TBR News April 16, 2019

Apr 16 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. April  16, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for April 16: There is a nasty war in Yemen, one that Congress wants to dump so they passed a resolution to get out of it which Trump promptly vetoed because he said it “wekened his Constutional authority.” He has very little of this because even Republicans in the Congress ae beginning to find him an obnoxious nut and since many of them are up for reelection in 2010, they want to stay as far away from Tubby as they can. This will enrage him more and soon he will be Tweeting nasygrams in his illiterate style about his own people.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • House panels issue subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, others, in Trump probe
  • Battle over Trump tax returns could extend into 2020 election
  • Captain chaos: Trump advises Boeing, despite swift failure of own airline
  • Satellite images may show reprocessing activity at North Korea nuclear site: think tank
  • Seth Meyers: Trump is hiding behind ‘a fake audit that definitely does not exist’
  • 6 of WikiLeaks’ biggest ever document dumps
  • Stonehenge: DNA reveals origin of builders
  • New discovery of European-style tools being heralded as among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for decades
  • Strange, and grossly inaccurate, Evangelical Christian View of Cro-Magnon
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

           -Margaret Hunter

          – Billy DeMoss

         –  Jock Doubleday

  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

House panels issue subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, others, in Trump probe

April 15, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two U.S. House of Representatives committees have issued subpoenas to multiple financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank AG, for information on U.S. President Donald Trump’s finances, the panels’ Democratic leaders said on Monday.

“The potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern. The Financial Services Committee is exploring these matters, including as they may involve the president and his associates, as thoroughly as possible,” the committee’s chair, Maxine Waters, said in a statement.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said in a statement the subpoenas issued included a “friendly subpoena to Deutsche Bank.”

Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

 

Battle over Trump tax returns could extend into 2020 election

April 16, 2019

(Reuters) – The U.S. Congress has strong arguments for obtaining President Donald Trump’s tax returns, but first faces a long court battle that could extend into the 2020 presidential election, some legal experts said.

Democratic Party leaders, who took control of the House in November, have recently stepped up pressure on Trump to release tax records from 2013 to 2018, which legal experts said could shed light on the president’s business dealings.

Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax matters, has given the Internal Revenue Service until April 23 to produce the documents.

Trump’s personal lawyer, William Consovoy, in a letter to the Treasury Department on Monday, accused Neal’s committee of using its “investigatory tools to unlawfully retaliate against a political opponent.”

Lawmakers can go to court and ask a judge to force disclosure of the tax returns, but such a process could unfold slowly and become an issue in the 2020 election, legal experts said.

“I expect Trump will stall at every opportunity,” said Steven Rosenthal, a tax lawyer with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, adding that “delay is a victory for Trump.”

Consovoy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A law from 1924 says that the IRS “shall furnish” any tax return requested by the chair of the Ways and Means committee.

“If you look at the plain language of the statute, Neal is on strong footing here,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

But this does not mean that Congress has unlimited power to request tax returns, experts said.

If Congress invokes this statute, it must be acting with a legitimate legislative purpose, legal experts said, citing a 1957 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In that decision, the Court said that Congress was not a “law enforcement agency” that can seek information to uncover crimes.

Neal said in an April 4 statement that the documents will aid Congress in evaluating whether the IRS has been effective in enforcing tax laws against the president.

“The IRS has a policy of auditing the tax returns of all sitting presidents and vice presidents, yet little is known about the effectiveness of the law,” Neal said.

Consovoy in Monday’s letter said that “no one actually believes” Neal’s “invented” reasons for wanting the tax returns.

Ross Garber, a lawyer in Washington focusing on political investigations, called Consovoy’s argument “plausible” and said it was possible a court would side with the president.

Garber said Congress’ authority to request the documents would be stronger if it were conducting impeachment proceedings. Courts have held that Congress’ investigative powers are broader in the impeachment context, he said.

But Edward Kleinbard, a tax law professor at the University of Southern California, said Neal’s stated reason for demanding the tax returns — ensuring that tax laws are being enforced against Trump — was more than sufficient.

“The integrity of tax system depends on peoples’ willingness to assess tax against themselves. The president of the U.S. is the taxpayer-in-chief, and he sets the standard,” Kleinbard.

Kleinbard, who formerly served as chief of staff to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, noted that Trump was the first U.S. president in nearly 40 years who has not voluntarily released his tax returns to the public.

Trump has said he cannot make the returns public because they are under audit.

Kleinbard called that argument “nonsense,” saying nothing prohibits a person under audit from releasing his tax returns.

Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Lisa Shumaker

 

Captain chaos: Trump advises Boeing, despite swift failure of own airline

Despite offering some unasked-for guidance about rebranding its 737 Max Trump’s form on airlines is not good

April 15, 20118

by Adam Gabbatt

The Guardian

What do I know about branding[?]” Donald Trump mused on Twitter, early on Monday morning. “Maybe nothing […] but if I were Boeing, I would FIX the Boeing 737 MAX, add some additional great features, & REBRAND the plane with a new name.”

Quite aside from the scant regard shown by the president for the 346 people who have died in two recent crashes involving the 737 Max, Boeing executives might also want to consider Trump’s business history before rushing to follow his advice.

In 1989, Trump bought an airline and branded it with his name. He then lost more than $100m in 18 months and was forced to shut the operation down after three years.

The president has a long track record of running Trump-branded businesses into the ground, whether through bankruptcy, lawsuits or sweeping incompetence.

The airline, Trump Shuttle, launched in June 1989. It was billed – by Trump – as a “diamond in the sky”. Two months later, one of his planes was forced to make an emergency landing in Boston when its nose gear – the front wheels – would not come down. Things didn’t get much better after that.

Trump paid $365m for Eastern Airlines, which had gone bankrupt. But its 21 planes were ageing and as the Washington Post reported: “Trump’s team estimated that they overpaid $65m for the operation.”

According to Business Insider, after a year and a half Trump Shuttle had lost $128m, due to a combination of oil prices rising thanks to the Gulf war and the folly of Trump spending $1m on cladding each aircraft with gold fixtures and impractically plush carpets.

Less than three years after he bought the airline, Trump handed it to USAir. It stripped his name from the planes. Another Trump-branded business had failed.

Among other such ventures, Trump magazine folded after 18 months, Trump Mortgage about the same. Trump Vodka – Vice said, “It tastes awful” – lasted about four years. It turned out no one wanted to play – or buy – Trump: The Game.

Trump University, an endeavor described as a “straight-up fraud” by the New York attorney general, went out of business after former students sued. Trump ended up having to pay a $25m settlement.

“You can’t con people, at least not for long,” Trump noted in his ghostwritten bestselling book, The Art of the Deal.

“You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole.

“But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

Trump has rarely followed his own advice. For Boeing, unlike his counsel on branding, it might make sense.

 

Satellite images may show reprocessing activity at North Korea nuclear site: think tank

April 16, 2019

by David Brunnstrom

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Satellite images from last week show movement at North Korea’s main nuclear site that could be associated with the reprocessing of radioactive material into bomb fuel, a U.S. think tank reported on Tuesday.

Any new reprocessing activity would underscore the failure of a second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi in late February to make progress toward North Korea’s denuclearization.

Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank said in a report that satellite imagery of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear site from April 12 showed five specialized railcars near its Uranium Enrichment Facility and Radiochemistry Laboratory.

It said their movement could indicate the transfer of radioactive material.

“In the past, these specialized railcars appear to have been associated with the movement of radioactive material or reprocessing campaigns.” the report said. “The current activity, along with their configurations, does not rule out their possible involvement in such activity, either before or after a reprocessing campaign.”

Jenny Town, a North Korea expert at the Stimson Center think tank, said that if reprocessing was taking place, it would be a significant development given U.S.-North Korean talks in the past year and the failure to reach an agreement on the future of Yongbyon in Hanoi.

“Because there wasn’t an agreement with North Korea on Yongbyon, it would be interesting timing if they were to have started something so quickly after Hanoi,” she said.

Trump has met Kim twice in the past year to try to persuade him to abandon a nuclear weapons program that threatens the United States, but progress so far has been scant.

The Hanoi talks collapsed after Trump proposed a “big deal” in which sanctions on North Korea would be lifted if it handed over all its nuclear weapons and fissile material to the United States. He rejected partial denuclearization steps offered by Kim, which included an offer to dismantle Yongbyon.

Although Kim has maintained a freeze in missile and nuclear tests since 2017, U.S. officials say North Korea has continued to produce fissile material that can be processed for use in bombs.

Last month, a senior North Korean official warned that Kim might rethink the test freeze unless Washington made concessions.

Last week, Kim said the Hanoi breakdown raised the risks of reviving tensions, adding that he was only interested in meeting Trump again if the United States came with the right attitude.

Kim said he would wait “till the end of this year” for the United States to decide to be more flexible. On Monday, Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brushed aside this demand with Pompeo saying Kim should keep his promise to give up his nuclear weapons before then.

Town said any new reprocessing work at Yongbyon would emphasize the importance of the facility in North Korea’s nuclear program.

“It would underscore that it is an active facility that does increase North Korea’s fissile material stocks to increase its arsenal.”

A study by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation released ahead of the Hanoi summit said North Korea had continued to produce bomb fuel in 2018 and may have produced enough in the past year to add as many as seven nuclear weapons to its arsenal.

Experts have estimated the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal at anywhere between 20 and 60 warheads.

Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Tom Brown

 

Seth Meyers: Trump is hiding behind ‘a fake audit that definitely does not exist’

Late-night hosts celebrate tax day by looking into Congress’s efforts to secure the president’s elusive tax returns

April 16, 2019

by Adrian Horton

The Guardian

Seth Meyers

Monday was the deadline for Americans to file their taxes, and to mark the occasion, Seth Meyers noted that Donald Trump still has not released his tax returns. For three years, the president has cited “a fake audit that definitely does not exist” to justify keeping his tax returns under wraps, Meyers said, but that probably won’t hold against a recent House ways and means committee demand that the IRS release them.

Noting that “the president always sounds like a spam email asking you for your social security number”, Meyers suggested that Congress “would have more luck getting his tax returns if they just used his syntax in their request”.

Mr President (some would say best President), We are WRITING to request your tax returns,” Meyers wrote for Congress. “Are willing to send truck to pick up as they are so big, massive even (!) from your many large and successful businesses (WOW!!!).”

Regardless, it’s up the IRS, not Trump, whether or not the House demand is fulfilled. Yet the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, circuited the Sunday talkshows to blast congressional Democrats for the request, claiming they were too dumb to understand Trump’s returns.

“OK, now, this is what she wants – she’s trolling us,” Meyers explained. “She wants us to get all mad and riled up and point out all the ways that Trump is actually the idiot because that’s their only move: to take whatever we say about Trump and turn it back on us. And we’re just too dignified for that. We’re not going to stoop to her level, and I’m just kidding and here’s a bunch of dumb shit the president has said and done.” He cut to a compilation of Trump’s more meme-able gaffes – toilet paper on his shoe, mispronouncing “future” as “furniture”, calling the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, “Tim Apple” and describing a hurricane as “very, very wet”.

In what Meyers described as another dumb move, Trump attempted to further incite outrage over immigration by floating the idea of forcibly moving migrants from the Mexican border to so-called sanctuary cities.

“So that’s your brilliant chess move: to send poor migrant families fleeing poverty and violence to cities that actually want to welcome them,” Meyers said. “This is one of the dumbest attempted trolls I’ve ever heard. We’re all actively volunteering to take in more refugees and Trump is like: ‘Oh, I know – I’ll let them take in more refugees. That’ll show them!’”

Jimmy Kimmel

Over in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel recapped Donald Trump’s enthusiastic reaction to Tiger Woods’s win at the Masters this weekend; in a tweet, Trump said he planned to award Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his comeback in golf and in life. Or maybe for a few more reasons, Kimmel said. “I know why Donald Trump is giving Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom: it’s the closest he can get to giving himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“Tiger Woods and the measles are back. What a time to be alive!”

In honor of tax day, Kimmel also pointed out that “we still haven’t seen the president’s taxes.”. The reason for that, at least according to Sarah Sanders, is that Congress is too dumb to interpret them. Today’s congressmen and women “are [not] smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be”, Sanders said.

“That’s interesting,” Kimmel responded. “Did you know she clips her toenails with her teeth?”

 

 

6 of WikiLeaks’ biggest ever document dumps

April 16, 2019

RT

Despite facing constant skepticism from mainstream media and government officials, whistleblower website WikiLeaks has managed to maintain a record of 100 percent accuracy over its 12-year history — and has never lost a lawsuit.

With much of the media now focusing on trivialities, like whether its recently arrested founder Julian Assange spent enough time washing dishes during his nearly seven-year exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, here’s a look back at some of WikiLeaks’ most famous document dumps.

  1. ‘Collateral Murder’ — Iraq/Afghanistan war logs (2010)

To this day, WikiLeaks’ publishing of the Iraq War footage showing a US Apache helicopter shooting dead 12 people, including two Reuters staff, is one of its most significant and talked-about exposures.

Released as part of the biggest leak in US military history, containing hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, the footage was provided to Assange by former US Army Soldier Chelsea Manning. Manning served seven years of a 35-year sentence for providing WikiLeaks with the classified information, before having her sentence commuted by Barack Obama in 2017.

Assange is now facing charges of engaging in a “conspiracy” to help Manning hack government computers in 2010 — specifically, “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer” — while Manning is back in prison for refusing to testify in a case related to WikiLeaks.

  1. Embarrassing US State Department Cables (2010-11)

WikiLeaks caused serious embarrassment to the US government with another of its most-remembered document dumps in 2010, dropping more than 250,000 US State Department cables from embassies around the world.

Among other things, the cables revealed that the US was spying on then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other top UN Security Council representatives.

Diplomatic cables described German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “rarely creative,” while then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy was described as “susceptible and authoritarian.” President Barack Obama was advised that Sarkozy’s support for the war in Afghanistan could be secured using “flattery.” Canadians were said to have a “chip on their shoulder” because they are “condemned to always play Robin to the US Batman.”

The UK Conservative Party was also embarrassed by the cable leaks, in which they were seen promising to run a “pro-American regime” and buy more weapons from the US if they were in power.

  1. DNC Clinton emails (2016)

Just one week before Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2016, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails proving top party figures had collaborated to ensure that Senator Bernie Sanders did not win the nomination. The leaks forced DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to resign.

Emails showed DNC staffers discussing how Sanders could be undermined, even by using his Jewish faith. The Clinton camp tried to distract from the leaks, concocting a conspiracy about a WikiLeaks-Russia collaboration to destroy her campaign.

Weeks before the election, WikiLeaks dropped more emails damaging to Clinton. One showed CNN contributor Donna Brazile (who replaced Wasserman-Schultz as DNC acting chair) had supplied Clinton with questions CNN planned to ask her during debates. The Clinton camp was also seen insulting Catholics and “needy Latinos.”

  1. ‘Vault 7’ CIA hacking documents (2017)

The CIA’s “global covert hacking program”was revealed in the 2017 ‘Vault 7’ leaks, which show the extent of the US spy agency’s ability to hack smartphones, smart TVs, and social media messaging apps like WhatsApp.

The documents showed that phone cameras and microphones can be remotely activated at will — and that the CIA collaborated with British intelligence agencies on these projects. WikiLeaks revealed the ‘Weeping Angel’ surveillance technique, which put smart TVs into “fake off” mode while actually using them as microphones to monitor targets.

The ‘Vault 7’ leaks also exposed the ‘Umbrage’ program with which the CIA can conduct a hacking operation but make it appear to be the act of a foreign nation.

  1. US uses IMF and World Bank as ‘weapons’ (2008)

With the recent US coup attempt in Venezuela, WikiLeaks highlighted what it called the US “coup manual” detailing Washington’s methods of “unconventional warfare” against adversaries. The document had been released by WikiLeaks in 2008 but found new relevance as US economic pressure on Venezuela mounted in recent months.

In the manual, the US government admits to “a long history of conducting economic warfare” and using “financial weapons” against governments that do not bend to its will. The “participation” of international financial organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) offers the US “diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” these goals.

  1. Guantanamo prison operating ‘manual’ (2007)

A 238-page US Army manual released by WikiLeaks in 2007 revealed the “standard operating procedures” for the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, where the US holds and tortures detainees, often without charge, for years on end.

The document revealed there were boys 15 years old and younger at the camp, that dogs were used to intimidate prisoners, and that some inmates were classified as being off-limits to Red Cross visitors. It also revealed that incoming prisoners were held in isolation for two weeks in order to foster dependence on guards and interrogators and to “enhance and exploit” the disorientation they felt.

With the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange last week, many have speculated on so-called “insurance” files, which some expected to be leaked immediately in the event of Assange’s detainment or death. So far, however, there have been no major new leaks.

 

Stonehenge: DNA reveals origin of builders

April 16, 2019

by Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

BBC News

The ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge travelled west across the Mediterranean before reaching Britain, a study has shown.

Researchers compared DNA extracted from Neolithic human remains found across Britain with that of people alive at the same time in Europe.

The Neolithic inhabitants appear to have travelled from Anatolia (modern Turkey) to Iberia before winding their way north.

They reached Britain in about 4,000BC.

Details have been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The migration to Britain was just one part of a general, massive expansion of people out of Anatolia in 6,000BC that introduced farming to Europe.

Before that, Europe was populated by small, travelling groups which hunted animals and gathered wild plants and shellfish.

One group of early farmers followed the river Danube up into Central Europe, but another group travelled west across the Mediterranean.

DNA reveals that Neolithic Britons were largely descended from groups who took the Mediterranean route, either hugging the coast or hopping from island-to-island on boats. Some British groups had a minor amount of ancestry from groups that followed the Danube route.

When the researchers analysed the DNA of early British farmers, they found they most closely resembled Neolithic people from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal). These Iberian farmers were descended from people who had journeyed across the Mediterranean.

From Iberia, or somewhere close, the Mediterranean farmers travelled north through France. They might have entered Britain from the west, through Wales or south-west England. Indeed, radiocarbon dates suggest that Neolithic people arrived marginally earlier in the west, but this remains a topic for future work.

In addition to farming, the Neolithic migrants to Britain appear to have introduced the tradition of building monuments using large stones known as megaliths. Stonehenge in Wiltshire was part of this tradition.

Although Britain was inhabited by groups of “western hunter-gatherers” when the farmers arrived in about 4,000BC, DNA shows that the two groups did not mix very much at all.

The British hunter-gatherers were almost completely replaced by the Neolithic farmers, apart from one group in western Scotland, where the Neolithic inhabitants had elevated local ancestry. This could have come down to the farmer groups simply having greater numbers.

“We don’t find any detectable evidence at all for the local British western hunter-gatherer ancestry in the Neolithic farmers after they arrive,” said co-author Dr Tom Booth, a specialist in ancient DNA from the Natural History Museum in London.

“That doesn’t mean they don’t mix at all, it just means that maybe their population sizes were too small to have left any kind of genetic legacy.”

Co-author Professor Mark Thomas, from UCL, said he also favoured “a numbers game explanation”.

Professor Thomas said the Neolithic farmers had probably had to adapt their practices to different climatic conditions as they moved across Europe. But by the time they reached Britain they were already “tooled up” and well-prepared for growing crops in a north-west European climate.

The study also analysed DNA from these British hunter-gatherers. One of the skeletons analysed was that of Cheddar Man, whose skeletal remains have been dated to 7,100BC.

He was the subject of a reconstruction unveiled at the Natural History Museum last year. DNA suggests that, like most other European hunter-gatherers of the time, he had dark skin combined with blue eyes.

Genetic analysis shows that the Neolithic farmers, by contrast, were paler-skinned with brown eyes and black or dark-brown hair.

Towards the end of the Neolithic, in about 2,450BC, the descendents of the first farmers were themselves almost entirely replaced when a new population – called the Bell Beaker people – migrated from mainland Europe. So Britain saw two extreme genetic shifts in the space of a few thousand years.

Prof Thomas said that this later event happened after the Neolithic population had been in decline for some time, both in Britain and across Europe. He cautioned against simplistic explanations invoking conflict, and said the shifts ultimately came down to “economic” factors, about which lifestyles were best suited to exploit the landscape.

Dr Booth explained: “It’s difficult to see whether the two [genetic shifts] could have anything in common – they’re two very different kinds of change. There’s speculation that they’re to some extent population collapses. But the reasons suggested for those two collapses are different, so it could just be coincidence.”

 

Comment:The so-called Cro Magnon man, the origin of our peoples, came initially from the mouth of the Volga River in Russia and, as a nomadic people, domesticated the wild horse and then spread up, via the Danube, into Europe, Scandinavia and western Russia as well as moving south.

These people had no traceable origin but simply appeared ca 35,000 years ago.

They were tall, very well-built, had reddish blonde hair and blue eyes.

They survived the last major ice age (that killed off the ape-like Neanderthal) and morphed into what we now call the Celts.

The Celt occupied all of Europe, northern Spain and Italy and were down to Macedonia. Alexander the Great was tall, well-built, had reddish blonde hair and blue eyes.

The northern Welsh, many of the French Bretons are the last of the Cro Magnons.

Their appearance on the scene is interesting in that there is no other trace of them.

They appeared but did not evolve.

The Neanderthal, on the other hand, did evolve from the monkey but the severe climate destroyed him.

He was very primitive, had a monkey skull and could not adapt.

Do tools belonging to Stone Age hunters found on U.S. east coast prove the first Americans came from Europe NOT Asia?

 

 

New discovery of European-style tools being heralded as among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for decades

Supports the theory that Stone Age humans could make the 1500 mile journey across the Atlantic during Ice Age

February 28, 2012

by Jill Reilly

Daily Mail/UK

 

America was first discovered by Stone Age hunters from Europe, according to new archaeological evidence.

Across six locations on the U.S. east coast, several dozen stone tools have been found.

After close analysis it was discovered that they were between 19,000 and 26,000 years old and were a European-style of tool.

The discovery suggests that the owners of the tools arrived 10,000 years before the ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World, reported The Independent.

Finding the tools is being heralded as one of the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades.

Archaeologists are hopeful that they will add another dimension to understanding the spread of humans across the world.

Three of the sites were discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware, while another one is in Pennsylvania and a fifth site is in Virginia.

Fishermen discovered a sixth on a seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast, which in prehistoric times would have been dry land.

Previous similar discoveries before the recent artefacts, dated back 15,000 years ago, which was long after Stone Age Europeans had stopped making those tools, and as a consequence, most archaeologists had refuted any possibility of a connection.

But the age of the newly-discovered tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago and are virtually exactly the same as western European materials from that time, reported The Independent.

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, were the two leading archaeologists who analysed  the evidence.

They have argued that Stone Age humans were able to make the 1500 mile journey across the Atlantic ice and suggested that from Western Europe, Stone Age people migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age.

About three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year at the peak of the Ice Age.

However, beyond the ice, the lure of the open ocean began would have been extremely rich in food resources for hunters.

But until now there was relatively little evidence to support their thinking.

They are presenting their theory and evidence in a new book – Across Atlantic Ice – which is published this month.

Buoyed by the recent discovery, archaeologists are now turning to new locations in Tennessee, Maryland and even Texas, all sites which are they believe will produce more Stone Age evidence.

But most of the areas where the newcomers stepped off the ice on to dry land are now up to 100 miles out to sea – along with any possible evidence.

 

Strange, and grossly inaccurate, Evangelical Christian View of Cro-Magnon

The Bible recounts the sweep of human history, from the first man, Adam, to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and finally, Jesus Christ. In this panoply of amazing people, places, and events, where do the fossils and artifacts of “early man” belong?

When a couple of German quarry workers stumbled upon a Neanderthal fossil in a cave in the Neander Valley, back in 1856, paleoanthropology (the study of early humans) vaulted into the limelight. And popular interest has never died down.

As the findings of early human fossils and artifacts continue to pile up, the story has become even more interesting and complicated. Remains from hundreds of different individuals have been discovered so far. They range from the southern tip of Africa to Russia’s frigid Siberian mountains and the tropical islands of Indonesia.

Most paleoanthropology books show charts and maps similar to these. So how do creationists explain the timing and location of these early human remains from a biblical perspective?

The earliest human remains are found in Ice Age deposits near Babel. By the middle of the Ice Age, however, human remains were scattered over three continents. New variations eventually appeared in different regions, such as Neanderthals in Europe. But by the end of the Ice Age, most of these variations disappeared. It is only at this late stage in the Ice Age that we find human remains in the Americas.

Time of “Cavemen”

Let’s first consider the timetable of these early fossils. The Bible gives invaluable clues.

First Cavemen After Babel

First, we know that the entire human race consisted of eight individuals at the end of the Flood, around 2350 BC. This was one “family,” but four were women who married into Noah’s line. So the maximum number of family lines who brought their genes onto the Ark was five (four potentially unrelated women, and one line of men).

Furthermore, we know that all humans who settled the planet after the Flood were descended from Noah’s three sons: “These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated” (Genesis 9:19). According to Genesis 11, they had many sons and daughters, including Canaan, whose descendants eventually founded the Canaanite cities where Abraham later sojourned.

Noah’s growing family eventually moved en masse to the plain of Shinar (in modern Iraq), where they decided to build a city.

No cavemen yet.

The dispersion from this first city, Babel, sets the oldest time limit for the humans whose remains occasionally appear in caves. The Bible does not give a specific date for this event; but it does say that the earth was “divided” in the days of Peleg, five generations after Noah; and presumably this is a reference to Babel. If the dispersion from Babel occurred at Peleg’s birth, the earliest date would be one century after the Flood, around 2250 BC according to the Masoretic text.

Last Cavemen Before Abraham

The dispersion from Babel explains when humans first spread over the continents. But at what point in biblical history did the men and women known as Neanderthals and their kin disappear?

Solving that mystery is a little more complicated.

An important clue is that all these humans are found in surface deposits associated with the post-Flood Ice Age (conventionally labeled as the Pleistocene). Their bones appear buried alongside extinct Ice Age animals, such as mammoths and stegodons.

The book of Genesis does not specifically mention this relatively brief era of worldwide climate change, but glaciers left grim reminders of their destructive power throughout northern Europe, Asia, and North America, as well as the mountainous highlands of Africa, South America, and South Asia.

The Ice Age began after the Flood and eventually came to an end. Again, the Bible provides us with important clues to establish rough dates. By Abraham’s day, around 2000 BC, cities had cropped up throughout the Middle East. None of the Neanderthals and their Ice Age cousins are found associated with any of these cities. Nor do we find any remains of Ice Age animals associated with these settlements.

In fact, any charcoal from Ice Age deposits consistently dates earlier than anything from the cities. For instance, ten Neanderthals were found in an Iraqi cave north of Babel (Shanidar Cave), dating before any city in this region. Similarly, Neanderthal fossils are found in caves of Israel, such as Skuhl Cave at Mount Carmel, but the remains date before the earliest Canaanite cities, such as Jericho.

One basic relative sequence in the successive post-Flood surface layers is not disputed: the Ice Age preceded the warmer period we are in today. Since the remains in all known cities postdate the Ice Age and have no Ice Age remains, it appears the effects of the Ice Age had waned before the establishment of the cities where Abraham sojourned.

Location of Human Fossils

The Bible gives the timeframe for the spread of early humans. But what about the location of their remains?

Genesis does not give many details about the geography immediately after Babel, but it is not hard to fill in some of the gaps. At the height of the Ice Age, so much water was bound up in ice that the ocean level plummeted 330 feet (100 m) below today’s level. The earth’s landscape was very different from today. The best spots for raising a family were much different than they are now!

Compounding the problem of establishing permanent settlements was the shifting climate, heavy rains, and unstable earth in the years after the global Flood cataclysm. The geology from this era indicates that massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions still rocked parts of the earth, dwarfing any local catastrophes we observe today.

It is easy to imagine why the early human populations kept migrating.

As Noah’s children overspread the earth, they needed temporary shelter. We can see why they might have sometimes needed to stay in caves for convenience.4 Caves would also be an excellent place for them to preserve the bodies of their loved ones.

Early Fossils Near Babel

Yet the families survived, as we can see in the record of Genesis 11. So we would not expect to find a trail of bodies from Babel to their new destinations. Instead, we would expect to find humans and artifacts suddenly cropping up at destinations all around Babel.

And that’s what we find in the fossil record. Except for a few stone tools and some footprints left in volcanic ash in East Africa, we do not find human remains in any post-Flood deposits until suddenly they appear in multiple regions in the same relative level of the Lower Pleistocene

The earliest human fossils are found in regions around Babel. They are similar in appearance, often labeled Homo erectus.

By the middle of the Ice Age, families were scattered across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Fossils and stone tools in East Africa and Central Asia have been dated from the same general time period. In fact, these fossils are so close in time that experts debate which came first. Specifically, human fossils were discovered in the mountainous region north of Babel (the Republic of Georgia) and appear to be as old as anything found in East Africa.

These human fossils—and their stone tools—are strikingly similar everywhere they are found in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene layers5 These people had large brow ridges, small chins, and receding foreheads. Although experts sometimes give the fossils different names in different regions, they recognize the similarities and agree they could be called by one name.(They usually call them Homo erectus.)

Later Variation Among Fossils  

In upper deposits (Upper Pleistocene), a fascinating variety appears among Noah’s descendants. These human remains are located in a much greater range of places at the very farthest reaches of Europe, South Africa, and East Asia .

The fossils also show a great variety of physical features. The Bible hints that God created the human body capable of a wider variety of forms than we see today. The giant Goliath, for instance, stood over 9 feet (3 m) tall. But these Ice Age deposits show us still other possibilities in God’s design, such as the 3-foot-tall (1 m) “hobbit” (Homo floresiensis) humans found on the Indonesian island of Flores.

While it is difficult to distinguish family resemblances just from bones, some seem pretty clear among the later Ice Age fossils of each region. In European sites we find the first human families with Neanderthal features, while in Africa we find another family variation with high foreheads and protruding chins (like us today). Meanwhile in Asia, the fossils generally have the pronounced brow ridges and other features associated with the earlier Homo erectus fossils.

Neanderthals’ compact body shape would have made them well suited for cold weather, similar to the Inuits (sometimes called Eskimos) of North America’s Arctic regions today. As hunting ranges in Europe were covered in ice, it would have made sense for the Neanderthals to move south into the Middle East, even if it meant displacing other people there. That might explain why Neanderthals are found buried at certain soil levels in caves in Israel, with other people found in layers before and after them.

Interestingly, the human remains at the end the Ice Age display only one variation of the human physique: people with protruding chins and high foreheads like ours. In Europe, these people are known as Cro-Magnon, but the difference between them and us is inconsequential.

End of the Ice Age

Not a single Neanderthal, Homo erectus, or hobbit fossil has ever been found in the topmost layers. They only appear with Ice Age plants and animals, which are now extinct.

The last Neanderthal fossils are found in locations in southern France and Gibraltar, while Cro-Magnons appear in the more recent layers, above them. The same pattern is repeated elsewhere. Apparently, Neanderthals and their cousins died off about the same time that the Ice Age ended.

Genesis then picks up the human narrative with Abraham. Even in his day, caves still were in use. Genesis mentions that Lot fled to a cave to avoid God’s judgment (Genesis 19:30), and Abraham bought a cave to bury his dead (Genesis 23:8–20). Their function may give us a clue about the role of caves among post-Babel migrants. Caves were temporary hiding places or convenient places to preserve the bodies of loved ones, but they were not normal living spaces.

By Job’s day, cave dwellers had earned a bad reputation. “Civilized” folk did not live in caves. “Cavemen” tended to be oppressed people who had lost their homes (Job 24:4–8) or bandits and loners who had left civilized society and behaved like wild animals (Job 30:3–8).

While we still have a lot to explain and understand, the overall picture is clear. The two hundred years or so after Babel (over 300 years after the Flood) was a chaotic transition in world history. The Bible gives us only a brief glimpse into that time and place, but the fossils hint at a grim tale.

Thankfully the human story does not end there. Indeed, the Bible passes over this transitional period with only a brief mention, and then picks up with God’s promise to Abraham—to bless all peoples through His promised seed, the Savior Jesus Christ. And that promise includes every sinner and outcast—ultimately every one of us.

 

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Margaret Hunter

Creationists have, if nothing else, come up with some pretty amazing arguments, such as the banana argument, the peanut butter argument, pygmies+dwarfs and the evergreen “why are there still monkeys?” to mention a few. Margaret Hunter has an argument that, although it can’t perhaps quite compete with the aforementioned ones, is definitely in the same league.

Who is Hunter? Apparently she is a self-described mathematician (we haven’t verified her credentials) and the owner of Bible Charts and Maps in Duck, West Virginia. She also has a vanity press book. We haven’t read that one, but it came accompanied by a press release containing an argument that, if it is representative for the contents of the book, suggests that it is a unique experience. The press release was titled “Amazing Bible Timeline Highlights Math Supports Creationism,” and the argument concerns “the twelve events stated in the Biblical account of creation.” You see, “[s]cience has actually confirmed that these events are not only correct but they are stated in the correct order.” Naturally, Hunter wondered: “Without prior scientific knowledge, what are the chances Moses guessed the correct order of Earth’s evolution or creation when he wrote Genesis?” And she calculated that it must be “Less Than 1 Chance in 479 Million Moses Made Up The Creation Account.” Oh, yeah. Of course, she overlooked the fact that it’s not like it would have been a random guess (you don’t need to know much science to figure out that the Earth must be created before the plants, for instance). She also overlooked the fact that Moses didn’t get the chronology even remotely correct (light being created before the sun and the stars, plants being created before animals and so on). But you know. Details. Jesus.

Diagnosis: Astonishing crackpottery. It’s probably pretty harmless, though, and will hardly recruit many non-crazy people to the anti-science movement.

A standard ploy among denialists is to offer pseudo-challenges to scientists to prove that the scientific fact they deny is true or that their pseudoscientific delusions are false – where the protocol for testing or standards of proof are set by them, of course, to ensure that they will (with some exceptions) never be satisfied. Kent Hovind’s $250,000 challenge is probably the most famous, but Ray Comfort’s $10,000 prize to anyone who can present a “genuine living transitional form” has received its share of scorn as well (Comfort defines a transitional form as “a lizard that produced a bird, or a dog that produced kittens, or a sheep that produced a chicken, or even as Archaeopteryx–a dinosaur that produced a bird,” which is not what a transitional form is, making the challenge an impossible one). Deepak Chopra’s “explain consciousness” challenge is arguably even dumber.

 

Billy DeMoss

Billy DeMoss is a California-based chiropractor who seems to have an unconditional love for all things pseudoscience and free of evidence, from cleansing to antivaccine conspiracies. He is, in particular, a big fan of Andrew Wakefield, going so far as to calling Wakefield his “mentor”. For that, DeMoss argues, he is targeted by Big Pharma. They are desperate to hide the truth and deliberately poisoning us (oral contraceptives, for instance, is a conspiracy to give women breast cancer), and they are out to get him, and … oh, well – let’s just let him tell us in his own words:

“… do you always believe the official story spoon fed to you by the ‘big brother’ controlled media?…I was just thinking still to this day that no one has ever shown US a video of a Boeing hitting the Pentagon?…especially with all the surveillance around the area and people’s video prowess… and I am sure a terrorist could definitely fly a jet with such precision as to not even scrape the ground at 500mph…and of course the plane evaporated on contact…Oh yes I am sure a Boeing could fit in that huge hole and what happened to building 7?…one of 3 steel framed buildings that collapsed(were actually demoed) from fire when not one steel frame building has EVER collapsed in history…so go ahead and believe that EBOLA is coming to the US just like H1N1,SARS,BERD FLU caused massive epidemics that we prevented by yet another moronic vaccine…believe the CDC that vaccines DON’T cause Autism and that vaccines REALLY make you healthier…keep chanting the mantra ‘vacines DON’T cause Autism,vaccines DON’T cause Autim,vaccines DON;T cause Autism…believe in Sandy Hoax and so many other stories that are sold as REAL news to create FEAR and sell an AGENDA for the NWO…keep vaccinating yourselves,use that fluoride for you dental health,eat GMO fake food,watch lots of TV,do as your doctor says and take your dope and NEVER change your lifestyle because ALL your problems are genetic…keep it up the agenda is working very well at dumbing you dumber!!!”

Diagnosis: Let’s get up for Billy DeMoss, shall we? Thank you for playing. .

Jock Doubleday

Jock Doubleday, also known as the director or Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc. and the author of such intriguing works as ‘The Burning Time (Stories of the Modern-day Persecution of Midwives)’ and ‘Lolita Shrugged (THE MYTH OF AGE-SPECIFIC MATURITY )’ has, in the same vein, gained himself some ridicule for his offer of “$75,000.00 to the first medical doctor or pharmaceutical company CEO who publicly drinks a mixture of standard vaccine additives ingredients in the same amount as a six-year-old child is recommended to receive under the year-2005 guidelines of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (In the event that thimerosal has recently been removed from a particular vaccine, the thimerosal-containing version of that vaccine will be used.)” The mixture will be body weight calibrated. By 2006 Doubleday claimed that “14 doctors, or persons claiming to be doctors, have contacted me about publicly drinking the vaccine additives mixture. None have followed through.” And to ensure that no one actually follows through with the challenge, Doubleday has created a pretty substantial list of criteria to be satisfied: Any participant must go through a psychiatric evaluation, a history of any mental health based counseling, an email exam of 10 questions regarding vaccine theory and history, compulsory purchase and reading of at last five altmed anti-vaccine books, a 20 question written exam, a certificate of good health, and so on and so forth. In short: You’re not going to pass; just forget it. In fact, several doctors have approached Doubleday, but they have all been rejected by him because of various details with regard to their application or because Doubleday just rejected them – it is, after all, up to him to determine whether the challenger is eligible). Of course, the test itself has been passed with flying colors: In 1996 a German guy ingested a dose of at least 1500 times the maximum dose of thimerosal a 6-year old with a complete vaccine history would theoretically have received in one go (weight adjusted!). It seems to have been unpleasant, but the guy recovered completely and did not develop autism.

Doubleday is, of course, a hardcore anti-vaxx loon. Not only are vaccines dangerous, “vaccines have never been shown by science to prevent any disease (you’d need a long-term controlled study for that).” Yeah, it’s kind of precisely like claiming that no one has shown that falling to the ground from 9000 feet is harmful. And no, Doubleday doesn’t understand science, or how evidence is measured, at all. Not that it would matter; all the science in the world wouldn’t change Doubleday’s mind, since it is all a conspiracy. Writes Doubleday: “There is a dark force working to undermine all ecosystems on Earth. This force is a trans-century cult that calls itself the Illuminati – because its members believe that one day they will be ‘illuminated’ and become gods on Earth. Illuminati members have infiltrated all world politics and control all financial systems. They have engineered the present financial crisis and they are responsible for the events of 9/11 and for the majority of false-flag events in recent history. Through war and other means, they are responsible for the hyper-poisoning of the planet.” Why they would be deliberately trying to undermine “all ecosystems” is a bit unclear, but Morgoth and Ungoliant, Skynet, the Harkonnens and the aliens in the classic documentary “They Live” have all been up to stuff like that before.

Diagnosis: Mike Adams, Sherri Tenpenny and Ken Adachi all rolled into one, only dumber (well … less influential, at least). A joke, really

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

April 16, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

 

Conversation No. 5

Date:  Friday, March 22, 1996

Commenced:  8:15 AM CST

Concluded: 8:45 AM CST

RTC: Up early, aren’t you, Gregory?

GD: Actually, I haven’t been to bed yet, Robert. Been reading a really interesting paper someone sent me about the Clintons. Such lovely people. Of course, I can’t do anything with it but I will make Xerox copies and send them off. Costs money and no paper would dare to even ask questions. Such sleazy crooks, Robert. Roosevelt stole but he had some class after all.

RTC: Do you think they shot that Foster man?

GD: I have no idea. It was the convenient death of a man who knew far too much, Robert. Have you any comments?

RTC: Bill is utterly ruthless and his shrew of a wife is one step behind him. They would have ordered it, for certain, but one does not know.

GD: I saw the in situ pictures from the Virginia park police of the body. Poor Vince. His last act was to defy the law of gravity. He was lying in the park with his head pointing down a hillside but the dried blood all ran up. Isn’t that wonderful?

RTC: Some of those people are mindless, Gregory. But that doesn’t mean he was murdered. Someone might have dumped the stiff there to get him out of the White House.

GD: Well, false in one thing, false in all, as they used to say. Frau Clinton looks like a bimbo who could put kittens into a microwave and have a real laugh. She was tied up with the Black Panthers in Oakland some years ago. I have a California police report about that. A friend in Sacramento sent me a copy about a day before the FBI came and removed the original. Caught in the sack with a nice black lassie, she was. They went to Sacramento, the Panthers and the gun moll, and they sported guns there and terrified people. The late night motel raid was the result. Well, I could send that around too but we would never hear a word about it.

RTC: Our people had connections with Bill when he was the governor there. Used to bring drugs in from Mexico and land them downstate. Arkansas is about as backwards as Kenya these days and Bill had no problem sticking a bag full of cash in his sock drawer. Oh, well, if it weren’t for the crooked pol, none of us could make an honest buck.

GD: Ah, Robert, that’s just what the Indian hooker said when the bank teller told her one of her twenties was counterfeit.

RTC: Now that’s a good one, Gregory.

GD: I thought so, Robert. Oh how about the whore who, when told by another teller in another bank, that a hundred was fake, ‘My God, I’ve been raped!’

RTC: Fun and games so early in the day.

GD: Yes, I suppose so. When I’m working…doing research…I’m very quiet and very focused on my work but all of the nasty comments and so on are just a form of relief. I have known a few CIA people in my life but you are the first one with whom I can have a nice talk. The others like to think that their feces smell like lilacs in bloom. They ask much and give little.

RTC: I see your point but you don’t fully grasp the techniques. No one wants to talk with you, Gregory, because while they are interrogating you, you are interrogating them and, let me be very clear on this as Nixon would have said, you are way and above any of them and certainly their superior  in the interrogation business. If one of them makes the slightest slip, you pounce on the knowledge and he loses control. You have a phenomenal memory and the ability to use it in a very abstract and very deadly manner. You know this, naturally, but always complain that people behave like swine around you. I agree they do. Kimmel is an example of this. Actually, they are afraid of you, Gregory, really afraid. I don’t mean that you’ll pull a knife or gun and do them but they cannot control you and when they cannot control a person or a situation, they panic. They live by rule books and you do not. May I ask you a question here?

GD: Surely.

RTC: Do you work for anyone?

GD: Like the Germans or the Russians? Or the Chinese? No, I work for myself. I hate working for other people who only want you to support the views of their superiors. If they want this or that to be a certain way and I see very clearly that they are wrong, I have to be silent or become a toady. For example, Gehlen told me that in ’48, the Army…he worked for them just before your people took him over…Critchfield that is…Gehlen told me that the Army wanted him to prepare a paper showing that the Russians were going to attack Western Europe. Gehlen said this was impossible. He said the Russians had torn up all the railroad lines in their Zone and sent the rails back to Russia. Obviously, they could not rush troops to the border except on bicycles or mules. And of the 135 Russian armored units technically…note that I said technically…stationed in their Zone, almost all of them were just cadre with perhaps ten officers and men and no armored units. No, our people needed a dangerous enemy against whom to arm. Revisiting the business heyday of the war was the right idea but, of course, without real dangers. We knew the Russians were not going to attack but the report, lies that it contained, was deliberately leaked by the Army to Congress and others. Hey presto! A Cold War starts. We had to rearm and stop the reduction of our Army. Oh yes, the Generals did not want to lose their cushy jobs and the American industrial people were cooing with delight over all the contracts for aircraft, bombs, rifles, tanks and battleships that they all knew would never be used. No, that was all a deliberate sham and designed to make the elite people richer. Of course the film industry and the media cranked out horror stories about the evil Stalin’s plans to attack us. Christ, they were terrified we would nuke Moscow like we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I can see the first attack but the second was not needed. The Japanese immediately indicated they would surrender but the military wanted to try out another bomb with a different approach. Just for fun as it were.

RTC: Well, and here we are, Gregory. Reagan played high stakes poker with the Russians and made them fold their hand. We beat them. No war, no destruction, was there?

GD: No there was not but what do we do now? Our greedy businessmen now try to loot Russia and strip her of her natural resources. We could try to make an ally of her, why not? No one needs an enemy.

RTC: Too many people in power remember the propaganda of the Cold War, Gregory and their mind sets are so strong that logic would scarcely move them.

GD: It’s too bad I am not in control. Can you see that, Robert?

RTC: You would be dead in a week, Gregory.

GD: Not if I got to them first.

RTC: Well, what would you do?

GD: Divide and conquer and the ones who wanted a turf war, would quickly end up under it. My main crime is a faint conscience. You can’t be moral when dealing with dung-munchers.

 

(Concluded at 8:45AM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

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