrestrained crony capitalism, in which special interests formed stronger and stronger alliances with government in order to secure economic monopolies and other privileges.
It was also, not coincidentally, an era of repeated boom and bust, as the Federal Reserve and other central banks created immense amounts of new money to keep the crony capitalist game going. The Fed did not create all the new money to help the poor and the middle class. They did it primarily to support the government debt machine, which they worried was on the verge of collapse in 2008. The result is that government debt has now doubled in the few years since then.
Can Noah Smith, an intelligent writer and economics professor, really believe that free market principles prevailed in recent decades? The only possible excuse for this is that crony capitalists tend to hide their actions behind free market slogans. This is genuinely confusing.
Today, for example, we are told by most commentators that we have a choice between “free trade” and “protectionism,” and the free trade position is represented by people like Hillary Clinton and Hank Paulson, the Bush Treasury Secretary during the last Crash who rescued his old firm, Goldman Sachs, and coincidentally the value of his shares in that firm, and who more recently supported Hillary for president. To describe these people as supporters of “ free trade” is a joke. They are supporters of “ crony trade” in which so-called free trade agreements are actually written by special interests in order to escape the pressures of a genuinely free market.
And does Smith really believe that giving government even more control over the economy will achieve anything other than making crony capitalism worse?
Oh well, at least Smith did not equate what he called “neoliberalism” with fascism, as many on the left are now doing in books and articles. That makes a lot of sense, does it not? Proponents of more liberty in economics and other areas of our lives are somehow like Hitler or Mussolini?
Lewis nails the dismal science but we leave it to econfinjunkie's comments to sum up the farce…
If anyone needed one more reason to hold Noah Smith and mainstream economics in contempt, read that article.
It is so much easier for those in the mainstream to be ignorant and publish crap like that than for, say, an Austrian economist to do the same. How can anyone with an advanced degree in economics say that our society is based on free market principles? It makes you wonder what they teach after high school.
Starting in intro classes all the way to PhD coursework, didn't anyone ever think to point out to the future Dr. Smith and his classmates that "oh, by the way, all these principles of free markets we're talking about, they're the ideal; they don't apply to our own economy since we don't have a free market/society, because we have a central bank, minimum wages, millions of pages of regulations, bank bailouts, and on and on"?
There can be a conversation about whether all these things are justified, but to say that our economy reflects a free market is to put your ignorance on full display for all to see.
- Visualizing The Netflix Generation
Since launching in the United States in 1948, cable television quickly emerged as the media consumption method of choice for families around the world.
Cable brought to us some of the most memorable and noteworthy events in history. People saw the fall of the Berlin Wall from their living rooms in 1989 – and many even remember being inspired by Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon twenty years earlier.
And although television is still a vital medium today, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins warns that it is also stuck in an inevitable quagmire. Digital already generates more ad revenue than television, while more people switch to streaming platforms every day.
Make no mistake – even though there is still plenty of money to be made in television, cable is experiencing a slow death, just like other traditional media channels. It might not yet be reduced to the more niche territory of radio or print, but cable is treading the same path.
THE DIGITAL NATIVES
Why this is the case is very simple math.
Even just six years ago in 2011, the average 18-24 year old millennial consumed about 25 hours of traditional television per week – today, they consume closer to 14 hours.
That said, it’s no surprise that the first generation of digital natives skews heavily towards digital content, but what will be even more interesting is the behavior of the next generation on deck: Gen Z (born in 2000 and onwards). This cohort was born into a world of screens and iPhones, and will not be aware of a prior era. To them, flipping through channels on cable television seems even more antiquated and arbitrary than it does to older generations.
Gen Z watches between two and four hours of YouTube and less than an hour of traditional television per day. They’re also twice more likely to use YouTube than Millennials, and a lot less likely to use Facebook.
– Shireen Jiwan, chief brand experience officer at Lucky Brand
Less than an hour per day is not very conducive to the cable business, especially when there are hundreds of channels in existence today. And while insights on Gen Z are still fluid and evolving, it’s highly doubtful that the generation will do a 360 on video anytime soon.
In the meantime, cable’s survival as a dominant medium rests squarely on the shoulders of older generations. While it works as a business for now, cable can’t fight the demographics forever.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
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