TBR News February 13, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. February 13, 2020:“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.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for February 13: “A program that can be seen on the Underground Internet that is entitled ‘Sadie and the Space Monkeys’ has done a shocking series of articles on Donald Trump and his close associates, those in Federal prison and those heading for one. If the trumpeters get wind of it, there will be hysterical rage in the Oval Office and demands for punishment but since The Underground Internet is located outside the country shutting it down would be impossible. They are not respectful and one of the least respectful comments they make is that if were not for the common turkey baster, Trump could never father children. Naughty people but always look for the truth in the jest.”

“Trump aches from his head to his toes
His sphincters have gone where who knows
And his love life has ended
By a paunch so distended
That all he can use is his nose”

The Table of Contents
• Roger Stone furore shows ‘crisis of credibility’ in US justice system, experts warn
• The American Media: A corporate hand-puppet
• A Primer on Domestic Spying
• The frantic rescue mission for Donald Trump’s indiscretions
• A Secret German Analysis of Donald Trump
• The Numbers Game: An Analysis of Demographics in Holocaust Literature
• The Season of Evil
• The Encyclopedia of American Loons

Roger Stone furore shows ‘crisis of credibility’ in US justice system, experts warn
Senior figures sound the alarm and say rule of law – and democracy itself – under threat from Trump and DoJ allies
February 13, 2020
by Ed Pilkington in New York
The Guardian
The US justice system is facing a crisis of credibility that could undermine the integrity of federal prosecutors, politicize the legal handling of Donald Trump’s friends and enemies, and ultimately threaten democracy itself, top lawyers warn.
A barrage of former justice department figures have sounded the alarm following a decision on Tuesday by the US attorney general, William Barr, to undercut a sentencing recommendation for Trump’s friend Roger Stone. In a new court filing, Barr’s office condemned the initial recommendation of seven to nine years in prison as “excessive and unwarranted”.
The direct interference of the US attorney general in an individual sentencing decision by his department’s own career professionals was highly unusual. The White House and Trump himself also appeared to be involved, with the president posting a tweet shortly before Barr made his move that called the original sentencing proposal for Stone “horrible and very unfair”.
Trump later congratulated Barr on “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control”.
In the fallout, all four career prosecutors who had framed the initial sentencing recommendation quit from the case in protest.
The new filing and the instant resignations it provoked have now led to an outpouring of rebuke from senior legal figures who cautioned that the rule of law is being shaken by Trump and his DoJ allies.
“This is a crisis of credibility,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, a former federal appellate attorney now with Relman Colfax. “Nobody knows whether decisions are being made based on the facts and the law, or whether they are based on a political whim.”
Chiraag Bains of Demos, who worked for four years as a DoJ prosecutor, told the Guardian he was shocked by events.
“This will have serious consequences for staff morale at the justice department, for the credibility of justice department attorneys in court, and for the public’s sense that the justice system is fair. How are judges or juries supposed to have faith that prosecutors represent the impartial position of the United States and not a political agenda?” he said.
Two of Barr’s predecessors at the helm of the DoJ expressed their distress. Eric Holder, US attorney general under Barack Obama, said in a statement that the conduct over Stone had “put at risk the perceived – and real – neutral enforcement of our laws and, ultimately, endanger the fabric of our democracy”.
Sally Yates, who briefly held the position of acting attorney general at the start of the Trump presidency, poignantly tweeted that the career lawyers of the DoJ – like the four who had resigned from the case – “are the backbone and the heart of the department. Your noble dedication to the rule of law is the foundation of our republic.”
The insulation of justice officials from any political interference in their handling of criminal prosecutions is seen as the bedrock of the entire US justice system. The concept is enshrined in the mission statement of the DoJ: “To ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.”
In the wake of the Watergate scandal, new rules were put in place under the title “White House contacts policy” that severely restrict any communication between the president, his team and justice officials. That wall of separation has been honored by successive Republican and Democratic administrations since 1978.
“Trump has torn down that wall,” Bains said. “He treats the justice department’s prosecution powers as an arm of his political apparatus, to threaten perceived enemies and reward friends.”
Michael Bromwich, who acted as the DoJ’s official ethics watchdog between 1994 and 1999, was so alarmed by the apparent intervention of the White House in Stone’s sentencing that he called on federal prosecutors coming under improper political pressure to report it confidentially to his successors in the inspector general’s office. He said the integrity of government lawyers had been “publicly undermined to suit the whims of the White House”, and said the events amounted to “a cancer on our system of justice”.
Preet Bharara, the former US attorney for the southern district of New York, who was fired by Trump, accused Barr and the DoJ leadership of “humiliating its own career prosecutors, and giving special treatment to the president’s criminal associates. The worst part is they don’t seem even to care any more.”
Bharara is no stranger to the crossing of sacred lines by Trump and his cohorts. A few days before he was dismissed in March 2017, he received a phone call from Trump asking him to talk.
A direct call from the US president to a senior justice official in charge of highly sensitive investigations was utterly against protocol, and Bharara did not pick up the phone. Bharara later told the Guardian it was the best decision he ever made.
“Imagine what it would look like now if I were still US attorney and it became known that I had quiet little chats with the president at the same time we were investigating the Trump organisation.”
That is not the only incident in which Trump has attempted to wield the powers of the presidency to forward his political purposes and help his friends in their tangles with criminal prosecutors. In February 2017, Trump tried to cajole the then FBI director, James Comey, into ending an investigation into the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
According to NBC News, the interference in Flynn’s case continues to this day. The news outlet reported that, in an echo of the Stone affair, senior DoJ officials intervened last month to try to undercut government sentencing recommendations for Flynn and spare him any prison time for lying to the FBI.
How the current crisis plays out could boil down to what Amy Berman Jackson, the judge in the criminal case against Stone, does next.
Stone was convicted by a jury in November of lying to investigators, obstructing a congressional investigation and witness tampering. Jackson has so far proven herself to be immune to Stone’s legendary wiles. She now exclusively has the power to determine Stone’s sentence.
At the sentencing hearing, set for 20 February, she will also be able to ask the justice department’s lawyer probing and potentially awkward questions.
Barr will come under further questioning on 31 March when he has been called to appear before the House judiciary committee. Democratic leaders of the committee said they wanted to address “the misuse of our justice system for political purposes”.
“This is a test for the entire justice system,” Samberg-Champion said. “It will determine whether political interference will be allowed to happen – because if you allow it once there is nothing to stop it happening again.”

The American Media: A corporate hand-puppet
February 12, 2020
by Christian Jürs
A small number of extremely wealthy men control and operate all of the major American print and television media.
Each of the few very powerful, rich men have their own reasons for deciding what qualifies as news.
But the public in America now gets its news, without cost, from various internet sites and the circulation number of major print news has dropped dramatically. This has forced the internet editions of the print news media to erect what they call “paywalls.” This permits a very limited number of articles to be read or downloaded before the system demands money for the use of additional material.
The major print media in America is faced with imminent bankruptcy and are making frantic efforts at attempts to prevent free news sites from being aired on the internet.
Government surveillance of the American public is very widespread and at the present time, almost every aspect of an American citizen, or resident, is available for official surveillance. This includes mail, television viewing, telephone conversations, computer communications, travel, ownership of property, medical and school records, banking and credit card transactions, inheritances and other aspects of a citizen’s daily life.
This is done to circumvent any possible organization that could contravene official government policy and has its roots in massive civil resistance to governmental policy during the war in Vietnam. The government does not want a reprise of that problem and its growing surveillance is designed to carefully watch any citizen, or groups of citizens, who might, present or future, pose a threat to government policy.
Another factor to be considered is the current American attitudes towards racial issues. There has always been prejudice in the United States against blacks. In 1943 there were bloody riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, the former aimed at blacks and the latter against Mexicans. Since then, there has been chronic racial prejudice but it has been relatively small and very local. Also, there is growing anti-Semitic prejudice in American but this is officially ignored and never is mentioned in the American media. Much of this growing problem is directed at the brutal actions of Israel against Palestinians. Israelis have an undue influence in the American political scene. The very far right so-called neo-cons are almost all Jewish and most are Israeli citizens. Also, the middle-level ranks of American CIA personnel are heavily infiltrated by Israelis and it is said that any secret the CIA has is at once passed to Israel and that countries needs are assuming importance in CIA actions.
The attitudes of the working class Americans were inflamed during the last presidential elections by Mr. Trump who catered to them and encouraged rebellious attitudes. By speaking against Central American illegal immigrants, Mr. Trump has caused a polarization of attitudes and the militant right wing in America, currently small in number but well-organized and potentially very dangerous, has begun to make its views very well known in public demonstrations.
This movement has played into the hands of far-right American political manipulators.
It is their intention to clandestinely arm these groups and use them to cause violent public confrontations with the far left groups.
By causing this potential violence, the manipulators intend to use the American military to move into unstable area to, as they say, ‘establish law and order’ while in reality, they will use martial law to firm up their basic control of a potentially fractious public.
It is then intended, according to information, to incorporate organized, para-military groups into a sort of domestic Federal police force. These people will not be punished for their actions but rewarded and utilized to ensure further right-wing control of the country.

A Primer on Domestic Spying
February 13, 2020
by Andrew P. Napolitano
AntiWar
“The Framers … conferred, as against the Government, the right tobe let alone – the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued bycivilized men.” – Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)
While we were all consumed by impeachment, a pernicious piece of legislationwas slowly and silently making its way through Congress. It is a renewal ofSection 215 of the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act of 2001 has three sections that are scheduled to expire onMarch 15. One of those sections is the infamous 215, which authorizes the federalgovernment to capture without a warrant all records of all people in Americaheld by third parties.
Do we really want the federal government to spy without warrants? How can Congress, which has sworn to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, legislatesuch a blatant violation of it? Here is the backstory.
After the Constitution was ratified in 1789, it was soon amended to recognizethe existence of natural rights and to keep the government from interferingwith them. As Justice Brandeis wrote 140 years afterward, the most comprehensiveof those rights was the right to be let alone, which today we call privacy.
To secure that right, the Fourth Amendment was ratified. The purpose of theFourth Amendment was to prevent the government from utilizing general warrantsand to require judicially authorized search warrants issued under narrow circumstances. James Madison, who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, shared thehatred that colonists-turned-Americans had for general warrants.
A general warrant was a document issued by a secret court in London authorizingthe bearer of the document, usually a British soldier or intelligence agent ,to search wherever he wished and to seize whatever he found. The applicant forthe warrant needed to demonstrate to the court only that the warrant was intendedto unearth something that the government wanted. Because these warrants did not specify the object of the search, there was no limit to them.
Hence Madison’s language in the Fourth Amendment preserving privacy but permittingthe government to invade it only upon a showing, under oath, of probable causeof crime, and then requiring the warrant to specify in writing the place tobe searched or the person or thing to be seized.
After 9/11, in the collective spirit of fear, timidity and subservience tothe presidency, and in utter disregard for its members’ oaths to uphold theConstitution, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. It permits one federal agentto authorize another federal agent to search and seize whatever the latter wishesto look at and capture so long as it is in the possession of third-party financialinstitutions.
Over the years, the definition of “financial institution” has beenradically expanded by both legislation and presidential executive orders soas to include nearly every conceivable entity that has any records about anyperson in America – from banks to hospitals to lawyers to merchants to creditcard issuers to telecoms and computer service providers and even the post office.
At the same time that the Patriot Act was being expanded, the National Security Agency – America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spy apparatus – was not even pretending to follow legislation. We know from Edward Snowden’s revelations – which have never been disputed by the government – that since 2003, the NSA has captured not only the records of Americans held by third parties but also the records of every keystroke touched by every person in America and every telephone call transmitted over fiber optic cable. That includes every email, text message and piece of data – even what was deleted. This warrantless mass surveillance continues today unabated.
Also unabated and equally unlawful and unconstitutional is the government’suse of cell towers as monitors of movement. Whenever anyone travels with a mobile device in the U.S., the nearest cell tower picks up signals from the mobile device, even turned off. The government, which either owns the cell towers orunder Section 215, captures all the data the towers amass, can effectively follow any person with a mobile device in real-time.
How does the government get away with this?
The feds have labored mightily to keep all of these constitutional violations as far from judicial scrutiny as they can. They rightly fear – they know – that all of this violates the Fourth Amendment. If their nefarious behavior, which we know they have used on the president of the United States and on the Supreme Court, comes under judicial scrutiny, the feds will argue that the Fourth Amendment only pertains to criminal prosecutions and not to domestic spying;thus, they can ignore it when they spy.
They have made up this argument out of thin air. There is neither a hint in the language of the amendment nor a whiff in its history to support that argument.
Has the government lost sight of our birthright? It is life, liberty and thepursuit of happiness – not to mention getting into Heaven. How can we do anyof this if the government we have hired to preserve our liberty is surreptitiously destroying it?
Brandeis’ language about being let alone was written in 1928, in a dissent to a Supreme Court opinion that failed to recognize the right to privacy. Today, his dissent is the law of the land, but the feds ignore it. He wrote that there is more to life than owning material goods. There is the fulfillment of spiritual, intellectual and cultural goals and the achievement of intimate aspirations,none of which are the government’s business.
Why do we permit the government to assault our most basic freedoms, under the law or under the table?

The frantic rescue mission for Donald Trump’s indiscretions

On 4 March 2018, it is alleged that Sergei Viktorovich Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who secretly worked for, and was well paid by, British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England, allegedly with a “Novichok nerve agent.”
It was reported that the pair were observed on a public park bench, acting very ill and were taken to the Salisbury District Hospital and put into an intensive care unit.
No one was allowed to visit them but a British official claimed they had done so and assured the media they had been seen.
There have no medical bulletins concerning the Skripals since then.
Immediately, it was officially claimed that somehow the Russians were responsible and the British Prime Minister and their buffoon of a Foreign Minister made endless accusative public comments about Russian guilt.
The British Prime Minister May’s claim that the “novichok” formula allegedly used was a deep secret, known only to the Russians is, like the rest of the drama, entirely false.
There are currently a number of countries who have been carrying out intense research on the substances from the so-called ‘Novichok’ program since the end of the 1990s to the present: the UK, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the United States and Sweden.
Russia is not one of them.
The near universal belief among chemical weapons experts, and the official position of the OPCW, was that “Novichoks” were at most a theoretical research program which the Russians had never succeeded in actually synthesizing and manufacturing. That is why they are not on the OPCW list of banned chemical weapons.
It should be noted that in England, where the alleged attack occurred, is home to the Porton Down facility
Porton Down, a secret British facility that works with, among other products, nerve gasses, is located northeast of the village of Porton near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, England.
It is home to UK Government facilities: a site of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl)
Work carried out at Porton Down on usable nerve gasses has, to date, remained secret
Between 1963 and 1975 the MRE carried out trials in Lyme Bay in which live bacteria were sprayed from a ship to be carried ashore by the wind to simulate an anthrax attack.
That to one side, there exists a secret CIA report that gives the lie to the allegations of Russian poisoning.
Origins of the purported nerve gas attack
Michael Richard Pompeo is an American politician and businessman who has been serving as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency since January 23, 2017, following his nomination by President Donald Trump.
Previously, he was the member of the United States House of Representatives for Kansas’s 4th congressional district (2011–2017).
He is a member of the radical right wing Tea Party movement within the Republican Party. He was a Kansas representative on the Republican National Committee and member of the Italian American Congressional Delegation.
Pompeo is also an Evangelical Christian.
In August of 2017, Pompeo took direct command of the Counterintelligence Mission Center, the department which helped to launch an investigation into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.
Former CIA directors expressed concern since Pompeo is known to be an ally of Donald Trump
William Evanina is currently the head of NCIX, which is the executive officer of the United States Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX), and who is also the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
The London branch of this secret organization is located at 33 Nine Elms Ln. London SW11 7.
Formerly, it was headquartered at Caversham Park.
A supposedly secret communication from Evanina’s office in question is marked USA/GBR/ EYES ONLY and addressed to M. Aubineau in the UK office of ONCIX (detailed information from Booth)
Part of the document reads:
“Necessary to remove Skripal from any possibility of allowing him to be interviewed via Judicial Assistance Request, by on-going U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump/Russian working agreements. If possible try to make this look like some kind of a negative Russian intelligence operation, thus killing two birds with one stone. Note that Skripal is of considerable value to UK intel so termination with extreme prejudice not suggested.”
And further in the same document:
“President Trump does not tolerate anything that he views as opposed to his will. For that reason, he has developed a very strong dislike for the Justice Department’s FBI because of their ongoing investigation of his extensive contact with Russian entities. He has been contemplating abolishing the FBI and turning its domestic intelligence programs over to the CIA, creating one massive surveillance entity that he can easily control.”
The British agency involved in the purported “nerve gas attack” scenario is the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit (NDEDIU)
In May 2013, the NDEDIU was split into two units:
a )Protest and Disorder Intelligence Unit. This unit collates and provides strategic analysis relating to protest and disorder across the UK; and b) Domestic Extremism Intelligence Unit. This unit provides strategic analysis of domestic extremism intelligence within the UK and overseas.
The NDEU had been created in 2011 following a merger of the three domestic extremism units under the National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism – the National Domestic Extremism Team, National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
The quid pro quo for Pompeo’s cooperation in keeping devastating information about Trump’s clandestine political deals with Russia away from hostile investigators is evident.
On March 13, 2018, Trump announced his intention to nominate Pompeo as the new United States Secretary of State, on March 31, 2018, succeeding Rex Tillerson who had the audacity to disagree with Trump.
There is absolutely no question whatsoever that Russian intelligence was able, by the offering of large amounts of money for rigged hotel business deals as well as securing his interest through the activities of very attractive women, to get Trump to work with them closely in the event he was able to secure election to the American presidency.
U.S. Congressional committees also have been investigating Russia and the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
It is now known that the Trump people hired the Facebook people to influence the election and it is also known, but only in top intelligence circles, that the WikiLeaks organization that released damning emails about the Clinton organization is entirely owned by Russian intelligence.
Trump, therefore, bought support with cash from Facebook and promises of cooperation from Russian top level sources.

A Secret German Analysis of Donald Trump
Herewith is an overview of Donald Trump and his background taken and translated from a German intelligence report. This came, with copies of official stamps and all, from a very reliable German newspaper official.

S T R E N G G E H E I M

Hintergrundbericht über den amerikanischen Präsidenten Donald T R U M P

– NICHT STEMPELN –
– NICHT UNTERZEICHNEN –
– NICHT BESCHRIFTEN –
– NICHT MARKIEREN –

Translation from the German

• Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination. He has a long record of bankruptcies, business failures, very dubious business practices and extraordinarily negative behavior to staff and other employees. To catalogue the full sweep of a flood of patently dishonest business allegations against Donald Trump would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial, the blatently criminal with the truly scandalous.
• Certainly, the psychological personal profile of Donald Trump could hardly be better tailored to being easily turned by a hostile intelligence agency.
• The concept of Trump taking bribes from the Russians (or the PRC) is completely understandable if one applies the concept of Occam’s Razor to the tumult and disruption he is deliberately causing both domestically and in foreign areas.
• Russian intelligence agencies are known to have highly compromising and often bizarre sexual material on him going back more than 30 years and they have used Trump and his elaborate network of business entites as a funnel for laundering dirty money from the Russian mafia and from post-Soviet oligarchs. The Russians are well-known to have more than enough compromising material on Trump to bend him to their will.
• Trump has constantly been engaged in bribings and manipulations and does this through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his recently convicted campaign manager during the election.
• Following Mr.Trump’s bankruptcies in the 1990s he borrowed very large sums of operating capital from Russian sources. He also obtained large loans from the Deutsche Bank (over 640 million dollars)
• Other big banks, domestic and foreign, have long refused to lend to him, coining the term “the Donald risk” to refer to his repeated bankruptcies and failures to repay loans. However, Deutsche Bank, whose real-estate division continued to lend him hundreds of millions of dollars to finance his projects, seemed to have a greater risk appetite. There is a solid connection and on-going business between this bank and two Russian-based banks.
• 1,300 Trump condominiums have been sold to Russian-connected buyers. Even a cheap Trump condo costs over a million dollars, so there over 1,300 condos that meet all the criteria for what is normally called money laundering. Russian intelligence is using Trump real estate to launder money
• In 2008 his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that Russia was an important source of money for the Trump businesses.
• Trump and his entourage have made a significant number of trips to Russia in the past (a list of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with can easily be found on Google), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country
• Russian intelligence owns Wikileaks entirely and released the damning, and authentic, ‘Podesta papers’ concurrent with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in coordinated agreement with the Trump people. This did serious damage to her campaign and was a major contributory factor to her narrow defeat and Trump’s election to the presidency.
• Trump’s actions, as President, are deliberate efforts to alienate both the putative allies of the US such as Germany, France, and Canada and, to a lesser degree, Mexico. Also, the tariffs suggested by Trump against China would result in retaliation by that country and many retail outlets in the United States would be forced to close because they would be unable to purchase Chinese-made goods, the bulk of their stock.
• Trump has deliberately launched pointless, and destructive, attacks against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, as well as Canadian, Chinese and German imports. All this has done is to create a highly negative image of his persona primarily and secondarily, the global image of the United States. This is only to the benefit of Putin’s Russia, not the United States.
• Trump’s tariffs, and threats of tariffs, have engendered counter-tariffs that will, when implemented, create serious economic problems for American businessmen and, eventually, the American public.
• Trump’s politically foolish but calculated support of the Israeli far right has done, and is doing, serious damage to the US image in the Middle East. It should be noted that Russian influence in the Shiite areas of the Middle East, is growing. Also note that Iran, and parts of Iraq, both Shiite, have extensive oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state, once America’s primary source of badly-need oil, is running dry. Further, his aggressive support of Israel is resulting in increasing antisemitism in the United States.
• The Middle East areas where Russia now has growing influence, have oil and if Russia sets itself up as major oil merchandising source, this will give them tremendous economic leverage vis a vis the United States which is the world’s largest consumer of oil and its by-products.
• By alienating America’s allies and disrupting that country’s social structure, Trump benefits only Russia and its interests.
• When he is caught at this, and it is common knowledge that the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either the American public will have to deal with another Dallas or Trump will suffer a fatal heart attack. Vice-President Pence, a Christian fanatic, would then have to be told to mind his manners or suffer similar terminal problems.
• Trump is very well aware of the ongoing and growing official investigation into his denied but completely genuine Russian connections and is certainly also well aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he initially fired the head of the FBI and even now, according to a very reliable source, is determined to replace the FBI with the cooperative CIA (their former head, Pompeo, is now Secretary of State) as the sole foreign and domestic intelligence agency. He, and his Russian intelligence handlers, want to nip any FBI revelations in the bud so that Trump can continue on his course of castrating the United States as a global power to the benefit of Putin’s Russia.
• There was a full page ad that he took out in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post in 1988, putting forth foreign policy points that could have been dictated by Vladimir Putin. It was an assault against NATO, and the European Union, both anathema to Russia
• In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies in France and Germany began picking up solid evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic States shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.
• During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly was known to be bugged
• Throughout his career, Trump has always felt comfortable operating at or beyond the ethical boundaries that constrain typical businesses. In the 1980s, he worked with La Cosa Nostra, which controlled the New York cement trade, and later employed Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, both of whom have links to the Russian Mafia. Trump habitually refused to pay his counter parties, and if the people he burned (or any journalists) got in his way, he bullied them with threats. He also used LLCs which he created for the purpose of swindling firm who, for example, laid new carpet in one of his hotels. The vendor billed the LLC which promptly went bankrupt. This has been a favorite gambit of Trump.
• Trump continually acts like a man with a great deal to hide: declining to testify to anything under oath, dangling Presidential pardons to keep potential witnesses and former employees from incriminating him, publicly chastising his attorney general for not quashing the whole Russian investigation, and endorsing Russia’s claims that it had nothing to do with the election. (“Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” he tweeted last month, contradicting the conclusion of every U.S. intelligence and counter-intelligence agency.) Trump’s behavior toward Russia looks exactly like that of an accessory after the fact.
• When, and not if, it becomes public knowledge that the President of the US is an agent of a foreign power, it would be the worst scandal in American history, far surpassing Tea Pot Dome or Watergate.
• In conclusion, it is clearly obvious that President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence and that he is currently engaged in efforts to carry out their political global programs which, if allowed to continue, will wreak economic and political havoc on the American government, business community and public.
• And consider that the United States has been harassing Vladimir Putin’s Russia economically and causing considerable problems for that country. Mr. Putin’s reactive countermeasures aganst the United States are certainly in response to these actions and in the long view, far more effective than sanctions and hysterical threats.

The Numbers Game: An Analysis of Demographics in Holocaust Literature
AUSCHWITZ: (Polish: Oswiecim)
Located approximately 60km (37mi) west of Krakow, in Eastern Upper Silesia, which was annexed to Germany following the defeat of Poland, in September, 1939
The first camp was built shortly after Poland’s defeat, in a suburb of Oswiecim (Zasole), at the site of a former Imperial Austrian Army Artillery barracks complex and initially held about 10,000 prisoners, mostly Polish prisoners of war.
The second site, known as Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was built 3km from the original camp, in March of 1941
All of the satellite camps, such as Auschwitz II, were under the control of the main Auschwitz camp commander’s headquarters. The Auschwitz monthly camp statistics that were sent to KL Headquarters outside Berlin reflected all of the auxiliary camps as well as the main camp.
In the years intervening since the end of the Second World War, there has built up a legend about the planned murder by the Germans of European Jewry. A program of euthanasia, it is said, was later developed into a wide-spread program of mass gassings of Jews in several of the German prisons called Concentration Camps.
The motivator behind these mass killings was, the legend states, Adolf Hitler whose personal hatred of Jews drove him to order his dread Gestapo and SS to round up and kill every Jew they could lay their hands on.
Initially, the camp at Dachau, outside of Munich, was stated to be the center of the murder machine but as it became evident that this camp did not gas large numbers of Jews, or anyone else, the center was arbitrarily moved to the east, to the town of Auschwitz located on several rivers in Upper Silesia.
Here, it is said, a vast death camp was built to house tens of thousands of Jews awaiting their turn in the enormous gas chambers, and a second camp, Auschwitz II or Birkenau was also built for the sole purpose of slaughtering the Jews who made up almost the entire population of this murder central.
Jewish victims, it has been written, poured into Auschwitz from all over conquered Europe. They arrived, jammed into cattle cars, were dragged out of their transport, lined up and immediately forced into the huge gas chambers. Later, after they were dead, their stiffened corpses were dragged out by other camp inmates and shoved into equally gigantic crematoria and burned to ashes.
In recent years, bits and pieces of evidence that would tend to bring some of this into question has resulted in a further shift to the east. Supporters of the mass murder theories now postulate that the SS Einsatzgruppen or Combat Units, composed of Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and German police units, who were operating behind the German front lines in Russia, were the true murders of millions of Jews. In the savage anti-Partisan wars, the Einsatzgruppen were stated to have slaughtered millions of Russian, and some Polish, Jews.
Opposing an enormous body of literature and media productions, a number of dissatisfied historians began to question the validity of the allegations of an immense German murder plot aimed primarily at Jews but also expanded to include Gypsies. Any attempts to bring these allegations into question were met immediately by loud outcries from their proponents and needless to say, no major publishing house anywhere in the world would dare to publish even the most moderate and meticulously researched revisionistic work.
The enormous death toll, it is firmly said by proponents of the murder machine theory, is immutable; these figures are well and permanently established in history and questioning them is the work of anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and professional, unbalanced hate-mongers.
It is the actual figures, however, upon which the legend of the Holocaust stands or falls. Are there such figures? Are they reliable? Surely in the enormous official German records, captured by both the Soviets and Americans, there have to be specific confirmations of the awful death tolls.
In fact such records do exist; some in Moscow and some in Washington, DC, but these original documents are generally not available to what Holocaust supporters state are prevaricators, liars and anti-Semites. They can be found today in official state archives, some difficult to find because they have been misfiled and others because pressure groups who fear their publication have pressured the archives to keep them hidden.
In this study, we have explored these forbidden or obscured documents, collated them and are presenting the results in an effort to achieve some balance for a subject that heretofore has been the private playground of individuals and organizations who have a vested financial and political motive in preventing any erosion of what they see is their own territory.
As huge sums of money have resulted from the maintenance and careful nurturing of what has proven to be an extraordinarily successful cash cow, the desperation of its creators can easily be understood.
Truth, however, is mighty and shall prevail.
“How many people died at Auschwitz?
“…Foner’s Spotlight article made assertions regarding the number of people killed at the Auschwitz camp:
Most Americans have been instructed in the “irrefutable fact” that homicidal gassings had taken place at Auschwitz. The number of those so executed – also declared irrefutable – was 4.1 million.
Then came the Leuchter Report in 1988. This was followed by a “re-evaluation” of the total deaths at Auschwitz (down to 1.1 million).
Previous to 1992, anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million “gassing” deaths at Auschwitz was labeled an anti-Semite, neo-nazi skinhead (at the very least). Quietly, because of revisionist findings, the official figure was lowered to 1.1 million. No mention of that missing 3 million.
Foner’s assertions are simply not true; although it is correct to note that the Polish Communist government did claim that four million people were exterminated at Auschwitz, historians (Feig, Reitlinger, Hilberg, et al.) have never supported that figure. Consider the estimates provided by Buszko at the end of his article on Auschwitz, which appeared in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust:
• Of the 405,000 registered prisoners, 65,000 survived
• Of the 16,000 Soviet POW’s, 96 survived
• Various estimates suggest 1.6 million were murdered
Buszko’s article, and the above estimates, appeared in the 1990 edition of the
Encyclopedia, which clearly puts the lie to Foner’s comment that “anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million .. ” figure “previous to 1992…” was “…labeled an anti-Semite…”. Buszko is not only a Jewish historian, but Polish as well.
Leon Poliakov, the author of the well-documented “Harvest of Hate,” which was, we note, first published in 1956, provides the following information, which clearly demonstrates that Foner’s contention, cited above, is an outright lie:
After some thirty months of intense activity, the Auschwitz balance sheet showed close to two million immediate exterminations (this figure can never be fixed exactly), (8) to which one must add the deaths of some 300,000 registered prisoners – Jews for the most part, but not entirely – for whom the gas chamber was only one of any number of ways by which they might have perished. (Poliakov, 202)
In his affidavits, Hoess spoke of two and a half million, ‘a figure set officially,’ he wrote, under the signature of [Eichmann], in a report to Himmler. This figure has been accepted by several authors, and it appears in the verdict at the trial of the major war criminals. However, there is no reason for accepting without question the statistics attributed to Eichmann, which may err on either side.
Adding the number of victims to those deported from different countries gives a lower figure, although we have little data, for example, on the number of Polish Jews sent to Auschwitz. An approximate figure in the neighborhood of two million seems closer to the truth.” (Ibid.)
Feig also provides evidence of the false nature of Foner’s comment when she notes that:
Höss testified that the Tesch directors could not help but know of the use for their product because they sold him enough to annihilate two million people.’
Feig’s book was published in 1981
According to Snyder, Adolf Eichmann reported to Himmler, in 1944, that four million had been killed in the camps, and another million had been shot or killed by mobile units. (Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. 1989) Eichmann’s report, which referenced all the camps (most of which were in Nazi-occupied Poland), may have been the source of the Polish Communist government’s figures. (Snyder is a Professor of History at the City College and the City University of New York.)
During the war crimes trials, Höss was asked if it was true that he had no exact numbers because he had been forbidden to compile them, and he agreed. He also agreed that Adolf Eichmann had told him that that more than two million people had been exterminated there. (von Lang, 120)
The Institut Für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, provided the following capsulated paragraph about Auschwitz in a March, 1992, letter of inquiry.
The extermination camp in Birkenau, established in the second half of 1941, was joined to the concentration camp Auschwitz, existing since May 1940. From January 1942 on in five gas chambers and from the end of June 1943 in four additional large gassing-rooms gassings with Zyklon B have been undertaken. Up until November 1944 more than one million Jews and at least 4000 gypsies have been murdered by gas. (IFZ)
While it is admittedly difficult to compile exact figures, (emphasis added) since the Nazis did not maintain registration records for those who were to be exterminated immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz, it seems accurate to assert that the number of Jews killed fell somewhere between one and one-point-six million.
According to figures provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years 1940-1945 is estimated at between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people. The majority of them, and above all the mass transports of Jews who arrived beginning in 1942, died in the gas chambers. (Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franciszek Piper, Eds. Auschwitz 1940-1945. Central Issues in the History of the Camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000, 5 vols., 1799 pp., ISBN 83-85047-87-5)
Jews were not the only victims of this Nazi German killing machine – historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000 Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20,000 Gypsies from several European countries, over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and over 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities.
The Leuchter Report, which Foner alludes to extensively in his Spotlight article, has been thoroughly refuted. For detailed information about the report, see the Leuchter FAQ.
Two German firms, Tesch/Stabenow and Degesch, produced Cyclone B gas after they acquired the patent from Farben. Tesch supplied two tons a month, and Degesch three quarters of a ton. The firms that produced the gas already had extensive experience in fumigation.”
This overview is entirely typical of the death camp argument. It is not based on official figures obtained from various archives but solely upon the personal opinions of individuals who are obviously writing to an idea. Such phrases as “absolutely established”, “irrefutable facts” and “thoroughly refuted” are the easily-recognized hallmarks of the propagandist, not the historian. In point of fact, writers attempting to confirm the allegations of astronomical death tolls for European Jews are not writing from any kind of an objective historical point of view but from thoroughly skewed and propagandistic one.
Truth is the first casualty of the propagandist.
The argument is made that since it is “clearly evident” that six million European Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis under Hitler, the fact that nowhere in the through and extensive files of the Third Reich can be found any specific reference to such acts, the answer to this absence is also clearly evident; there are special and secret lists made of Jews who were not entered onto the rolls of the camps but who were immediately executed.
However, if there are no existing Third Reich documents proving the mass murders, neither are there any of the secret lists to be found.
The “secret list” theory is one of desperation, not a clever invention.
When the Glücks files emerged in Moscow, the archivists at the Central Archives stated that Jewish groups were well aware of these documents and had repeatedly insisted that the Russians not release them to “outsiders” who were “not able to properly understand them.”
What obviously was meant is that these extensive, and complete, files clearly did not support the murder of six millions of European Jews and their release would merely complicate the fundraising efforts of the proponents of the planned extermination theories.
As an historical footnote to this commentary, the following officially recorded conversation of Hitler’s is set forth. The first part of it has been widely quoted in a number of books but the second part, for obvious reasons, has not.
On Saturday, October 25, 1941, Hitler received Count Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister at his East Prussian military headquarters for a conference. Present were a number of senior government officials. Following the conference, Hitler held a small, private dinner for several of these personages. One of them was Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS and the other was (SS-Obergruppenführer) Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Main State Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) which controlled the Gestapo and the SD. During the course of the dinner, Hitler said:
“From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesized to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more.”
At this point, historians generally comment on Hitler’s obvious intention to slaughter all the Jews he could lay his hands on. The balance of the conversation conveys a rather different meaning.
“Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who’s worrying about our troops? It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”1
The question of the number of persons who died in Auschwitz has been addressed in a publication entitled Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.2 A chapter by Franciszek Piper entitled “The Number of Victims” addresses the issues discussed here and sections of it deserve to be quoted and enlarged upon.
“In erasing traces of the crimes perpetrated in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis destroyed documents that could serve as the basis for determining how many people died there. When the Soviet soldiers liberated the camp in January 1945, they found documents that confirmed only 100,000 deaths. Yet surviving prisoners maintained that millions had perished at Auchwitz.
Faced with this disparity, officials of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, the organization entrusted with investigating the crimes committed at Auschwitz, conducted an in-depth study. Based on witness testimonies regarding the capacity of the camp and the length of time that its machinery for mass murder was operative, (emphasis added) the commission concluded that no fewer than four million (emphasis added) persons were put to death at the camp…Four million…is the number recorded in Polish literature, as well as in publications of other countries.”
In The Final Solution, one of the first books to deal with the Holocaust, published in 1953, the figure of four million was radically reevaluated. English art historian Gerald Reitlinger estimated the number of victims at Auschwitz to be roughly 800,000 to 900,000, (emphasis added) based on an analysis of the losses of Jews reported by specific countries…
The destruction by the Nazis of most Auschwitz records is the most important cause of divergent estimates…researchers had to rely on discrepant and imprecise data from testimonies and depositions of witnesses, former prisoners and Nazi functionaries and on court decisions and fragmentary and incomplete records of camp registries, archives, (sic) and other institutions. (Emphasis added).”
The question of the destruction of Auschwitz records has been raised over the years to support the claims that large numbers of people died in the camp but were not recorded. If the SS camp administration did destroy or remove official records from Auschwitz before the complex was overrun by the Soviets in early 1945, they did not and could not touch the records that had been sent to the headquarters of the camp system outside of Berlin, or any other copies sent to different agencies. According to the author of the article, the Soviets did find records indicating 100,000 deaths.
Reliance on anything originating from Stalin’s agents is totally unrealistic. The Soviets had no problem continuously rewriting their own history and obviously would have had no problem rewriting the history of other nations. The concurrence of the Poles in Soviet findings has no validity whatsoever.
Poland was under complete control of the Soviets at the time of their reports and any official commission would do precisely as it was told by its masters.
It was only after the implosion of the Soviet Empire that their state archives became available to outside researchers, at least on a limited basis. As has been noted before, it was the standard policy of the Soviet government to denigrate and attack the government of West Germany, not support it. The microfilms released by the Russian archives in the early 1990s were copies of documents found at the SS camp headquarters in 1945 and had these supported the theory of extensive extermination programs, they certainly would have been released years before.
There is another argument used to explain the lack of documentation supporting the thesis of a million or more dead at Auschwitz. This argument claims that endless transports of Jews were delivered to the camp, not recorded anywhere and immediately executed. This, it is claimed, explains why there is such a disparity between official German figures and those proposed by others.
This argument has some fleeting validity but the question arises that if these transports were unrecorded in German records, how could anyone use them as references other than by supposition and speculation? It is very difficult to have one’s cake and eat it too.
The question of transport also needs to be addressed. When the German Reichsbahn scheduled rail transportation to Auschwitz, it was listed officially as special trains (Sonderzug) which indicated that the transports were privately contracted…in this case by the SS. If these transports were of an official, State nature, they would be listed as regular traffic, paid for by the government. While in the beginning of the forced Jewish emigration prior to the war, the Jewish community in Germany and overseas was compelled to pay for the emigration out of their own pockets, such accommodations were not operational during the war except in rare cases.
It should also be noted that transport from Auschwitz taking manufactured products to various points in Europe were also listed as Special Trains. Auschwitz was part of the SS economic empire and as such, was run by the SS and not the German government. The Armed SS (Waffen-SS) was not an official part of the Wehrmacht and its operating expenses, as were the operating expenses for the entire SS, had to be paid for by the SS itself.
This in itself would cast considerable doubt on the thesis that a vast extermination program had been ordered by Hitler officially as State policy. When the SS ran out of operating capital, the transports stopped running.
The use of prisoner labor was certainly addressed in the numerous trials held after the war.
Another thesis often expressed is that the victims at Auschwitz were nearly all Jewish. Reports from the camp break down the exact number of inmates by groups, to include Jews. At Auschwitz, by far the largest group were those held in protective custody or as political prisoners.
With former Soviet archival material now available, a greater balance should be much easier to obtain. It was only their stubborn refusal to release these records that allowed inflated figures, supported only with anecdotal and unsupported material, to flourish and, like ivy, expand and cover every aspect of the building beneath.
This archival material has, in fact, been available on microfilm since 1989 but is rarely discussed.
An article in the New York ‘Times’ of March 3, 1991 quotes the Soviet sources with considerable accuracy. Forty-six camps are covered with a total death toll of more than 400,000. Auschwitz records contain approximately 70,000 death certificates and in addition the death totals of 130,000 among the forced laborers in all camps and 200,000 additional names of various classes of prisoners in all camps to include Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Gross Rosen. When queried about this article and the numbers reflected in it, Red Cross officials in Washington, DC agreed that they were indeed the figures contained in the microfilms they had received from Soviet sources but that “special secret lists” existed that boosted the death toll far higher. Further questioning elicited that no one had seen these “secret lists” but that they must certainly exist and that quoting from the official records was “misleading” and should not be done.
The records of the concentration camp system discovered by the Soviets at the system headquarters outside of Berlin in 1945 are complete. From a chronological point of view, there are no gaps. Many of the records found by the Soviets at Auschwitz are not complete but the headquarters files contain copies of all the Auschwitz records
The arrest, deportation and forced labor of a large number of people, including Jews, was repugnant and on a parallel with the British concentration camps (from whence the name came) instituted during the Boer War in which over 20,000 Boer women and children died in conditions of disease, filth and squalor, and is not possible to ignore or justify.3
Aside from the records of the camp headquarters siezed by the Soviets in 1945 from Oranienburg, another source exists that deals with the monthly population reports made by the individual camps to headquarters. These consisted of radio reports sent in to Oranienburg on a monthly basis. From early 1942 through February of 1943, British intelligence was monitoring these reports and in their official history of the British intelligence system, stated that,
“The returns from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause of death, but included references to shootings and hangings. There were no references in the decrypts to gassing.” (emphasis added) 4
Given inaccurate demographics about the post-war Jewish population, there is still a considerable gap in the number of Jews, mostly Polish Jews, who were living in Poland in 1939 and unaccounted for in 1945. The assumption was made, and is still being made, that these differences were clearly explained by the extermination theory.
The former Soviet Union maintained a rigid control over its files until its collapse, and it has only been since this point in time that a much clearer picture of events has become evident.
In 1995, Russian author Arkady Vaksberg, a Jewish writer, attorney, and investigative journalist, published a book entitled Stalin Against The Jews, the basic theme of which is the persecution of Soviet Jews by Stalin after he had used them against his enemies.
Vaksberg goes into some detail about the Polish Jews who, in September of 1939, fled the German advance into Poland and went into the Soviet Union. Vaksberg states that these Polish Jews were seized by Stalin’s agencies and put into prison camps.
The author states that exact figures of these prisoners are not presently available but speaks of “hundreds of thousands.” He also mentions that Soviet border police shot down many escaping Jews before they crossed the border into Communist territory.
Survival in Soviet Gulags was very poor; of the 80,000 German prisoners of war captured at Stalingrad, only 6,000 were alive in 1955 to return to Germany. How many of these hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived the war is not known, but perhaps former Soviet archives hold the final answer to this issue, an issue that has persisted for half a century.5
After the breakup of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s, the “ethnic cleansing” by the winsome Serbs of anyone they disliked, including Catholics and Jews, was greeted with a chorus of dismay from other nations…but nothing more.

1. “Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941-1945,” New York, 1953, p 72, Protocol 52.
2. “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, 1994, Indiana University Press. pps 61 et seq.
3. Amery, vol.5, 252, 253, 601; vol. 6, 24-25
4. “British Intelligence in the Second World War,” Hinsley et al, London, 1980, vol. 11, p 673.
5. “Stalin Against the Jews,” Vaksberg, New York, 1995, pp 103-107.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccuratre.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

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Chapter 85
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It would be interesting, Alex thought, to return to Duluth with a large military tank, drive it down to his detested high school, running over more fragile bicycle traffic, the slow elderly and small children in the process, and then methodically blasting the building, contents and all, into smoking rubble.
He considered this act of savagery with pleasure.
Alex could visualize the Red Cross making urgent appeals for donated blood for very dead and thoroughly dismembered students, which they would then sell, tainted by terrible diseases or not, for top dollar.
Television stations would spend at least three weeks on the story of the obliterated school with grave, airhead newsreaders pontificating on the scripted reasons for the Great Duluth Slaughter.
Congress would swiftly pass badly flawed laws against boys in tanks pumping shells into high schools, while hundreds of grinning and eager grief counselors would flood into Duluth to comfort weeping, hysterical students and parents while gratefully stuffing their wallets or purses at public expense.
Morticians, on the other hand, would secretly pray for another such incident and the sidewalks surrounding the ruins of the school would sprout plastic flowers in jelly jars and scrawled, badly spelled messages to the uncaring departed.
If Alex somehow managed to escape capture, various law enforcement agencies would triumphantly make daily announcements about his imminent apprehension and enterprising telemarketers would merchandise titanium identification bracelets for other students whose families might want prompt future identification of pulverized offspring so as to be able to more rapidly cash in on insurance policies.
And, of course, there would be a great business in national flags, colored ribbons to be worn on dress or lapel and endless maudlin, and grossly inaccurate, biographies of the slain third period students stuffed into the tattered and shrunken remnants of the national media.
Music groups, whose careers had long since terminated, would give benefit concerts for their faded reputations and a year later, the Mayor of Duluth, two Minnesota Senators, a number of other politicians and a group of professionally grieving parents would unveil a bronze plaque in a public park that would commemorate the fragmented dead.
Two years later, someone would steal the plaque and sell it to a scrap dealer for drug money.
It would not be missed, having been long forgotten and blotched with pigeon droppings and sprayed obscene and misspelled graffiti
Such disasters, Alex decided, could be so profitable for everyone but the mangled dead and even they had the envy of oblivion.
No more ripe zits, faulty cell phones, defective computers, nagging or stingy parents, whining and demanding girl friends, growing sexual frustrations, social rejections, chronic unemployment and the faint but terrible realization that eventually the cloistered world of public education would be replaced by the threatening realities of unrewarding work, failing marriages and expensive children, waiting just outside the exit from the school parking lot.
There had been an ongoing rash of school killings with tormented students finally turning on their tormentors and shooting numbers of them to death. The American media, utilizing shallow-minded psychologists, gabbling social workers and pompous members of the clergy, pontificated endlessly on the reasons for this bloodletting.
Alex, who never bothered to read such nonsense, immediately recognized the motives of the harassed and intimidated and thoroughly applauded their actions whenever he saw another news break on television concerned with slaughter in the public schools.
In his mind, a pistol or shotgun was not sufficiently deadly or inclusive and the possibility of utilizing a rocket or flame-thrower gave promise of much wider destruction and far greater satisfaction.
Normally, Alex was not a happy person but he genuinely enjoyed the prospect of his special fishing trip and bored everyone in the house with his enthusiasm.
Claude liked Alex, did not relish camping but entered into the spirit of things, and was delighted that he would not have to take part in Chuck’s dangerous idea of personal revenge.
They left at four in the morning on a warm Saturday.
Claude’s car was filled with camping equipment, food, maps, disassembled fishing rods, suntan cream, a pair of small but very powerful binoculars, a portable CD player for Alex, several books that no one would probably read and a folded newspaper in the glove compartment.
In the trunk were two suitcases of clothes in addition to various objects that Claude had stored in the secret compartment under the spare tire that he used to transport small but valuable stolen art objects. The back seat was filled with the overflow from the trunk with a cooler of soft drinks on top of the folded tent, positioned for easy access from the front.
Alex woke Chuck up and said,
“Hey, Chuck, we’re off now. Sorry to wake you but you said it was OK.”
“OK,” Chuck mumbled and then sat up.
“Be sure to keep your cell phone on at four every afternoon and we can talk to each other. Catch fish and be careful, Alex. OK?”
“OK and be good.”
And he was away down the stairs, two at a time, wearing a white cotton beach hat with a pair of high-fashion sunglasses clipped to the back edge.
It was still cold in the early morning hours and Alex, who was wearing shorts, sandals and a wife-beater athletic shirt, jumped into Claude’s car, slammed the door and turned on the car heater.
“Cold, kid? If you run around half naked early in the morning, you get what you pay for.”
He pushed the button on the door opener and waited for the gates to slide aside.
“I’m not cold, Claudie, but my balls just bumped into my appendix.”
“Listen, pin head, don’t call me Claudie. The name is Claude. Got that?”
“I like Claudie. But, OK, I won’t call you Claudie. Can I call you Lucille instead?”
“You shut your foul mouth, kid, or I’ll throw you out of my car. What do you call Gwen? Hot Twat?”
“No, I can call her anything but late to dinner. Hey, it’s early in the morning and everyone knows that I’m no good in the morning.”
“Tell me about it. If we’re going on this trip, kid, let’s try to be pleasant in the morning so I don’t have to smack the shit out of you. And turn the heat down in here.”
As they drove south, the sun began to rise above the trees and Alex put on his expensive sun glasses, pulled the brim of his beach hat down over his forehead, put one bare knee against the dashboard and leaned back in the seat, hands laced behind his head.
Claude glanced over at him and remembered the timid, diffident boy that had to have someone sleep with him to ward off evil spirits. It’s amazing, he thought, what good food and affection will do for someone
(Continued)

This is also an e-book, available from Amazon:

The Encyclopedia of American Loons
Richard & Ernestine Markoll

One would expect that quacks, frauds and promoters of alternative medicine would have found ways to promote magnets as a miraculous cure for all sorts of ailments, and sure they have. There is, of course, no scientific basis or evidence to conclude that small, static magnets can relieve pain or influence the course of disease, and the magnets suggested by promoters of magnet therapy) do not even produce any significant magnetic field at or (much less) beneath the skin’s surface.
Richard Markoll and his wife Ernestine are, together with one David H. Trock, M.D., central promoters of the nonsense known as pulsed signal therapy (PST), through an outfit called Bio-Magnetic Treatment Systems (BMTS). Or at least they used to be: in 2001 they pled guilty to criminal charges in connection with a scheme involving pulsed magnetic therapy and fraudulent billing codes to seek payment from Medicare and other insurance plans for PST treatment with a device (Electro-Magnetic Induction Treatment System) that did not have FDA approval. The device in question was invented by Richard Markoll, who does not appear to have a medical license but is a graduate of the Grace University School of Medicine, a Caribbean medical school. Trock, who was formerly principal investigator for the Magnetic Therapy Center, has co-authored studies claiming that PST is effective for treating pain. It isn’t.
PST is still promoted, however, though apparently mostly for pets. Quackery, once released, is rarely contained again.
Diagnosis: Well, they were convicted, so that should be enough. Hopefully neutralized, but being convicted of a scam is not always enough to keep suckers at bay.

Abby Martin

Abigail Suzanne “Abby” Martin is an “investigative journalist”, presenter of The Empire Files, and formerly host of Breaking the Set on the Russian network RT America. A relatively well-known figure, Martin has been heavily involved in various foundations and “documentaries”. She also claims to have grown weary of viewing politics on a Left–Right axis, but what she offers is nevertheless more or less a liberal version of Breitbart-style conspiracy mongering.
She was long a 9/11 truther who labeled the official story as government “propaganda”, saying of the attacks that “I’ve researched it for three years and every single thing that I uncover solidifies my belief that it was an inside job and that our government was complicit in what happened,” where “research” in this context means trawling conspiracy theory websites guided by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
In fairness, she has said that she “no longer subscribes” to the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, but even if she doesn’t there are plenty of conspiracy theories she does subscribe to. For instance, Martin is an important promoter of conspiracies surrounding water fluoridation, and devoted at least one Breaking the Set show to the topic. Like so many fluoridation conspiracy loons, Martin invoked studies showing the dangers of fluoridation, neglecting completely the fact that those studies employed dosages many times as high as would be physically possible for humans to get exposed to through water. But as most chemically illiterate people, the rather fundamental idea that the dose makes the poison remains beyond Martin’s grasp. She also ran various conspiracy theories targeted at Monsanto, the big bogeyman of liberal conspiracy theorists everywhere.
Diagnosis: Often described as a spokesperson for the Millenial generation, Martin is probably at best a specimen of Millenial conspiracy mongerers. Addle-brained fop. Don’t listen to her.