New Details From Government Autopsy Make Jeffrey Epstein "Suicide" Story Even More Implausible

The New York City Medical Examiner has done an autopsy on the body of Jeffrey Epstein, who was locked up in the Federal Government dungeon in lower Manhattan called, in what sounds like a tribute to the "Newspeak" in George Orwell's dystopia political novel "1984," the "Metropolitan Correctional Center." All the elements of the power establishment, including of course "the" media, want us to believe that Epstein committed suicide.

Which I could have believed, if they'd only been more assiduous at hiding certain physical facts that causes the suicide story to strain credulity.

First there was the information that Epstein's neck bones were broken. If you blinked, and didn't scour media relentlessly to come across it, you would have missed this.

Now we're told that Epstein tied a bedsheet to the top bunk in his cell, and then "knelt" to hang himself. In other words, he was standing up, then crouched down, killing himself.

I can believe it is possible to choke or strangle oneself to death in this manner, although I think it would be difficult to control the automatic responses of one's own body, such as reaching with the hands, or rising with the legs. But breaking neckbones? And Epstein wasn't a slender guy. He didn't have an extremely thin neck, say.

This information slipped out in the fourth paragraph of a Wall Street Journal story. Here is the paragraph in its entirety:

"Early findings by authorities indicated Mr. Epstein hanged himself by using his bed sheet, according to people familiar with the investigation. [So-called investigation, actually a cover-up.] Authorities [whoever they are] believe he tied the bed sheet to the top bunk of his bunk bed, then knelt forward to the floor, one of the people said." [My emphases.] [1] 

They BELIEVE? Didn't they find his dead body? Wouldn't the bedsheet still be tied around his neck and to the bunk if he'd killed himself?

And he knelt forward to the floor. From a standing position, presumably. How would that have fractured his neck bones?

It wouldn't have.

The article didn't mention the broken neck bones. If you want to find out about reality from the U.S. power structure's media, you have to act like a detective and hunt around for clues in various disparate sources and then assemble the pieces like you're doing a jigsaw puzzle. Our rulers count on most people having neither the time nor the motivation to do that, especially for EVERY SINGLE EVENT. And the events they completely black out are another challenge, because you may have never heard of them.

The article also quotes the city's chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson, as officially concluding "in a brief statement" that Epstein's demise was suicide, without any details, after in her words "careful review of all investigative information." I.e. taking at face value what the Federal prison told her. Which would be all the "investigative information" she had at this point. And calling it "investigative information" is just dishonest. It's really public relations spin.

And Sampson's "review" couldn't have been very thorough, as there wouldn't be much to review. The various Federal "investigations" (at least 3 have been announced!) have just begun, yet the ME has already reached a conclusion! Barely a week since Epstein's death. A rush to judgment, for sure.
By the way, bogus autopsies are routine in nations that commit political assassinations. They go with the territory. We had a lulu of a fraudulent military autopsy in the JFK murder by the CIA. That one was done by an officer who didn't even perform autopsies! And who somehow missed the giant exit wound in the back of JFK's skull that all the surgeons who examined him at Parkland Hospital in Dallas described on film.

There still has never been an explanation of what occurred in July, when Epstein was "found" in his cell, unconscious, with "marks" on his neck. The "authorities" never said it was a suicide attempt. It was all very murky. Sometimes "the" media described it as a suicide attempt, but government officials never said that.

So what was it? An attack by another inmate? By a guard? An incompetent assassin? What kind of "marks" were they? What did Epstein say about it?

Nothing. Just the sound of crickets from "the authorities" and "the" media.

He was briefly put on suicide watch after that, but almost immediately taken off it. So "the authorities" apparently DIDN'T think it was a suicide attempt! Or else they are grossly feckless, negligent, and incompetent. (A possibility that we cannot rule out, thus confusing matters further.) But in the highest-profile case such as this one, with daily saturation media coverage, how could it be that the Federal government could be so inept? They surely were paying very special attention to Epstein!

But you're just a loony conspiracy theorist if you don't swallow the official guff from government officials being shoveled at you daily and around the clock by "the" media. I guess that makes Epstein's lawyers crackpots, since according to the same WSJ article, they don't accept the ME's "findings," and want to obtain video from the Federal dungeon. Good luck with THAT. The longer the Government stalls releasing that footage, the more certain you can be that it was tampered with, altered, or completely fabricated. And digital video is very easy to alter undetectably. They can even put a false time stamp on the footage of empty hallways they'll be showing to "prove" there was no foul play.

One major function of dishonest propagandists (who nowadays call themselves "journalists") is to obfuscate reality. Another major function is replacing reality with a fake reality, a story, a myth, a legend, that the targets of the propaganda are tricked into believing is true and real.

The U.S. government has murdered so many people, and lied so often, and "the" media has perpetrated so many hoaxes, that neither should have a smidgen of credibility at this point in history. They should have to prove, with overwhelming genuine (not fabricated) evidence, every assertion they make.

1]  "Epstein Killed Self, Autopsy Concludes," Wall Street Journal, August 17-18, 2019, page A4, fourth paragraph. Interesting how the WSJ downplayed this article. Not just putting it on page A4, but running it as a narrow sidebar on the left side of the page (in English we start reading on the right) in a long narrow column 1 and 3/4ths inch wide, with the text a mere 1 and 5/8ths inch wide.

Dow Jones Company owns the WSJ and another rightwing financial rag, Barron's. Rupert Murdoch bought the Dow Jones Company from the plutocrat Bancroft family and promptly locked up the websites of the publications behind firewalls. So here's the top portion of the page with the paragraphs I cited.

Even DEATH Is Too Good For Jeffrey Epstein!

Amazingly, that's the attitude being transmitted by the establishment propaganda system (which calls itself "the media," as if it's the one and only media in the universe and not a particular group of organs representing corporate oligarchy and U.S. imperialism) in the wake of the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Here in America, we're being treated to a deluge of teeth gnashing that although Epstein in effect got the death penalty for paying teenagers to indulge his sexual proclivities, he "escaped justice." What would "justice" have been? Drawing and quartering? Burning alive at the stake? Crucifixion?

Of course he was being crucified, by the media, and by an incredibly vengeful, opportunistic U.S. Attorney in New York City. The crimes he was all but convicted in advance of date to the early 2000's. I haven't heard a whisper about statute of limitations. For most Federal crimes, it's seven years.

And still "the" media, and the prosecutors, are protecting the various eminences who partook of the pleasures of the flesh provided by their host, Epstein. These include two U.S. presidents (Trump and Clinton) and a British "prince." And the loathsome Zionist attack dog Alan Dershowitz. Instead all the focus now is on getting Elaine Maxwell, Epstein's erstwhile "girlfriend" and alleged "procurer" of teenagers. (Whom the media attack dogs insist on calling "children," thus infantilizing sexual beings, and falsely pasting the "pedophile" label on Epstein.

Epstein was charged with "trafficking." To whom did he traffic? Himself? Yet the U.S. Attorney running the inquisition, Geoffrey Berman, didn't so much as name the members of the protected elite who partook of forbidden sex as unindicted co-conspirators. Media yakkers finger Maxwell as the next target, along with "pilots and whoever." Nary a mention of those being protected.

And already the propagandists are sneering at the "conspiracy theories" that Epstein was silenced to protect the highly privileged "pedophiles."

Now Trump's handpicked U.S. Attorney General, William "Cover Up Pro" Barr, is reported to have "asked" the Department he's the boss of, the Department of "Justice," and an agency that is under the nominal purview of that Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the notorious political secret police, the FBI), to "investigate" the Epstein death. We can always rest assured when the government investigates itself. (Specifically he wants the DOJ Inspector General to investigate, as well as the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, whose prisoner Epstein was, is part of the DOJ also. The DOJ is a many-armed octopus of repression.)

Barr has an "interesting" history which "the" media helpfully hides. As a key cog in the regime of George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush the Elder (the slaughterer of 4,000 poor Panamanians and countless hapless Iraqi conscripts running for their lives), Barr is the one who got Bush to issue preemptive pardons to Iran-Contra criminals like Caspar Weinberger before they could be brought to book by the special counsel, who was much outraged by the move. By doing so, Bush protected himself. He did exactly what Democrats and their media allies have been screaming that Trump better NOT do- issue pardons that protect himself. Bush did exactly that- and he was given a two-week apotheosis was the old murderer died.
As for how Epstein ended up dead: There are plenty of solid reasons to be skeptical of the "suicide" conclusion. For one thing, the New York City Medical Examiner has completed an autopsy but so far  refuses to release the results. It's only a "suicide" because the propaganda system says it is.

Then there was the previous "suicide" attempt. Or was it? The government has never actually said that it was. All that has officially been announced by "the authorities" was that Epstein "was found unconscious" with "marks on his neck." Anything else has been media (propagandist) speculation and surmise.

Epstein may well have killed himself. He looked extremely depressed in the photo released of him in captivity, a release that was part of the humiliation ritual imposed on him. At a minimum, he was allowed to kill himself. What the establishment propaganda outlets have reported is that he was on a suicide watch after the first incident, then he was taken OFF suicide watch, but protocol called for him to have a cellmate to prevent self-harm. But he was left alone, locked up with his despair, and unwatched.

Various excuses have been defensively floated out by the guards. They are overworked. They are working overtime. (Apparently they don't "work" overtime but NAP overtime.) The prison is overcrowded. (Yet there was room to give Epstein a cell to himself alone.)

It's all a crock, of course. Obviously they wanted him dead. This prisoner was extremely high profile, subject of daily, lurid "coverage." Yet if we are to believe his captors, they were completely indifferent and feckless and inattentive to their highest profile prisoner in the Manhattan Federal Jail, the absurdly misnamed "Metropolitan Correctional Center." (Like they want to rehabilitate people!)

Usually in cases where a target of a political inquisition has damning evidence against the establishment itself, he is simply prevented from speaking at trial, and then consigned to a U.S. black hole, like the "Supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners are locked in tiny, windowless concrete cells for life, deprived of all human contact. Apparently it would be too kind to have a small porthole in the cell so the prisoner consigned to this living hell could at least look outside at the mountains, at the sky, at clouds. Since these prisoners are "monsters," they must be made to suffer as much as possible.

Manuel Noriega could have told a damning story about CIA drug dealing, and his work for them, but wasn't allowed to. "El Chapo" could have told about the millions in bribes he's paid to Mexican officials, including presidents, and U.S. complicity in Mexican corruption, but wasn't allowed to. Now he's to be buried alive in the "Supermax."

The next chapters in the Epstein saga are the substitution of Elaine Maxwell to be burned at the stake, and "justice" for the "victims" by their looting Epstein's estate. This has already been announced by "the" media as a form of "justice." A couple of the former teens and their lawyers are complaining they were deprived of "closure" by Epstein's death. Maybe they should stop traumatizing themselves by insisting they were so horribly victimized by getting paid a few hundred dollars for what was mostly mild sex (not counting one woman who serviced Epstein numerous times for money, and then claims he raped her, and maybe he did) that they can never get over it.

The man is DEAD. Can you let it go?

The establishment doesn't want to, for various reasons. That will have to await another essay.

Jeffrey Epstein died in jail, age 66. Was in good health so had many years to live. 

                                         "He got away with it!" screech The Morally Outraged. (Oh really?)

Iran Cannot "Violate" The Nuclear Deal That the U.S. Nullified in 2018- Another Big Lie By Western Propaganda Media

What would you think of someone who openly cancelled a deal they made with you, but insisted that YOU had to ABIDE by it, and threatened violence to force you to do so?

You'd call that a gangster.

Imperialists, of course, are gangsters.

Western media and political elites are all in a tizzy suddenly about Iranian "violations" of the agreement that the U.S. abrogated over a year ago, and which is thus null and void. This is an example of how demented Western "elites" are. Trump tore up the nuclear accord with Iran in March of 2018, and not only reimposed the sanctions that were lifted by the U.S. in return for Iran shutting down and mothballing its various nuclear enrichment programs, even permanently crippling a brand new reactor to prevent it from producing plutonium, but has intensified sanctions even more than the Obama regime had imposed, including a declared goal of blocking ALL Iranian oil exports. The U.S. has forced even China and India to stop buying Iranian oil. It just had its British stooges seize an oil tanker carrying Iranian oil to a Syrian refinery, near British-controlled Gibraltar on the Mediterranean tip of Spain. (To be sure, the Assad regime is monstrous.) The U.S. has effectively prevented all major companies all over the world from doing business with Iran, under threat of U.S. economic punishments levied on the companies. Iranians are dying today because vital medicines are effectively blockaded by the U.S.' actions.

But IRAN is expected to continue to ABIDE BY THE AGREEMENT! It's simply insane. Iran should have stopped abiding by it as soon as the U.S. abrogated it and reimposed sanctions. Iran got raped, completely ripped off, by the U.S. They handed over a stockpile of enriched uranium, crippled a reactor, mothballed their centrifuges, and much else. This is one of the greatest double-crosses in recent history. (The Kurds know a lot about being double-crossed by the U.S., having been so victimized repeatedly.) [1]

But Trump said it was "the worst deal ever." Because? it expires in 15 years. And it didn't ban Iran from having ballistic missiles. And it didn't end Iran's alliance with Hezbollah, a major part of Lebanon's political establishment. And it didn't ban Iran from trying to help Hamas in the Gaza open air concentration camp. And it didn't force Iran to abandon the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And it didn't conpel Iran to stop fighting on the side of the Assad regime in Syria.

But Trump said it was "the worst deal ever." Because? it expires in 15 years. And it didn't ban Iran from having ballistic missiles. And it didn't end Iran's alliance with Hezbollah, a major part of Lebanon's political establishment. And it didn't ban Iran from trying to help Hamas in the Gaza open air concentration camp. And it didn't force Iran to abandon the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And it didn't compel Iran to stop fighting on the side of the Assad regime in Syria.

And another fatal flaw in the 2015 Obama deal, from the perspective of John Bolton and Michael Pompeo: it didn't overthrow the Iranian regime.

However, the U.S. was just one party to the agreement. It was Iran on one side, pitted against the U.S., China, Russia, France, Britain, and Germany, all against Iran's nuclear program. Iran has patiently waited for over a year for those other parties to the deal to DO something to counter the U.S. imposition of the worst sanctions yet. Instead they have abided by the U.S. sanctions policy, while in the case of the Europeans, making noises about creating mechanisms for their companies to do business in Iran. But those countries won't even purchase Iran's oil. And the lame moves the Europeans have made otherwise have been a joke.

 So now Iran is being roundly attacked in the Western media, and threatened by European politicians (and most gallingly, by TRUMP!) for not continuing to abide by the deal in which they have been totally double-crossed. Even though Iran totally lived up to the deal from 2015 until last month, over a year after Trump killed the agreement and in the face of relentless economic warfare. (And no doubt all kinds of covert sabotage by "special ops" and via computer attacks.)

Trump has called for a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (which is responsible for monitoring Iran's compliance with the agreement) to gin up further political and diplomatic attacks on Iran to force it to keep its side of a bargain that Trump loudly reneged on.

It's enough to make your head spin, unless you ignore reality. Which is exactly what those in power in Western nations expect you to do.

The deal that had been worked out took years, and immense pressure on Iran, and was the best that was obtainable. Trump's strategy is to force Iran to crawl on its belly, using U.S. power to wreck the Iranian economy (done) and compel the rest of the world to bow to U.S. diktat and conform to U.S. policy (done). Will it work? Who knows?

In addition, the U.S. has created fake "Iranian attacks" on oil tankers as part of a military brinksmanship campaign, using the threat of war to intimidate the Iranian rulers. [2] So far it hasn't worked. That was followed by Iran shooting down a U.S. spy drone (which maps the location of Iranian defense installations and sniffs out vulnerabilites in their defenses and collects the frequencies of their radars and communications, enabling the U.S. to jam, attack, spoof, and render ineffective these systems). U.S. surveillance ops provide preparation for future U.S. aggression. The Iranians properly defended itself from this menacing, hostile foreign power by shooting down the drone. The bickering over which side of the Iranian maritime border it was on at the time is frankly irrelevant. (The U.S. is SO punctilious about international law when it wants to be. Not so much in its own behavior, like sabotage, torture, subversion, election-meddling, coups, assassinations, invasions, and other such "tools of statecraft.")

There was much screeching by U.S. politicians and "commentators" over the fact that Trump didn't pound Iran with bombs afterwards. One of the few things Trump did that was RIGHT.



Look, the Iranian government is pretty bad. It's a repressive theocracy. But only about half as repressive as the Saudi Arabian theocracy, with which the U.S. is so chummy. So "freedom" and "democracy" and "human rights" have NOTHING to do with the U.S. hostility towards Iran. And by making the Iranian economy scream, and killing Iranians by blockading medicine, the U.S. demonstrates how much it really cares about the well being of the Iranian people. It's the same cynical song the U.S. sings whenever it destroys a country- Iraq, Guatemala, Vietnam, you name it.

He's kinda arrogant, don't you think?

1] It just so happens that the U.S. has one of the worst records in the world of honoring its treaty obligations. It solemnly signed hundreds of treaties with Native American Nations and broke every single one. It has committed international aggression repeatedly, a crime under international law. It has subverted governments. Under Bush the Younger it infamously created a system of institutionalized torture, even though it is a signatory to the Torture Convention. And so on.

2] See "Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression" for detailed factual analysis of the U.S.-created "Iranian tanker attacks." As the crew of the Japanese tanker said, they were attacked by flying objects, not limpet mines placed on the hull. Plus we are supposed to believe that Iran wanted to sabotage its own diplomacy with Japan! The story is too long and detailed to recount here. There are videos included with this report.

Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression

Last time it was Iraq. This time Iran.

We KNOW that Iran didn't attack a Japanese oil tanker and a Norwegian tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the Strait of Hormuz, as the Trump regime is asserting and the U.S. media is echoing. (Also part of the propaganda echo chamber are the media of stooge lackey nations. For example, the British government's overt propaganda arm, the BBC, is pushing the same lie. And the rightwing British government headed by the loathsome Theresa May is parroting the U.S. false indictment of Iran. Also Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, put in her sycophantic two cents blaming Iran. These craven courtiers to U.S. power are deluding themselves if they think Trump won't screw them on trade deals and everything else if they suck up to him hard enough. Trump is an ingrate, which makes him the perfect U.S. president. U.S. ingratitude is a historical fact. But that's another essay.)


Here's the proof the U.S. condemnation of Iran is a lie: the U.S. asserts that Iran placed mines on the hulls of the ships, damaging them, and then retrieved an unexploded mine from the side of the Japanese vessel. But the president of the Japanese shipping company that owns the Japanese tanker reports that the crew of the tanker said there was no mine, but that two flying objects hit the ship.


And this: the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in Tehran, Iran, at the very time the U.S. claims Iran attacked a Japanese ship by attaching limpet mines to the hull. (Magnetic mines.) This was a critical visit for Iran, which is trying to find ways to defeat the U.S. economic strangulation of the country. Previously the Iranian foreign minister went to Tokyo, Japan, and this visit by the Japanese prime minister was set up. The top ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Kamenei was meeting with Abe when the "attack" occurred.

Qatar TV station Al-Jazeera.

So if you accept the U.S. government and media version of reality, seconded by lackey stooges like the British government and media and others, Iran invited the prime minister of Japan to Tehran for a rare visit just to sabotage Iran's own diplomatic effort.

Yeah, right.

Who is more likely to want to sabotage Iranian diplomacy, Iran or the U.S.? The question answers itself. [1]

So of course the U.S. and allied propaganda media systems simply IGNORE the facts that Abe was IN TEHRAN during this "attack," that the owner of the tanker SAYS IT WAS FLYING OBJECTS that hit the ship, and instead keep repeating the lies of the Trump regime. [2]

Iran's foreign minister saw right through the U.S. false flag attack. But it's not designed to fool Iran. It's designed to fool YOU!

Tellingly, the Japanese government, which has been a supine lickspittle to the U.S. ever since the U.S. occupied it in 1945, hasn't fallen into line behind the U.S. The government has been very circumspect. The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Kono, even referred to the sabotage attack as an "accident." (!) And in a sign that the U.S. attempt to sabotage Iran's diplomacy has failed for now, Kono said that Japan will continue to engage in "dialogue" with Iran to reduce tension (which the U.S. is working overtime to ratchet up) and "seeking the peace in the region." Refusing to go along with the U.S. "proof" of Iran's guilt, he said Japan would continue to gather information to find out "what really happened." 

Wow! What really happened? Don't you believe Michael Pompeo, the egregious U.S. Secretary of State, who within hours of the attack summoned the media to hear him read a statement that it was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that Iran mined two ships. (You don't think this wasn't all arranged in advance?) (Pompeo took no questions. Gee, I wonder why.)

Also, Japan's defense minister said Japan wouldn't send troops to the region, as the U.S. war cabal must have hoped to goad them into doing.

Singapore station cna.

What about the other tanker that was attacked by the U.S. and blamed on Iran? It is Norwegian. Here's why I think that was a deliberate choice. Trump obviously is reluctant to start an actual war with Iran. He knows how bad that would be, and indeed the entire region would be thrown into even greater turmoil. The last thing he needs as he runs for reelection is another unpopular war. And he badly needs to get reelected to run out the clock on the statute of limitations for the various crimes he committed before becoming president. (Maybe the New York State Attorney General should get some indictments for state crimes NOW.) It has been reported that he's griped about his "National Security Advisor" John Bolton pushing him to war. And just today (June 20) Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone and Trump publicly soft-pedaled it as no big deal and opined that it was probably an accident by low level personnel as opposed to a state decision.

Trump also puts Norway on a pedestal. This was shown just recently when he was asked on TV if he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign nation, and Trump said "Norway" as an example of such a nation.

And a few years ago, when he referred to African and other "non-white" nations as "shithole countries," he he mused why can't "we" get more immigrants from Norway. Also, for what it's worth, his first Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is Danish on her father's side. Most of all, Trump is a well-know white supremacist.

So I have a suspicion that attacking a Norwegian tanker was designed to provoke Trump's ire at Iran.

Bonus Plus: Norway is a NATO member. When the U.S. goes to war on Iran, that gives it an excuse to demand that NATO members contribute forces, as some have done for the U.S.' Excellent Never-Ending Adventure in Afghanistan, and the "Liberation" of Iraq. 

Trump has called in to Murdoch's propaganda minions on TV, Fox "News," to blame Iran categorically. So he is sinking into the quicksand trap laid for him. Of course, as president of the United States, he is way out of his depth. A sleazy grifter son of a cutthroat immoral and criminal real estate baron, he is experienced in pulling off scams and acting as a shill for himself on television, but he has no understanding of geopolitics or how to run an empire. And he picked the worst possible imperialist apparatchiks to help him do it. I guess he equates extremism with toughness.

Let us briefly consider the "evidence" that supposedly proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran planted mines on the hulls of the two tankers. The first and main evidence is a grainy video purporting to show Iranians on a patrol boat removing a mine from one of the ships. Trouble is, no mine is visible in the video.

Qatar station Al-Jazeera.
 See the mine? It's right there! Are you blind?

Also, IF there was a mine on the hull, how do we know the U.S. didn't put it there for the Iranians to find when they sent out vessels to rescue the crews of the tankers? (No crew members were injured or killed in the U.S. attacks on the vessels. Apparently the U.S. deliberately fired relatively low-yield projectiles at the tankers designed to start fires but not sink the ships or cause loss of life.)

One last note on videos: this video may well be genuine, but on the day of the incident it was reported that a bogus video was posted I believe on Facebook seeming to show Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never actually said. Also I recently heard a program about the "danger" of technology allowing the creation of seemingly genuine videos that are fake, but the fakery is undetectable by technical means. It has been possible to create undetectable photographic forgeries for years with Photoshop. The point being, images are not the last word on anything. Even before digital photography, photos could be dramatically altered, as when under Stalin, officials who had been purged had to be airbrushed out of photos. So this kind of manipulation is nothing new, but with digital technology it has reached dramatic new levels of verisimilitude. (Go see a Hollywood "action" or Sci-Fi or comic book "hero" sometime and see!)

The grainy video the U.S. released seems genuine, as we would expect a surveillance video taken from far away to look like this. (But I think that is naive. The U.S. has space satellites that can resolve objects the size of car license plates. Surely their warships have camera lenses that can do better than this video.) Conveniently, you can't really make out what the Iranian crew is doing.

Over the following days, the U.S. dribbled out more "evidence," such as a photo of the Japanese ship with a black triangle smudge on the hull that it purported was the "unexploded mine," but could just as well have been (indeed looks like) a mark added with a simple photo editing program.

A ship mine makes such a TINY HOLE? How could it ever sink a ship? That's what ship mines are designed to do! And that little triangle- DEFINITELY a mine!

Pompeo has also claimed that the U.S. had mine fragments that were Iranian-like.

Last month four tankers were sabotaged in some vague way in a UAE port. Saudi Arabia rushed to blame Iran. But apparently the designed effect wasn't achieved.

To be sure, Iranian officials have publicly noted that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic if it wished. This is played as an "Iranian threat" in Western media and by government officials.

I don't think they could. The U.S. Navy could wipe out Iran's fleet of tiny patrol boats, and minesweepers could clear sea lanes of any floating mines.

There are plenty of covert units in the U.S. government that specialize in false flag operations and such types of frame-ups. When Pompeo was CIA director, his first job for Trump, in addition to demonizing Julian Assange and increasing vicious sneaky attacks on Venezuela, he took the opportunity to form a CIA task force, the "Iran Mission Center," in 2017.

The U.S. has had it in for Iran ever which the Iranian people had the temerity to overthrow one of the U.S.' favorite dictators, a man president Jimmy Carter called a "great friend," "Shah" Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. (Pahlavi was installed in 1953 in a CIA coup ordered by president Dwight Eisenhower, which destroyed Iranian democracy and resulted in the deaths of a quarter million Iranians during the Shah's 25 year reign, many after hideous torture by the CIA-created and coached secret police, the SAVAK.)

Now, I don't like the current Iranian regime. it is a repressive theocracy. But that is NOT why the U.S. opposes it. Saudi Arabia is a FAR MORE repressive theocracy, and the U.S. is joined at the hip to it. The U.S. is in the business of destroying democracies and creating and backing dictatorships to allow economic exploitation of captive nations. But it won't admit that of course because it isn't inspirational. It needs to dupe people, especially the American people. So it pretends to be a spreader of freedom and democracy, when it does the exact opposite, over and over and over.

The war cabal in the U.S. government, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, a political creature created by the Koch Brothers, a man who has publicly called for the execution of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden [3], and John Bolton, a lifelong psychopathic war monger and fanatical imperialist, are maneuvering Trump into war against Iran. The U.S. is already waging economic warfare against that country- which of course primarily hurts the people of Iran. (People whom the sick imperialist dog Bolton says "deserve a better government," as if he or any U.S. imperialist gives a shit about the welfare of Iranians or of any other people, for that matter. Similar Bolton opined on television that having U.S. oil companies seize control of Venezuela's oil would benefit the American AND Venezuelan people. How the hell diverting that oil wealth into the coffers of large corporations would do that, he didn't bother explaining.)

If and when the war cabal succeeds in its goal, a goal enthusiastically supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, two darling nations of the U.S. government, the only thing most Americans will care about, unfortunately, is American casualties, not the far greater number of Iranian deaths and maimings, or the devastation to be wreaked upon Iran's infrastructure. And Iran's retaliation and self-defense will be branded "terrorism," and used as excuse and justification for the U.S. aggression.

Just as, during World War II, the Nazis branded the armed partisans who resisted them in various occupied nations "terrorists." Really, the same word. Oh, and "enhanced interrogation techniques," the euphemism the Bush regime and U.S. media adopted to pretend they didn't torture people, was lifted straight from the Gestapo interrogation manual, which the CIA carefully studied after the war. (Ray McGovern, the retired career CIA analyst who briefed presidents daily and who is fluent in German and Russian, revealed this.)

Anyway, here's hoping you won't drink the propaganda Kool-Aid being served up daily around the clock by "the" media.

Propaganda smoke gets in your eyes.

Enemies of humanity Pompeo and Bolton.

The primary target of the war cabal's psychological-political warfare: the Grifter-in-Chief as dupe.

1] Speaking of well-timed sabotage of diplomatic events, remember when special counsel Robert S. "Grand Inquisitor" Mueller III released an indictment of Russians RIGHT BEFORE Trump was to meet Putin? Quite a "coincidence."

Or how about the October Surprise, when Reagan's gang cut a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of U.S. embassy personnel until minutes after Jimmy Carter was out of office, thus insuring his defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election?

Or Nixon's sabotage of Lyndon Johnson's peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968? He told the "South" Vietnamese military regime to refuse to go along with a deal. FBI wiretaps alerted Johnson to this, but he didn't want to expose that spying so kept it quiet. Nixon beat the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, by about 1/2 of 1% of the "popular' vote.  (Oh, but Trump is paranoid and insulting to think a sitting president would wiretap a candidate!)

2] Not that the blackout was total. But it doesn't need to be to keep most people in the dark. For example, there was one article in the Washington Post about the Japanese tanker company's statement. Did YOU happen to read it? How about everyone you know? They've all heard the U.S. propaganda line, day after day after day.

Incessantly for a week now, "the" media has repeated the government line about Iran's guilt, while ignoring the facts that prove the U.S. assertions a lie, so most people will be unaware of these key facts. Bourgeois commentary now takes for granted the "fact" that Iran mined two tankers, just as it takes for granted the lie that Russia "hacked the DNC server." All that remains to be determined is what the U.S. should do to punish Iran. For that purpose, it gives a platform to, for example, Senator Tom Cotton. A first-term senator from the insignificant state of Arkansas, Cotton is a former military officer and rabidly aggressive militarist and imperialist. Why HE of all people should be all over television is a question properly put to the media czars and their henchmen, the executives and producers of television propaganda programs. ["Japanese ship owner contradicts U.S. account of how tanker was attacked," Washington Post, June 14, 2019.

3]  See "Pompeo wants to execute Snowden."

Secret Policeman Mueller Reinforces Hoax of Russian Threat To U.S. "Democracy," Tells Democrats Don't Bother Getting Him to Testify

Those were the two points he hammered home in a political theater performance, a show to which he summoned the media to attend as his audience, and just as audiences do not participate in the performance, Mueller barred them from questioning him. Just be stenographers, you propagandists. Or political theater reviewers.

Just as he did when helping justify aggression against Iraq by the Bush regime, by falsely testifying to Congress, pretending to know that Iraq had prohibited weapons plus ties to Al-Qaeda, once again Mueller spewed lies designed to further a covert yet obvious political agenda. Back then it was furthering the campaign to create the warlike atmosphere to enable the invasion of Iraq. This time it's perpetuating the Big Lie that Russia mounted a major assault on U.S. democracy. (Leave aside the fact that the existence of U.S. "democracy" is itself a myth. The U.S. is a corporate oligarchy, a bourgeois class dictatorship, with a secret police state that is more powerful than the legislature, a legislature that exists to do the bidding of big corporations and rich plutocrats, and that is monopolized by a two-party political cartel.) [1]

Mueller had it both ways about Trump's guilt. Playing it coy, he claimed the reason he didn't accuse Trump of any crimes was because Department of "Justice" policy (set by fiat by itself) is that a sitting president of the U.S. cannot be indicted. (Which flies directly in the face of the oft-repeated political slogan that "no one is above the law, including the president," but that contradiction is NEVER mentions by ANY corporate media propagandist, establishment politician, or state apparatchik, so you're not supposed to THINK the most obvious thing, once again.) Talking out of the other side of his mouth, he pointedly said that wasn't an exoneration either. So guilty as NOT charged, I guess. He was miffed that Trump's hand-picked Attorney General, William "Maximum Authoritarianism" Barr, spun the Mueller report as exoneration of Trump. But the U.S. Constitution does not bar indictment of a president. It provides the mechanism of impeachment on the obvious presumption that a president would be able to block his own prosecution by the executive branch he controls. And Kenneth Starr, another special prosecutor and a GOP hitman, had no problem accusing President Bill Clinton of crimes in his report, which he turned over to Congress where the GOP-controlled House of Representatives duly impeached Clinton. (The Senate fell short of the 2/3rds majority needed to convict and remove Clinton from office.)

Mueller disingenuously said it would be "unfair" to Trump to accuse him of crimes without Trump having the option to legally clear himself. As if the report was an indictment, which it is NOT. He would have been perfectly free to accuse Trump of crimes in a report that isn't an indictment without violating DO"J" absurd Can't Indict A President policy. As for Trump somehow being unable to "clear" himself, perhaps it has escaped Mueller's notice, but Trump has the biggest bully pulpit in the nation (indeed in the world) and uses Twitter several times a day as a mega-bullhorn, the noise of which is amplified daily by U.S. media quoting it. So Trump is hardly prevented from replying to anything in the Mueller report.

Speaking of people who will never have a chance to clear themselves, and how unfair that is, what about the Russian spam farm people Mueller indicted? Seeing how adept U.S. courts are in political frame-ups, and seeing the legal crucifixions of Viktor Bout and Maria Buttina, it is obvious that the U.S. can convict anyone it targets (Julian Assange is next!) so that the Russian defendants have no choice but to stay in Russia instead of subjecting themselves to a U.S.kangaroo  political court with a foregone conclusion. By the way, Mueller dropped that indictment like a bomb on the eve of Trump meeting with Putin, with obvious political intent to affect the meeting. But "Bob" Mueller is a "straight arrow!" Just ask anyone in the power elite!

Mueller could have written that Trump broke the law, or there was evidence of crimes, but he was barred by DO"J" policy from indicting the president. Instead he's playing to both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats. Both are taking what they want from the Mueller report and from Mueller's stunt performance. And both have a real basis for doing so, thanks to Mueller's deliberately mealy-mouthed evasions and obliqueness. He didn't accuse Trump of any crimes, even though the point of the two-year-long exercise was to determine that one way or the other. On the other hand, he says he didn't exonerate Trump. Instead he persecuted a couple of dozen marginal figures who had brief ties to Trump, destroyed Paul Manafort, and most consequentially bolstered the Big Lie of "massive Russian election meddling."

EVERYONE in the U.S. political establishment agrees that there was MASSIVE Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, a whopping Big Lie that rivals any Big Lie in world history. This lie will continue to mold U.S. policy towards Russia for years, perhaps decades to come. And only ill will come of the U.S. pretending to be victimized by Russia. The reality is the reverse, of course, with the U.S. constantly punishing Russia with more and more sanctions, and waging economic warfare, for example by trying to sabotage Germany's agreement with Russia for a gas pipeline to carry Russian natural gas to Europe.

What Mueller did was rather craven but perfectly reflects the political crosscurrents. He positioned his "report" and himself to protect himself from attack by either faction of the two-party political cartel, and artfully gave each faction, Republican and Democratic, something they could seize on. Mueller, who rose to the top of the Deep State apparatus as FBI secret police chief, is a consummate political animal. [2]

Numerous U.S. presidents have broken U.S. laws countless times. And forget about international law. The U.S. has contempt for that. except when it can cynically use it to beat an adversary nation over the head with it. So U.S. presidents are not merely "above" the law, they are virtually immune, with only rare exceptions.

Just a few examples of outrageous presidential criminality: Trump's "favorite president," Andrew Jackson, ignored a Supreme Court ruling upholding the treaty rights of Native Americans in the Southeast and sent 16,000 men, women, and children on a death march, killing 4,000 of them on the so-called Trail of Tears, as they were forced to walk from Florida and Georgia to Oklahoma, a trek of about 1,500 miles. And the second president, John Adams, had laws, the Alien and Sedition acts, which turned the Bill of Rights into useless verbiage, imprisoning publishers of newspapers who criticized him. 

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (and John Kennedy too) waged undeclared war on Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia, which were "secretly" bombed- i.e. U.S., but not foreign media, refused to report it- thus "secret" from the duped American public who get their "news" from corporate propaganda organs.

Ronald Reagan and his henchmen broke various laws in the Iran-Contra scheme, by which they funded international terrorism against Nicaragua.

There are too many more examples to cite.

Mueller's other big theme was making it clear he would add nothing to what was already in the report and that therefore the Democrats shouldn't bother getting him to testify to House Committees. Everything he has to say was already in the report, he insisted. Which is ridiculous. Of COURSE there are questions to ask! Like how he arrived at his various decisions. And the evidentiary basis for the reports "findings." Trump's handpicked Attorney General William Barr refuses to provide Congress with an uncensored version of the report and the supporting documentation. (They hate saying "censored," so they say "redacted," just an evasive way of saying "censored," like "enhanced interrogation technique" obfuscates "torture.")

The Democrats, instead of focusing on the awful policies of Trump, instead are still angling to unseat him in the 2020 election with this ginned up "Russian collusion" campaign. One irony is that Clinton paid for the "Steele Dossier," a fantastical piece of disinformation by a former MI6 British secret policeman which cites as sources Kremlin officials! So WHO got help from Russia! And this dossier was fraudulently used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to start a so-called foreign counterintelligence investigation targeting Trump campaign people like Carter Page. The secret police dripped factoids to undermine Trump in the media. And despite their proven hostility and adversarial posture towards Trump, media propagandists and Democratic political hacks regularly attack him for "siding with Putin" (or others) "against his own intelligence agencies." 

They are hardly "his own" agencies. They're his enemies! Not to defend Trump: a pox on ALL their venal houses!

The reason the Democrats DON'T criticize Trump for his actual evil policies (excepting the persecution of Hispanic migrant issue, which the Democrats are using ONLY to curry favor with Hispanic voters- Trump's policies are merely an intensification of Obama's, and the Democrats haven't made much of the murders of migrant children by medical neglect and indifference), is that they FAVOR those policies. They don't really mind gargantuan tax cuts for corporations and the rich, who are their real constituents. They are enthusiastically beating the drums for the U.S. coup effort in Venezuela. They are indifferent to the destructiveness of Trump's anti-environment policies. However on foreign policy they want him to be even more hostile to Russia- apparently words matter more than actions to the Democrats. The fact is that Trump's actions have been highly hostile to Russia. I already cited the matter of the gas pipeline project with Germany, which Trump's ambassador has been aggressively trying to kill. There was the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats. The ratcheting up of sanctions. Sending lethal military aid to the Kiev cabal in Ukraine, something Obama refrained from doing. Supporting opposite sites in the Syrian civil war. And now on opposite sides in Venezuela. Trump has actually done nothing FOR Russia, except be verbally polite to Putin and accept Putin's denial of election "meddling." (The "meddling" was so inconsequential as to not be worth mentioning. But the U.S. politico-media system has inflated a nothingburger into a gigantic propaganda balloon. The universe hasn't seen such a huge expansion from nothingness since the Big Bang that created the universe!)

Like this guy below, who insists that the fabricated Russian "hack" of the DNC server was JUST LIKE THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR! He's Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a "liberal" from New York City (a fanatical enemy of the Palestinian people, by the way). You'll read more about him in the footnotes below.

Nadler interpreted Mueller's little speech thusly: "Mueller told us that Russia attacked our political system."  And that "Trump welcomed it." "The president is lying about Mueller's conclusions" of no collusion or obstruction. [No he's not. Mueller didn't SAY Trump obstructed "justice," and he definitively concluded the Trump campaign did NOT conspire with Russia or Russians.] Nadler went on to take a swipe at lifelong GOP apparatchik William Barr: "The Attorney General is lying about that too."

Well Jerry, I got news for you. You, your party, the "intelligence community," and the GOP are all FULL OF IT. The Great Russiagate Hoax is just that. Once in a blue moon Trump is right about something. 

This is one of those rare times. 

Self-Styled Grand Inquisitor Jerrold Nadler

Donald J. Trump. He's so innocent, says he! (And his stooges, flunkies, and flacks all agree!)

1] I don't want to go off on too long of a tangent, so for now I'll just briefly illustrate how exiguous the Russian "effort" to "elect Trump" was. It consisted of the false claim that they gave damning Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, exposing Hillary Clinton's mendacity by revealing just what she said in her secret speech to Goldman Sachs that she had refused to release, and how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) under the control of Clinton agent Debbie Wasserman Schultz, used underhanded methods to tilt the primaries for Clinton and against Senator Bernard Sanders. Those emails made the American electorate better informed! So far from being an "attack on our democracy," it made for BETTER democracy, such as it even exists in the U.S. Unless you understand "our democracy" in the way "La Cosa Nostra" is understood, "Our Thing." "Our democracy" means the criminal system of power in which a two-party political cartel maintains monopoly political power for the benefit of themselves, their corporate masters, the military-industrial complex, and the Deep State secret police agencies. But career NSA technical experts (now retired) William Binney and Kurt Wiebe have proven that the DNC emails were NOT downloaded over the Internet, but were copied to a flash drive. Nor has any evidence at all ever been presented by the "intelligence community," establishment politicians, or the pseudo-journalists who act as conduits for secret police disinformation and Democratic Party propaganda to substantiate their CLAIM that this occurred. Instead it is assumed a priori as a fact, and anyone who so much as asks for evidence is smeared as a Russian agent, pawn, or stooge.

As for the effect of those emails on the outcome, they apparently had none. They were released in July 2016. In October 2016 Clinton was ahead in the polls by a comfortable 14%. Then in late October, then-FBI secret police chief James Comey announced that the investigation into the Clinton private server scandal was alive again because the FBI found more State Department emails, this time on a device belonging to officially disgraced and ridiculed former Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York City. (Weiner had an irresistible compulsion to send women photos of his genitalia via the Internet.) The emails turned out to be mere copies of previously examined ones, but the effect on Clinton's poll numbers was startling- dropping her to a lead of only 3.5% (same as the typical polling margin of error) to dead even with Trump. On Election Day ten days later in November, she won by 2.9 million votes, but lost because of the absurd and archaic U.S. electoral college. (There is good evidence the GOP stole the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.) 

Instead of blaming Comey, the Electoral College, GOP voter suppression and cheating, the Democrats decided to falsely blame the Russians. The GOP has obvious reasons to go along with this. And the corporate propaganda, which also wants to preserve the reactionary Electoral College system and hide GOP election malfeasance, is happy to scapegoat Russia. 

The other evidence that can be adduced to claim extensive Russian "meddling" in sacred U.S. "democracy" was $50,000 spent on Facebook ads before the election, and $4,700 spent on all Google platform, including youtube. This according to the testimony of Google's CEO to Nadler's Judiciary Committee, when Nadler himself asked. So that's something. When weighed against the combined $1 BILLION ($1,000,000,000) spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns, plus additional gargantuan sums spent by other U.S. persons and entities, plus the estimates $2 BILLION worth of free air time that "the" media bestowed on Trump, so fascinating did and do they find him, it is extremely risible to be squealing about "massive" Russian "interference." 

In light of all this, you can see how cynical, farcical, and just plain demented is the insistence that Russia is "undermining our democracy." It would be a bad joke if they weren't so serious and persistent in perpetuating this Big Lie.

2] Trump and his lackeys reiterated the "no collusion no conspiracy" theme. Trump himself said no charge equals innocence. (If he'd been acquitted at trial- or if the Democrats impeach him and the Senate doesn't convict, and it is impossible to imagine the necessary two/thirds of Senators voting to convict, especially with a Republican majority in the Senate- that would be a verdict of "not guilty." Whether "not guilty" equals "innocent" is a semi-Talmudic question.

The Democrats continued to interpret this latest manifestation of Muellerism their way, both in regards to Trump and the frame-up of Russia as guilty of "attacking" so-called "American democracy." For example, one of the worst Russiagaters, who has said the mythical Russian "hack" of the DNC computer server was the same thing as the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor (!), the screwball political hack Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York City, who now sits as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, hysterically opined after The Mueller Show that "Mueller told us that Russia attacked our political system." 

I'll tell you a country attacking another nation's political system: the U.S. attacking the Venezuelan government, trying to overturn the result of the last election there by force, violence, and economic warfare. Oh, and the U.S. does that sort of thing all the time. With Nadler's full-throated support.

Mueller Lays a Goose Egg. Predictably. (And Predicted.)

There is so much to debunk, and that has BEEN debunked, about the gigantic pile of horse manure agitpropaganda that "the media" has heaped on our heads these past 2+ years, that my brief remarks here can only touch on a few points.

We witnessed absurd conspiracy theories, with every ill in the Western world being blamed on Russian online memes that "divide us." The rise of rightwing populism in Europe is blamed on Russia (not discontent with those in power!). Chuck Todd, the Dumbest Man On Television, speculated that the terror bombs that turned out to have been mailed by a pro-Trump zealot, Cesar Sayoc, were sent by Russia.

Russian clickbait and spam from a troll farm was equated with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 by political demagogues of the Democratic Party. Congressman Adam Schiff made a name for himself as the worst political mountebank in the nation, against stiff competition.

Much was made of the "lies" that tripped up Trump's erstwhile minions. (People Trump threw overboard at the first sign of trouble.)

And what were the lies Mueller obtained convictions for? Inconsequential things. Except for Michael Flynn's lies. Flynn conspired with Turkey to kidnap Fethullah Gulen from the U.S. to hand over to the Erdogan regime. And what were the consequences? Flynn got off easiest, with no jail time, as recommended by Mueller's prosecutors. He was even praised by the judge for his murderous military record. (He served U.S. imperialism in a high position, so he gets privileged treatment.)

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's main lie was to Congress, when he claimed attempts to do a deal for a hotel in Moscow ended a few months sooner than they actually did.

The severest penalties were meted out to Paul Manafort, for things totally unrelated to Trump and his presidential campaign. Mainly hiding his money from the IRS (which the attempt to do made him guilty of money "laundering" as well as tax evasion), bank "fraud" (he put false information on applications for bank loans- something Trump himself has done with impunity, in fact overstating his assets by $2 BILLION to obtain a loan from Deutsche Bank), and failing to register as a foreign agent. (Because he worked in Ukraine, NOT in the U.S. representing Ukraine, trying to steer the president the U.S. later overthrew, Yanukovych, into pro-EU pro-U.S. actions. He wasn't repping the Ukraine in the U.S., so how could he be guilty of that? At the same time, Flynn got away with not registering as an agent of Turkey, and AIPAC, the AJC, the Congress of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Zionist Organization of America, et al, act as agents of Israel, take directions fron Israeli government officials in frequent meetings with them, and are NOT prosecuted for refusing to register. U.S. justice certainly is blind. Or rather, it looks the other way for those with special privileges and power.)

Manafort made the stupid mistake of not throwing in with Mueller, relying instead on Trump to protect him! What a dumb grifter. Trump is only loyal to himself,  and to his family who are psychologically extensions of himself.

So what, finally, did Mueller "discover" about Trump's "collusion" with "a hostile foreign power to interfere with our election and subvert Our Democracy"?

Nothing. But the Democrats are twisting this to say Mueller didn't DISPROVE it!

Talk about diehards.

Aaron Maté of the The Nation magazine and formerly at democracynow.org summed up the more than two year saga of a full court press propaganda campaign by most of the major U.S. media and elements of the secret police and Department of "Justice" to paint the president of the United States, Donald Trump, as beholden to Russian president Vladimir Putin and a co-conspirator with him in "stealing" the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. 

Maté  put it succinctly and accurately thus: "This entire affair is journalistic malpractice." [1]

As for the result of over 2 years of investigating by a large prosecution team with all the "tools" of "law enforcement" (including secret ones) at their disposal, with a howling pack of media dogs sniffing out every factoid to "connect the dots" into a picture of criminal culpability, what did it all add up to? Maté did the arithmatic:

"In terms of the substance of this issue, which is whether or not there is a conspiracy between Trump and Russia, we arrive at zero."

So with the buried treasure chest of the Mueller report turning out to contain only sand, what are the Democrats going to do now?

The Democratic Party's poohbahs STILL intend to press on with it, thus undercutting their own presidential candidates for 2020.

Good luck with THAT.

"Sorry about that." Not the Democratic Party's Saviour After All. Square-jawed former FBI secret police chief and U.S. Marine Invader of Vietnam Robert S. Mueller III. Exit right from the Stage of History, Bob.

1] "Aaron Maté sums up the denouément of the Mueller investigation on the Jimmy Dore Show."

"Pope" Proves There is No "God"

"Pope" Francis, the Supreme Leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has spoken his strongest words yet in the years-long saga of the Catholic Church finally being exposed as a global pedophilia conspiracy. He called down "God's wrath," on pedophile priests and their higher-ranking protectors in his church. (His God, that is, not some other religion's deity, or any of the 2,500 known "Gods" that people have invented over the millennia- there are probably more lost in the sands of time.)

Well, why didn't his "God" get angry at the pedophiles and their protectors all these past decades?

Is his "God" lazy? Incompetent? Indifferent?

If the "Pope" has to call out for his "God" to react to all this, what does that say about his "God"? If his "God" really exists, he's a really awful "God."

I think rather it is yet more proof that this god, like all gods, is imaginary.

For that matter, here are a few of many other things a "Just God" might find objectionable:

Such as: the abuse and deaths of children in Catholic "orphanages"

Or the exploitation of enslaved Irish women in Magdalene laundries, regarded as scum for having had sex.

Or the Church's helping Nazis escape Europe after World War II. Or the failure to oppose the Holocaust.

What about the Inquisition, and the infliction of the most hideous tortures on their victims?

How about burning the scientist GIordano Bruno at the stake?

Either their "God" is a vicious, immoral sadist who approves all this stuff, or is completely callous and indifferent to the beings he alleged created "in his own image" (No, I don't capitalize pronouns of imaginary beings), or else "he" doesn't exist.

I think that last is the most charitable interpretation, as well as being true.

But the conclave called by the "Pope" February 21-24 to deal with the crisis of legitimacy of the Catholic Church (CC) wasn't just talk. There were proposals for action. (Well, okay, so far still just talk.) One proposal was the increase the Church-approved age for marriage for girls to 16, from 14. (It's currently 16 for boys.) Very enlightened!

A day before the conclave during which the "Pope"  threatened sexual miscreants under his command with "the wrath of [his] God," he deemed critics of the CC "friends of the devil." [1] 

The Catholic Church is a global authoritarian cult over 1,500 years old that has perfected techniques of mind control that enable it to mentally enslave over a billion people worldwide. It is also a criminal enterprise whose made members, the priests and bishops, have committed countless tens of thousands of sexual crimes, including pedophilia, in numerous countries, and the institution itself was an accomplice in these crimes by protecting the perpetrators, intimidating and silencing the victims, hiding and destroying evidence, and stonewalling for years until their walls were gradually broken down by outside pressure. The CC is clearly an illegal criminal enterprise under the U.S. RICO statutes, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act and others.

The chance that the CC will ever be prosecuted, however, is less than the chance of winning an American lottery (which is about one in 300,000,000.) RICO is reserved for going after unprotected drug dealing organizations, the Mafia, and leftwing movements.

The CC, which formerly ruled Europe until just a few centuries ago, has been the ally of reactionaries everywhere, especially reactionary governments such as the U.S. It creates little authoritarians, obedient to "authority," and punitive-minded, which is why so many police and secret police are Catholics.

1]  "friends of the devil" link. 2/20/19.

This pedophile business is such a headache.

The Irrefutable Proof That Calling Nicolas Maduro a "Dictator" is a Damned Lie: Juan Guaido Is a Free Man IN Venezuela!

Maduro is the elected president and head of state. Juan Guaido is the puppet of a hostile foreign power, who was instructed by the vice president of that power (Michael Pence of the U.S.A.) to declare himself president, and the next morning did so, self-administering a bogus oath of office to himself. Now he's running around pretending to be the president, usurping all the power he can, and that hostile foreign power has transferred control over Venezuelan government assets to Guaido.

Under what "dictatorship" would Guaido not now be undergoing severe torture in a secret dungeon?

Whatever Maduro is, he's not a dictator. And Venezuela is no dictatorship.

Unlike the U.S.' Great Friend, Saudi Arabia.

Guaido openly holds rallies. He calls on the armed forces to overthrow the government. The violent street thugs who are the tip of the spear of the opposition Guaido leads attack police, and are NOT shot dead. (Imagine if Occupy Movement participants or Black Lives Matter protesters had thrown rocks and molotov cocktails at police! There would have been a bloodbath, and the U.S. corporate media would have celebrated the massacres.) If anything, Maduro has for years been far too tolerant towards the reactionary violence, which has blockaded roads and burned people alive who were identified as government supporters.

We saw the exact same thing in Ukraine, where the neo-Nazi terrorists set police on fire (watch the youtube videos if you don't believe it!) and false flag snipers sent in by the U.S. murdered police as well as protesters. There as in Venezuela, the state failed to protect the people from terrorists, the nation from subversion by a foreign power, and itself from being overthrown because it failed to suppress terrorist violence. In both cases, the U.S. threatened the government if it cracked down on the U.S.-backed terrorists. (Obama in the case of the Ukraine, Trump and the imperialist thugs he's appointed in regard to Venezuela.)

And when I say "terrorists," I'm using the U.S. power establishment's definition of terrorism: politically motivated violence by non-state actors. They exclude state terrorism by definition. They have to, since the U.S. is the world's greatest sponsor of state terrorism, such as in Guatemala (250,000 murdered), Argentina (30,000 "disappeared"), Indonesia (one million "communists" exterminated in 1965), and numerous other places. (Sometimes the U.S. does the dirty work even more directly than merely "advising," such as the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam, in which they murdered 50,000 Vietnamese or more.)

Let's take another look at Saudi Arabia, one of many repressive tyrannies the U.S. backs to the hilt. In Saudi Arabia, there are no elections for the rulers of the country, and anyone who criticizes or protests is arrested, tortured, and some are beheaded, even crucified.

No complaints from the U.S. Government or establishment media about THAT!

The "Crown Prince," a nasty piece of word named Mohammed bin Salman, imprisoned scores of rich Saudis and forced them to turn over billions of dollars. One or two died in the process.

But Maduro is "corrupt," don't you know! And he's "stealing the assets" of Venezuela. Like the oil money.

The oil money which John Bolton announced on January 24 will be turned over to U.S. oil corporations. He said this on Fox Business tv program. He absurdly added that this would benefit the American and Venezuelan people.

How so, John? Will the U.S. oil corps fund programs for the Venezuelan people? Will they provide cut-rate heating oil to poor people in Boston, as Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor, did?

I don't think so, asshole.

U.S. propagandists aren't satisfied with branding Maduro a "dictator," which they apparently think justifies overthrowing him (never mind the scores of dictators the U.S. has supported, many of which could never have achieved power without U.S. help, and are reliant on the U.S. for staying in power), but these propagandists demand that everyone call Maduro "dictator." 

Just this morning, on the U.S. Government created and funded NPR national radio network, the host of the morning "news" show, the reactionary Scott Simon, started by griping that Senator Bernie Sanders "doesn't call himself a democrat, he refuses to call Maduro a dictator!" The fact that Sanders has been spewing anti-Venezuela propaganda mirroring that of the U.S. government and media apparently isn't good enough.

What nerve that Sanders has! Who does he think he is, to go against the political line of the U.S. Imperialist establishment! Does he think this is a free country or something? (OOPS!)

Smarmy unctuous reactionary dweeb Scott Simon, of NPR infamy

Bernie Sanders better get in line!

U.S. "friend and ally," the sinister Saudi "Crown Prince," Mohammed bin Salman. 

If you criticize him, he might cut you to pieces! (Think Jamal Khashoggi.) 

There's a dagger in that hand...

Was the Pecker Gang "Extorting" Jeff Bezos or "Negotiating" With Him? BOTH!

Currently there is a tiff between The World's Richest Man, Amazon.com Supremo Jeffrey Bezos, and The World's Sleaziest Man, David Pecker, Boss of Bosses at a tawdry racket named American Media Inc. (Sooo, patriotic, that name!) AMI publishes smarmy, sensationalist rags sold at supermarket checkout stands, the most notorious of which is named the "National Enquirer." It specializes in ginned up sex scandals and celebrity gossip. Its target audience is bored housewives and others with low intellectual standards attracted by the tawdry. [1]

An AMI executive and an AMI lawyer sent letters to the lawyer of the investigator Bezos had assigned to find out how AMI got photos and private emails of him and his mistress. These two threatening to publish nude photos of Bezos (which they described in detail) UNLESS Bezos agreed to issue a public statement retracting his claim that AMI had a political motive in going after him, which they called "libel," and stuck to that position in future. More tellingly, AMI demanded that Bezos stop investigating how they obtained his emails and the photos. In other words, a classic case of both blackmail and extortion.

Rather than knuckling under to this criminal extortion/blackmail attempt, Bezos went public with it, exposing AMI's action.

The result in the establishment jabbersphere has been an avalanche of quizzical questions, Is It Or Isn't It Extortion? AMI, after a period of silence where they imitated a deer frozen in oncoming headlights, recovered their composure and said they were merely "negotiating" "in good faith," just a perfectly normal business practice! Much of the jabbersphere made it a He Said He Said story.

But that won't wash with this fact set.

Kidnappers negotiate ransom payments. Hostage-takers negotiate their demands. Criminals can negotiate in the commission of their crimes. Happens all the time. A bank robber can demand X amount of money, and be told it's not available, and settle for a lesser amount.

Blackmailers and extortions ALWAYS negotiate with their victims! They present their demands, and the victims respond. There is a back-and-forth about terms and conditions. Likewise with kidnappers.

The backstory here is that Bezos owns The Washington Post newspaper, which has been relentless in documenting Trump's endless firehose of lies, and is also upset that Trump is allowing the Saudi Arabian regime to get away with murdering one of their contributors, the Saudi Jamal Khashoggi. Pecker is a close friend and ally of Trump, who during the campaign used the rags he controls to relentlessly promote Trump every single week, and denigrate Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, AMI made illegal undeclared campaign contributions in the form of paying off at least one woman Trump has sexual relations with, by buying exclusive rights to her story and then not publishing it, effectively silencing her. AMI subsequently entered a plea agreement with Federal prosecutors. In return for no criminal charges being brought, AMI agreed to cooperate with their investigation, and to commit NO MORE CRIMES for a period of three years.

The fact that AMI tried to blackmail Bezos into ceasing to investigate how they obtained their material on him, led Bezos to believe that Trump had obtained or given it to them to use to embarrass him and pressure him to jerk the Washington Post's leash and ease up on criticizing Trump. Another suspicion was that Saudi Arabia was involved. Pecker put out, at company expense, a preposterous 100-page glossy magazine positively glorifying the murderous "crown prince" of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who has been bombing Yemen and starving its population with essential U.S. help, and who ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi last year.

What a WONDERFUL tyrant!

The commentator Glenn Greenwald, who usually is trenchant and on-the-mark in his analyses, made a logically flawed argument about the case to say that it wasn't clear if it was extortion, it was in a grey area, because it happens all the time that people accuse each other of libel and then arrange to stop libeling each other. Except Bezos was NOT being libeled by AMI (AMI CLAIMED Bezos was libeling AMI by asserting they had a political motive in attacking him- which they obviously do), and Bezos never claimed they were libeling him. They published the true fact that he was having an affair, with whom, and of course embarrassing photos that are really of him are not libelous.

The "business model" of AMI is extortion and blackmail, coercing celebrities wishing to avoid career-damaging embarrassment to provide juicier "dirt" on others or to cooperate in other ways. Unsurprising that the sleazy Pecker is pals with the mega-grifter Trump. Trump attracts to himself like a dustmop collecting dirt dodgy and disreputable hustlers like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen the Fixer, political mountebank and saboteur Roger Stone, and novice grifter Michael Flynn, who was in the pay of Turkey. Trump has frequently broken the law over the years, and he and his family have committed tax fraud for years and defrauded their tenants, as documented by the New York Times.  [2]

A number of Trump's appointed government officials have committed multiple acts of graft and corruption and malfeasance, such as his first EPA head Scott Pruitt, his first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Ben "$30,000 Office Chair We Paid For" Carson, and others.

Previous regimes did a better job of hiding their moral corruption than this gang.

An example of the fine "journalism" produced by "American" Media, Inc. 

The barracuda bares its teeth: David Pecker, Sleaze Personified.

"You dirty little PECKER!"

1] There are other "titles" in AMI's staple of garbage publications. All peddle celebrity gossip and fluff, sexual titillation, and sensationalistic nonsense. These include a cheesier version of the Time Inc. magazine People, named Us (sic!). They used to publish an absurd supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News, which relentlessly promoted- in all seriousness, NOT tongue-in-cheek- fake stories of extraterrestrial aliens on earth, complete with cooked-up photos. The people who churned out this brain-poison for the lower uneducated classes were Harvard graduates. Cynical, soulless, amoral graduates, I presume. Calling such garbage, peddled year after year, and not as satire or irony, is properly viewed as psychological warfare against credulous members of the hoi polloi. Keep them dumb and distracted and confused. 

2] See from the New York Times, "Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father," October 2, 2018; "11 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth," October 2, 2018, and "4 Ways Fred Trump Made Donald Trump and His Siblings Rich." October 2, 2018, among other articles.