TBR News August 6, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. August 5, 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 August 6 :” I see in the media that citizens of the world are supposed to put on their tiny green hats and get their legislators to Do Something About Climate Change. My God, the morons are taking over everywhere. No one can change the current climate. These airheads think some crooked politicians can do something about drastic weather? Perhaps they can get the sun to rise in the west or stop the heat waves by jumping up and down and singing ‘Kumbaya’ at the top of their lungs. True Christians know Jesus will get Elon Musk to transport them to the heaven of Mars and then they, too, can join hands and sing ‘Shall We Gather by the River?’”
The Table of Contents
- Trump referred to immigrant ‘invasion’ in 2,000 Facebook ads, analysis reveals
- El Paso Gunman’s Fear of a Migrant “Invasion” Echoes Donald Trump and Fox News
- Quarter of world’s population faces high water stress
- Water scarcity
- Parousia: The Elevation of Fiction for the Dim of Wit
- What is Ricin?
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
Trump referred to immigrant ‘invasion’ in 2,000 Facebook ads, analysis reveals
President’s campaign ads on social media use language similar to that of El Paso suspect’s manifesto
August 5, 2019
by Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
The Guardian
Donald Trump blamed the internet and social media for the “racist hate” displayed by the suspect in the El Paso massacre, but his own re-election campaign has characterized immigration as an “invasion” in more than 2,000 Facebook ads this year.
The president said the internet provided a “dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds” on Monday, in his first public remarks about the mass shootings that left 22 dead in El Paso, Texas, and another nine dead in Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend.
“The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate,” he said. “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet, and stop mass murders before they start.”
The white nationalist screed by the suspect in the El Paso shooting was indeed posted in one of the those dark corners of the web: the extremist message board 8chan.
But the language used by the alleged killer replicates language used by Trump, and his re-election campaign, not in any obscure forum but on his official Facebook and Twitter pages. The second sentence of the manifesto – “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” – echoes white nationalist rhetoric falsely asserting that people of Latino or Hispanic descent represent an “invasion” in the United States. Trump has used similar language on numerous occasions.
Trump’s campaign has used the word “invasion” to describe migrants seeking entry at the US-Mexico border in 2,199 Facebook ads since January, according to a Guardian analysis of Facebook’s political ad archive. Those ads have been viewed between 1,059,000 and 5,559,801 times by Facebook users and cost the Trump campaign between $7,900 and $241,601 to promote. (Facebook reports spending and performance of ads as a range.)
There are dozens of variations on the video clips in each ad, but just two variants of the copy.
The first version reads in part: “The crisis at the Southern Border is even worse than most understand. I have taken MULTIPLE trips to the border to show the true invasion happening but the Democrats and the Fake News Media just won’t listen. THE TIME IS NOW. WE NEED TO SECURE OUR BORDER! Nancy and Chuck have made it clear that they don’t want to know your opinions on how to keep America safe. They don’t want to know why you want the wall. But I do.”
Donald Trump has used the word ‘invasion’ in over 2,000 Facebook ads since January
This ad copy was used with different short videos, including one with a voiceover from Trump saying, “Liberals care more about illegal immigrants than they do about our own citizens. It’s time to put America first. We need border security,” playing over what appears to be footage of migrants running toward the border wall.
The ad encouraged users to click on an “official secure the border survey”, which then asks users to provide their contact information and identify their top concerns about the border from the following list: “Drug trafficking, criminals, MS-13 gang members, sex trafficking, illegal aliens, terrorists, all of the above.”
The second version of ad copy reads in part: “We have an INVASION! So we are BUILDING THE WALL to STOP IT. Dems will sue us. But we want a SAFE COUNTRY! It’s CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION. Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have not negotiated in good faith to fund a wall at our Southern Border, proving that OBSTRUCTION is far more important to them than YOUR SAFETY. I cannot allow America’s safety and security to be put at risk any longer. We need the wall, and I must put AMERICA FIRST!”
These ads ran with various short videos that largely used dark and foreboding music over dark and moody images, including a series that featured pixelated images of concertina wire against a dark sky, with the slogan: “America’s safety is at risk. This is a national emergency.”
These ads linked to a fundraising page rising money for Trump’s campaign.
The “invasion” advertisements appear to have been most successful among older women. Of the 372 versions of the ads that received at least 1,000 impressions – a figure referring to the number of people who see an ad – Facebook’s data revealed that 175 (47%) garnered the most impressions from women older than 55. Young men (between 25 and 34) and middle-aged men (between 55-64) were the other groups most likely to have been shown the ads. These demographic results are based in part on how a campaign chooses to target its ads and in part on how users respond to them.
The most successful of the “invasion” ads ran on 23 January with the second version of the copy. It was viewed by between 100,000 and 199,000 Facebook users, of whom 23.7% were men aged 25 to 34 and about 8% were from Texas. The Trump campaign spent between $500 and $999 to promote the ad.
The threatening tenor of these ads is not unusual for Trump’s social media campaign. Since the beginning of the year, Trump has spent more than $8.7m on Facebook advertising, much of it designed to inspire outrage or fear. Other frequent topics include the border wall, “fake news” and “socialism”.
Another noteworthy ad campaign addressed the migrant “caravan” from Central America that became a fixation of conservative cable news and politicians as it traveled through Mexico in the weeks before the midterms. The ads did not include the word “invasion” in the copy, but did use it in a video voiceover, which said: “America cannot allow this invasion. The migrant caravan must be stopped.” The set of six ads were launched on 5 November 2018 – the day before the US congressional elections.
Facebook pulled the ads amid public outcry, but not before they were viewed by at least a million people. The video spot was also pulled from NBC and rejected by Fox News and CNN.
The group most likely to have seen the caravan ads on Facebook before they were removed was men aged 25-34 in Florida and Arizona.
Since Trump’s remarks on Monday morning, the set of approximately 1,000 Facebook ads his campaign is running have focused on selling campaign merchandise, including plastic straws, beer cozies and baseball caps. He is also running 28 ads featuring the slogan “Latinos for Trump”.
Peter Andringa contributed reporting
El Paso Gunman’s Fear of a Migrant “Invasion” Echoes Donald Trump and Fox News
August 5, 2019
by Robert Mackey
The Intercept
The white supremacist who killed at least 22 people in El Paso, Texas on Saturday appears to have been driven by a racist conspiracy theory — that the United States is under “invasion” by migrants and asylum-seekers from Central America — which has been repeated again and again on Fox News broadcasts, and amplified by that network’s most powerful viewer, President Donald Trump.
As Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official, pointed out, it is hard to read even the first page of the suspected gunman’s manifesto, about the supposed “Hispanic invasion” he aimed to repel, without hearing echoes of the toxic rhetoric Trump absorbs from Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and then passes on at rallies and in tweets.
“There are literally straight lines between what the terrorist believes and what is repeated daily by conservative media outlets and the U.S. president,” Friedman observed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is running for the presidency, said the poisonous influence of Fox had to be acknowledged.
Indeed, the steady drumbeat of invasion rhetoric from the network and the president over the past two years suggests that they are locked in a feedback loop, working together to generate an ever-intensifying level of paranoia and frenzy in their shared fan base.
On Monday, Trump read prepared remarks in which he cast blame on social media for spreading hatred, and completely avoided the fact that his own words, and those broadcast by his favorite television channel, play a hugely significant role in the spread of racist ideology online.
Elizabeth Warren quickly rejected Trump’s claim that “mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,” by writing on Twitter: “White supremacy is not a mental illness. We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism. And we need to call out Donald Trump for amplifying these deadly ideologies.”
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana who is currently running to replace Trump, said on Sunday that “the ultimate amplifier on this kind of hate is the bully pulpit of the White House.”
Pete Buttigieg
✔ @PeteButtigieg
Will the President of the United States leave his golf resort, go back to Washington, address the nation, condemn—in no uncertain terms—white nationalism, and call for the Senate to convene tomorrow to enact at least the most basic gun safety reforms that most Americans want?
On Saturday, Buttigieg told reporters in Las Vegas that “America is under attack by lethal, violent, white nationalist terrorism.” When he suggested that the government needed to take action to counter the radicalization of Americans, I asked him if the president was a factor in radicalizing white nationalists like the El Paso attacker and the gunman who killed 11 American Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October. Buttigieg said that the president was guilty of “condoning white nationalism.”
Former congressman Beto O’Rourke, another Democratic presidential candidate who is from El Paso, told MSNBC on Monday that “this president’s open racism is also an invitation to violence.”
“The writing has been on the wall since his maiden speech coming down that escalator calling immigrants ‘rapists and criminals,’” O’Rourke added. “The actions that follow cannot surprise us. And anyone who is surprised is part of this problem right now — including members of the media who ask: ‘Hey Beto, do you think the president is racist?’ Well, Jesus Christ, of course he’s racist. He’s been racist from day one — before day one, when he questioned if Barack Obama was born in the United States.”
Even before Trump entered politics, Fox gave copious air time to fringe extremists who characterized immigrants as a secret invasion force. One frequent guest was Michelle Malkin, the author of “Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.” Another was the Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, who compared the arrival of migrants to the D-Day invasion in a speech to Congress in 2014, in which he said, “in just two months, we’ve had nearly 300,000 people invade the United States through Texas.”
In recent months, however, the network, and the president, have clearly been using this rhetoric of invasion to instill fear in voters ahead of elections.
According to Natalie Martinez, a researcher on extremism for Media Matters for America, Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign has run more than 2,000 Facebook ads warning of a coming invasion.
There was also a noticeable uptick in the rhetoric before the midterm elections last year, as Trump barnstormed the country issuing dire warnings about a caravan of asylum seekers whose every move was reported on Fox as akin to an approaching army. (In fact, the manufactured panic was so obvious, one Fox News anchor, Shepard Smith even debunked it on air.)
That pre-election scare campaign was presaged earlier in 2018 by hysteria over a previous caravan of asylum seekers who were described as an invading horde by Fox News hosts and guests like Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who has defended white supremacy
“If you’re wondering why America is not anything like the country you grew up in, this is why,” Tucker Carlson told Fox News viewers in April of last year, describing the arrival of undocumented immigrants. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time, or will our leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?” he asked.
Closing the feedback loop, Carlson then quoted a tweet from Trump, in which the president called on Congress to change the asylum laws. “Act now Congress, our country is being stolen!” Trump wrote.
In 2017, one of Trump’s favorite Fox hosts, Pete Hegseth, referred to the immigration of Muslims to Britain — from that country’s former colonies — as “a silent invasion.”
As Cristina López G., the deputy director of extremism at Media Matters, explained in HuffPost last year, in 2015, Fox News used the term invasion “to spread anti-Muslim rhetoric in the context of the European refugee crisis.” That September, Bill O’Reilly called the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East “The Muslim Invasion.”
Trump embraced this rhetoric during his 2016 campaign for the presidency. Trump’s closing argument in that campaign, overseen by Steve Bannon, seemed to embrace a version of the so-called “great replacement” theory developed by white supremacists in Europe — the idea that there is a secret conspiracy to “import” Muslims from the Middle East and Africa to dilute the Christian character of the continent by making it a multicultural society.
As The Intercept reported at the time, Trump’s final campaign commercial even used footage of Syrian migrants walking from Hungary to Germany, taken from the internet without permission and passed it off as video of immigrants streaming across the border from Mexico into the United States.
Quarter of world’s population faces high water stress
A quarter of the world’s population lives in countries where water demand threatens to outstrip supply. Forty-four countries are under extremely high or high water stress.
August 6, 2019
by Chase Winter
DW
Seventeen countries that are home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population face “extremely high” levels of water stress, according to a report released Tuesday.
The World Resources Institute’s (WRI) “Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas” ranked water stress using 13 hydrological risk indicators.
In the 17 worst impacted countries, “irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year,” WRI said.
“Such a narrow gap between supply and demand leaves countries vulnerable to fluctuations like droughts or increased water withdrawals,” the report said, warning that communities are facing “Day Zeros” and other crises.
Qatar, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, UAE, San Marino, Bahrain, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Oman and Botswana made up the top 17.
Twelve of the 17 worst countries are in the Middle East and North Africa, where pressure on already scarce water resources has been compounded by rapidly growing demand and climate change.
India ranked 13 in overall water stress, but has a population three times larger than the other 17 extremely highly stressed countries combined. WRI said that in addition to rivers, lakes and streams being overused, groundwater resources are overdrawn to provide water for irrigation.
Another 27 countries ranked for “high baseline water stress.”
The report highlighted that even in countries with low levels of water stress there are pockets of high stress. While South Africa and the United States ranked 48 and 71 on WRI’s list, respectively, Western Cape Province and New Mexico have extremely high water stress level
Water scarcity
Wikipdia
Water scarcity is the lack of fresh water resources to meet water demand. It affects every continent and was listed in 2019 by the World Economic Forum as one of the largest global risks in terms of potential impact over the next decade.[1] It is manifested by partial or no satisfaction of expressed demand, economic competition for water quantity or quality, disputes between users, irreversible depletion of groundwater, and negative impacts on the environment.[2] One-third of the global population (2 billion people) live under conditions of severe water scarcity at least 1 month of the year.[3][4][5][6] Half a billion people in the world face severe water scarcity all year round.[3] Half of the world’s largest cities experience water scarcity.[5]
A mere 0.014% of all water on Earth is both fresh and easily accessible. Of the remaining water, 97% is saline and a little less than 3% is hard to access. Technically, there is a sufficient amount of freshwater on a global scale. However, due to unequal distribution (exacerbated by climate change) resulting in some very wet and some very dry geographic locations, plus a sharp rise in global freshwater demand in recent decades driven by industry, humanity is facing a water crisis. Demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40% in 2030, if current trends continue.[5][7]
The essence of global water scarcity is the geographic and temporal mismatch between freshwater demand and availability.[8][9] The increasing world population, improving living standards, changing consumption patterns, and expansion of irrigated agriculture are the main driving forces for the rising global demand for water.[10][11] Climate change, such as altered weather-patterns (including droughts or floods), deforestation, increased pollution, green house gases, and wasteful use of water can cause insufficient supply.[12] At the global level and on an annual basis, enough freshwater is available to meet such demand, but spatial and temporal variations of water demand and availability are large, leading to (physical) water scarcity in several parts of the world during specific times of the year.[3] All causes of water scarcity are related to human interference with the water cycle. Scarcity varies over time as a result of natural hydrological variability, but varies even more so as a function of prevailing economic policy, planning and management approaches. Scarcity can be expected to intensify with most forms of economic development, but, if correctly identified, many of its causes can be predicted, avoided or mitigated.[2]
Some countries have already proven that decoupling water use from economic growth is possible. For example, in Australia, water consumption declined by 40% between 2001 and 2009 while the economy grew by more than 30%.[13] The International Resource Panel of the UN states that governments have tended to invest heavily in largely inefficient solutions: mega-projects like dams, canals, aqueducts, pipelines and water reservoirs, which are generally neither environmentally sustainable nor economically viable. The most cost-effective way of decoupling water use from economic growth, according to the scientific panel, is for governments to create holistic water management plans that take into account the entire water cycle: from source to distribution, economic use, treatment, recycling, reuse and return to the environment.[13]
Glaciers
Glaciers are noted as a vital water source due to their contribution to stream flow. Rising global temperatures have noticeable effects on the rate at which glaciers melt, causing glaciers in general to shrink worldwide.[29] Although the meltwater from these glaciers are increasing the total water supply for the present, the disappearance of glaciers in the long term will diminish available water resources. Increased meltwater due to rising global temperatures can also have negative effects such as flooding of lakes and dams and catastrophic results.[30]
According to a UN climate report, the Himalayan glaciers that are the sources of Asia’s biggest rivers – Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Yellow – could disappear by 2035 as temperatures rise.[59] It was later revealed that the source used by the UN climate report actually stated 2350, not 2035.[60] Approximately 2.4 billion people live in the drainage basin of the Himalayan rivers.[61] India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar could experience floods followed by droughts in coming decades. In India alone, the Ganges provides water for drinking and farming for more than 500 million people.[62][63][64] The west coast of North America, which gets much of its water from glaciers in mountain ranges such as the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada, also would be affected.[65][66]
Apart from the conventional surface water sources of freshwater such as rivers and lakes, other resources of freshwater such as groundwater and glaciers have become more developed sources of freshwater, becoming the main source of clean water. Groundwater is water that has pooled below the surface of the Earth and can provide a usable quantity of water through springs or wells. These areas where groundwater is collected are also known as aquifers. Glaciers provide freshwater in the form meltwater, or freshwater melted from snow or ice, that supply streams or springs as temperatures rise. More and more of these sources are being drawn upon as conventional sources’ usability decreases due to factors such as pollution or disappearance due to climate changes. Human population growth is a significant contributing factor in the increasing use of these types of water resources.[23]
Effects of water crisis
There are several principal manifestations of the water crisis.
Food security in the Middle East and North Africa Region Nouri, H.; Stokvis, B.; Galindo, A.; Blatchford, M.; Hoekstra, A.Y. (2019). “Water scarcity alleviation through water footprint reduction in agriculture: The effect of soil mulching and drip irrigation”. Science of the Total Environment. 653: 241–252. Bibcode:2019ScTEn.653..241N. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.10.311. PMID 30412869.</ref>
Inadequate access to safe drinking water for about 885 million people[45]
Inadequate access to sanitation for 2.5 billion people,[46] which often leads to water pollution
Groundwater overdrafting (excessive use) leading to diminished agricultural yields[47]
Overuse and pollution of water resources harming biodiversity
Regional conflicts over scarce water resources sometimes resulting in warfare.
Waterborne diseases caused by lack of sanitation and hygiene are one of the leading causes of death worldwide. For children under age five, waterborne diseases are a leading cause of death. According to the World Bank, 88 percent of all waterborne diseases are caused by unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.[48]
Water is the underlying tenuous balance of safe water supply, but controllable factors such as the management and distribution of the water supply itself contribute to further scarcity.
A 2006 United Nations report focuses on issues of governance as the core of the water crisis, saying “There is enough water for everyone” and “Water insufficiency is often due to mismanagement, corruption, lack of appropriate institutions, bureaucratic inertia and a shortage of investment in both human capacity and physical infrastructure”.[49] Official data also shows a clear correlation between access to safe water and GDP per capita.[50]
It has also been claimed, primarily by economists, that the water situation has occurred because of a lack of property rights, government regulations and subsidies in the water sector, causing prices to be too low and consumption too high, making a point for water privatization.[51][52][53]
Vegetation and wildlife are fundamentally dependent upon adequate freshwater resources. Marshes, bogs and riparian zones are more obviously dependent upon sustainable water supply, but forests and other upland ecosystems are equally at risk of significant productivity changes as water availability is diminished. In the case of wetlands, considerable area has been simply taken from wildlife use to feed and house the expanding human population. But other areas have suffered reduced productivity from gradual diminishing of freshwater inflow, as upstream sources are diverted for human use. In seven states of the U.S. over 80 percent of all historic wetlands were filled by the 1980s, when Congress acted to create a “no net loss” of wetlands.
In Europe extensive loss of wetlands has also occurred with resulting loss of biodiversity. For example, many bogs in Scotland have been developed or diminished through human population expansion. One example is the Portlethen Moss in Aberdeenshire.
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Parousia: The Elevation of Fiction for the Dim of Wit
August 5, 2019
by Christian Jürs
It is the belief of Pentecostals that when certain conditions are met, Jesus Christ will return to earth, take his elect (the Pentecostals) physically to Paradise in an event known as Rapture. Those not belonging to the Pentecostal elect will have to remain behind for Satan to deal with.
When Parousia happens, there will be a great battle fought at Armageddon between the forces of Jesus and the Devil and his antichrist and Jesus, quite naturally, will be triumphant.
All of this, the Pentecostals assure their membership, can be found in the book of Revelation.
Unfortunately for this interesting thesis, the struggle between good and evil at Armageddon is not found in the book of Revelations. Revelations 16:16 only mentions the name of the long-forgotten town but there is nothing about an epic struggle mentioned anywhere else other than twisted interpretations in cult literature.
This strange book was allegedly written by St. John the Devine, “a disciple of Jesus” when, in fact is believed by most reputable Biblical scholars to have been written by a certain John of Patmos who lived many years after the period ascribed to Christ’s ministry.
He wrote his disjointed ideas in 96AD which obviously precluded him from having lived during the Jesus period. John also claimed he lived in a cave with the Virgin Mary!
John of Patmos was a hermit/monk on the Greek island of Patmos and contemporary historical reference briefly dismisses him as a lunatic. No one has been able to understand a word of what he wrote, and his confused and mystic writings easily lends themselves to all manner of interpretations by various dimwitted and obsessed religious fanatics.
When Martin Luther prepared the Protestant Bible, he discarded Revelation, and other books then found in the Bible, as being ‘unworthy and filled with nonsense.’
The Second Coming has as one of its primary requirements that a Jewish nation must be reestablished in Palestine (which it was in 1948) and, even more important, that the great Jewish temple of Solomon must be rebuilt before Christ can return to earth and elevate his elect.
The first temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians and the more elegant second, by the Romans when they crushed the Jewish revolt in the first century.
Unfortunately for the Pentecostals, the former site of this temple is now occupied by the much-revered Muslim Dome of the Rock mosque.
The Jewish temple cannot be rebuilt, therefore, as long as the Muslim mosque occupies its space and therefore, it would be necessary to destroy this very holy building and replace it with a new edifice of another religion.
However, if this lunatic act were consummated, there would be an immediate and terrible rising in the Muslim world and a savage religious war would burst forth on an already-ravaged Middle East.
The Pentecostals are, by their very nature, uncaring and fierce fanatics and such a war would, to them, be a fulfillment of the spurious prophecy of the manic Revelation’s non-existent Battle of Armageddon.
Already we can hear comments from prominent Pentecostals that the Muslims are the forces of the anti-Christ and must therefore be engaged by the forces of Jesus in a final hecatomb of blood and destruction. This pending bloodbath means nothing to Pentecostals because, according to their beliefs, they will be safe in Paradise and those left behind are of no consequence
What is Ricin?
August 4, 2019
by Jack Mehoff
Patent Number 3, 060,165
Preparation of Toxic Ricin
Harry L. Craig, Cincinatti, and Otto M. Alderks, Wyoming, Ohio, and Alsoph H> Corwin and Sally H. Dicks, Baltimore, and Charlotte L. Karel. Silver Springs, Md., assignors to the United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Army
Filed July 3, 1952, Ser. No. 287,142
2 Claims (Cl 268- 123.5)
This invention relates to the method of preparing toxic Ricin.
Ricin is a protoplasmic poison prepared from castor beans after the extraction of castor oil therefrom. It is most effective as a poison when injected intravenously or inhaled, the latter requiring extreme comminution and small particle size to be effective. It is believed that the toxic action is catalytic rather than stoichiometric which probably accounts for the toxicity of the agent.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
August 6, 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. 12
Date: Thursday, May 2, 1996
Commenced: 8:45 AM CST
Concluded: 9:22 AM CST
GD: Good day to you, Robert. How goes the battle with you?
RTC: I think I’m slowly losing ground, Gregory, but I’m still fighting.
GD: I’ve been fighting for years so I understand the concept.
RTC: I hear the Germans are not happy over some of your writings. You are disturbing the Jewish community with your allegations that we hired the head of the Gestapo.
GD: Who cares?
RTC: You heard the old saying that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Well, the Beltway has no fury like a Jew ignored. How dare we hire the head of the Gestapo? How could we do such a thing to them? They are the Chosen of God, after all.
GD: What did God choose them for? To stand in the shower lines in some Polish camp?
RTC: Oh, now, Gregory, show some compassion.
GD: My God, why should any of us care about all of those nonsense stories? Lampshades and cakes of soap, my ass.
RTC: We are all supposed to care about that, Gregory. And if they use it right, they can get discount airline tickets and something off on that new sofa.
GD: Stunning revelations indeed, Robert. Another group of obnoxious nuts.
RTC: Believe me, Gregory, there are far worse.
GD: Who? The Pedophile’s Protective League? The Bellowing Jesus Freaks of Bad Seepage, Ohio?
RTC: There are worse things in this world than the Society of Professional Hebrew Moaners.
GD: The Sackcloth and Ashes League? The Humpback’s Tuesday Afternoon Bridge Club?
RTC: Why don’t you try the Scientologists? Now that group is really something to contemplate.
GD: I’ve read a little about them but not much. Started by some old faker named Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard. I used to be a science fiction nut and I remember reading one of his stories years ago. Awful writing. Sounded like it was written by a ten year old.
RTC: That’s the one. He may have been an awful writer but he was a class A conman. Those people made more Goddam trouble for us. They were running all over the Med in the ‘60s in some rusty tub called the Royal Scotsman. My God, what a ship of fools that was. We were getting requests from DoS and other people to look into them. All over the place, docking here and there, chasing frantic deserters into towns, screaming at people…my God what a circus that one was. And old Hubbard waddling around in some naval uniform, shouting at people one minute and trying to bribe some public official on shore the next.
GD: That I knew nothing about.
RTC: We did, believe me. Hubbard was as crazy as a loon and Washington was afraid he would start a war. You ever read about them?
GD: Just something here and there. Hubbard died, didn’t he?
RTC: Yes, about ten years ago. His people got rid of him because he was getting to be a flaming nut and threatened to fire all of his top people. Since their scam brought in about a million dollars a day, those at the top had no intention of allowing a fat, old psychotic liar push them out.
GD: Was that in the press?
RTC: No. Hubbard was a raging paranoid, among other failings, and was convinced that everyone was out to get him so he went into hiding. That was where he was, out in California, when they gave him the needle. Of course they got the old idiot to sign a will leaving them everything and in with the drugs. As I recall, they cremated him as fast as possible and dumped his ashes into the Pacific off the stern of a sardine boat.
GD: Sic transit Gloria mundi, Robert
RTC: Isn’t that always the truth?
GD: How did they make a million a day? Print it?
RTC: No, Barnum was right, Gregory. There is a sucker born every minute. When I took Jim’s files out of there, I got the Scientology file, too. Three large boxes of files. My son read through some of them and said it sounded like a group therapy session over at St. Elizabeth’s The money? It came from legions and more legions of suckers who flocked to the tin can boys and paid until they were broke.
GD: Tin cans?
RTC: Yes. Hubbard had a very simple device that registered electrical skin responses. Works like the polygraph but has no value. We all have these electrical impulse things and of course the little needle jumps around. They have so called experts called auditors who tell the mark that this is helping to clear up their psyche so they can go out into the real world without a bag over their head. We know, and I am sure you do too, that the world is full of failures and worse. Now, instead of hanging themselves or jumping in front of Amtrak trains, they can grab the tin cans and let someone tell them that being ugly, stupid or a failure is really not their fault. Others are to blame. Of course they will never be free of their loads of guilt until the auditor tells them they are OK and that day never comes. As long as the marks have money, the tin cans are grasped and the wallets slowly empty. When it does, the sucker is tossed out on the street and then, broke, they jump off of railroad bridges and make messes on the tracks.
GD: A million a day?
RTC: Oh yes, at least. Hubbard once said that if a man wanted to be really rich, he should found a religion.
GD: Faking it with tin cans and some worthless meter is not a religion.
RTC: Oh, they turned it into one. They have a lock on a number of frustrated fanatics, fueled by vast sums of money pouring in from the army of suckers.
GD: You mentioned a boat?
RTC: Oh yes, in the 80’s, old Hubbard got it into his head that powerful forces were after him so he bought an old boat, filled it up with nuts and off they went, cruising all over the place and creating diplomatic havoc. Later, he got tired of his admiral’s uniform so he took over some town in Florida and terrorized the normal people before moving on to California, the true home of fruits and nuts. And in the meantime, before Hebe the Yench and the Dwarf, Miscarriage, terminated him, old Hubbard had his crazy followers break into government building and steal sensitive files. Of course they got caught but Hubbard claimed ignorance. He wasn’t stupid by any means but he had Borderline Personality disorder and couldn’t tell the truth when a lie would suffice.
GD: Who are the Hebe and the Dwarf?
RTC: In house for Heber Jentsch and David Miscavage. The first one is a front and the dwarf is the one who runs the show now that his founder is floating on the surf. Oh, you should read the nonsense….Gregory, do you know what a DC 3 is?
GD: Certainly. It’s an older commercial jet.
RTC: Hubbard said, and the ninnies still believe, that certain superior aliens, the father of all of the more enlightened of us, were brought to Earth from Venus millions of years ago on DC 3s.
GD: Robert…
RTC:(Laughter) No, I’m serious. We don’t need to even discuss this moronic crap but thousands of panting believers accept it as the truth. The problem is, while they have stopped running around in the boat, they now try to take over small towns and are heavy in the electronics business. And of course swindling fools out of Daddy’s trust fund.
GD: You have material on them?
RTC: Yes, I do, Gregory.
GD: Any chance I could see it?
RTC: Of course, I can dig it out and ship it to you. But a word of caution here, Gregory, never try to use it.
GD: Why not?
RTC: My God, these twits sue everyone in sight for no reason. If you wrote that all up, they would sue you, your dog, your neighbors, your dead grandmother, your school and probably the mailman. The word ‘crazy’ is too mild to use in conjunction here. But, I will send this off to you with my caveat.
GD: You know, my sister’s cat keeps crapping on her bed. Maybe I could stuff it into a tin can and read the meter.
RTC: (Laughter) Be my guest. Why not audit a cat?
GD: I used to think it was books that were audited.
RTC: Gregory, these people can’t read books.
GD: Speaking of books, Bender is going ahead with the Mueller series so I guess Wolfe will hiss at you in the Archives like Loki.
RTC: Bill and I will look forward to the new books, Gregory. And we do need to get together in person sometime, right here. It’s safe enough here.
GD: Should we invite Kimmel?
RTC: Gregory, I have enough problems from the Justice people over you without fanning the flames. I think you love to fan the flames. Have you ever considered a gracious retirement?
GD: That takes money, Robert.
RTC: Yes, that it does. Sell more books.
GD: That’s not my bailiwick. Maybe I could start a religion, Robert. Tell people I came from Venus and if they are good, and give me lots of money, I can elevate them to a huge and invisible flying saucer and take them to Pluto where the men will have huge peckers and the women get to eat a ton of chocolates a day and not gain a pound. And they will all live forever and never worry about falling hair or sagging breasts. Why? Because I will turn them all into little green toads and eventually feed them to the Great God Dagon.
RTC: Well, that way we would get rid of everyone in Los Angeles and Washington.
GD: And our magic spaceship will be a 707 and we can call it the Ship of Fools.
RTC: I will look up those files for you Gregory.
GD: Thanks. It will beat reading the obits in the paper, looking for dead enemies.
(Concluded at 9:22 AM CST)
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Rob Schwarzwalder
Rob Schwarzwalder is currently Senior Lecturer at Regent University, Pat Robertson’s mockery of educational institutions. And prior to that, Schwarzwalder was vice president of the fundamentalist hate group the Family Research Council. In that capacity, Schwarzwalder would for instance call for boycotts of Starbucks, warning that the company may be endangering the country’s economic health by supporting marriage equality. How, you might ask? Well, because “[b]y supporting a movement that would further vitiate the already weakened family unit, [Starbucks CEO Howard] Schultz is tacitly but actively advocating the continued erosion of the institution – the two-parent, heterosexual, traditional and complementary family unit – without which no economy or society generally can thrive.” How recognizing same-sex marriage would lead to erosion of the family unit is not entirely clear (unless Schwarzwalder believes that gay people, if denied same-sex marriage, would instead opt into stable, loving heterosexual marriages), but this really has nothing to do with reason or evidence, of course. Apparently it has something to do with supporting gay rights being a matter of “show[ing] a lack of love” and sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage leading to “the withering of the soul and the erosion of society.” President Obama thus got it all wrong, since “there is no love in affirming something God declares wrong and harmful, whether it relates to human sexuality or thievery or malice or deception or anything.” Schwarzwalder has also suggested that legalizing gay marriage might lead to civil war.
To change it up a little, Schwarzwalder claimed in 2016 that defending trans rights is “fascistic” and “the banning of dissent”. Apparently legal or political decisions Schwarzwalder don’t agree with are violations of his First Amendment rights and thus contrary to democracy. And indeed, Schwarzwalder is much concerned about First Amendment rights, in particular religious freedom; he has little idea what religious freedom involves, though. “Everyone should be free to agree with me” is not quitethe correct interpretation.
Schwarzwalder has weighed in on other issues, too. He has for instance argued that conservative Christians do not “cherry pick” the Bible when they claim that the Bible’s command to stone rebellious children doesn’t really mean what it says. The guiding principle to reading the Bible is apparently that you should adhere to the Biblical commands Schwarzwalder favors the way he interprets them, and that pricipe should be applied universally and without exception. He is also a creationist and climate change denialist, of course.
Diagnosis: Precisely what you’d expect from someone in Schwarzwalder’s position: complete rubbish.