TBR News February 5, 2019

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. February 5, 2019:” With the collapsing American economy, many Americans are rushing to invest in gold; either coins or bar, and also silver. One of the most popular forms of this investment are American coins.  Where there is a need, there is always someone to fill it and in this case, the filling consists of the massive counterfeiting of gold coins, silver coins, and even Swiss gold bars in China. Initially, it appeared they were only faking Morgan dollars, but then it turned out they were also making $20 Liberty, and Indian Head gold $2.50, $5, and $10 coins, of all dates. Evidently, this is extremely easy with today’s computer-and-laser-die-cutting technology, and the fakes are being die-struck in vast quantities, not cast, and visually at least, are superb copies.

The good news is that these fakes are readily detectable with a 0.01 – gram scale, as the Chinese in their greed are using lower carats of gold and lower grades of silver than the genuine coins, to maximize profit, and thus, in most cases, the fake coins and bars are lighter than the real ones. In a few cases, the silver coins of high numismatic interest are actually OVER weight – it appears that the supply of accurate planchet stock is a major difficulty for the forgers.”

 

 

The Table of Contents

• Trump’s 30 Broken Promises
• Lost in TrumpWorld
• Analysis: Northern Ireland, Brexit and New IRA violence
• Polar express: magnetic north pole moving ‘pretty fast’ towards Russia
• The Cro-Magnon man: Fact and Fiction
• 15 years on, is it time to #DeleteFacebook?
• Conspiracies Invented for Fun and Profit
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

Trump’s 30 Broken Promises

by Robert Reich

AlterNet

1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his 2017 tax law has done the opposite. By 2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent will have received 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in taxes. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”
2. He promised that the average family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of the tax law. You bought it. But real wages for most Americans are lower today than they were before the tax law went into effect.
3. He promised to close special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers, especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law kept the “carried interest” loophole.
4. He promised to bring an end to Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear program. You bought it. Kim Jong-Un hasn’t denuclearized.
5. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful,” including “insurance for everybody.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 24 million Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. According to the Commonwealth Fund, about 4 million Americans have lost health insurance in the last two years.
6. He told you he wouldn’t “cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But now he’s planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.
7. He promised to protect anyone with pre-existing conditions. You bought it. But in June, his Justice Department told a federal court it would no longer defend provisions of Obamacare that protect patients with pre-existing conditions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the decision was made with Trump’s approval.
8. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border.You believed him. But there’s no wall.
9. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.
10. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.
11. He promised to re-institute a five-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for five years after they leave government.” You bought it. But the five-year ban he signed applies only to lobbying one’s former agency, not the government as a whole, and it doesn’t stop former officials from becoming lobbyists.
12. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.
13. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by negotiating “like crazy” with drug companies. You bought it. But he hasn’t.
14. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.
15. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.
16. He said he’d create tax-free dependent care savings accounts for younger and elderly dependents, and have the government match contributions low-income families put into their savings accounts. You bought it. He’s done neither.
17. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he declared China is not a currency manipulator.
18. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.
19. After pulling out of the Paris accord, he said he’d negotiate a better deal on the environment. You bought it. There have been no negotiations.
20. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.
21. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and criticized Barack Obama for taking too many vacations. You bought it. But since becoming President, he has spent a quarter of his days at one of his golf properties.
22. He vowed to “push colleges to cut the skyrocketing cost of tuition.” You believed him. But he hasn’t. Instead, he’s made it easier for for-profit college to defraud students.
23. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be consequences for companies that shipped jobs abroad, especially government contractors. You believed him. Never before in U.S. history have federal contractors sent so many jobs overseas. There have been no consequences.
24. He promised to end DACA. Then in January 2018 promised that “DACA recipients should not to be concerned… We’re going to solve the problem,” then he reversed himself again and vowed to end the program by March, 2018. Currently, the federal courts have stayed any action on it.
25. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back lost coal mining jobs. You bought it. But coal is still losing customers as utilities turn to natural gas and renewable power.
26. He promised to protect American steel jobs. You bought it. His tariffs on steel have protected some steel jobs. But industries that use steel – like automakers and construction – now have to pay more for the steel they use, with the result that their jobs are threatened. The Trade Partnership projects that 400,000 jobs will be lost among steel and aluminum users.
27. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But mass shootings keep rising, and Trump has failed to pass effective gun control legislation. After 17 died in Parkland, Florida, Trump promised “immediate action” on gun safety in schools, but has done nothing.
28. He promised to make two- and four-year colleges more affordable. You bought it. But Trump’s most recent budget contains deep cuts in aid for low-income and first-generation college students, reduces Federal Work Study, and eliminates the 50-year-old Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, which goes to more than a million poor college kids each year.
29. He promised to eliminate the federal deficit and bring down the debt. You bought it. Yet due to his massive tax cut mostly for corporations and the rich, and his military spending, the deficit is set to rise to $1 trillion, and the debt has ballooned to more than $21 trillion.
30. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,” he promised during the campaign. You bought it. He still hasn’t released his taxes.

 

Lost in TrumpWorld

War in the Shadows (of You Know Who)

by Andrew Bacevich

TomDispatach

The news, however defined, always contains a fair amount of pap. Since Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, however, the trivia quotient in the average American’s daily newsfeed has grown like so many toadstools in a compost heap, overshadowing or crowding out matters of real substance. We’re living in TrumpWorld, folks. Never in the history of journalism have so many reporters, editors, and pundits expended so much energy fixating on one particular target, while other larger prey frolic unmolested within sight.

As diversion or entertainment — or as a way to make a buck or win 15 seconds of fame — this development is not without value. Yet the overall impact on our democracy is problematic. It’s as if all the nation’s sportswriters obsessed 24/7 about beating New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.

In TrumpWorld, journalistic importance now correlates with relevance to the ongoing saga of Donald J. Trump. To members of the mainstream media (Fox News, of course, excepted), that saga centers on efforts to oust the president from office before he destroys the Republic or blows up the planet.

Let me stipulate for the record: this cause is not entirely meritless. Yet to willingly embrace such a perspective is to forfeit situational awareness bigly. All that ends up mattering are the latest rumors, hints, signs, or sure-fire indicators that The Day of Reckoning approaches. Meanwhile, the president’s own tweets, ill-tempered remarks, and outlandish decisions each serve as a reminder that the moment when he becomes an ex-president can’t arrive too soon.

Hotels in Moscow, MAGA Caps, and a Nixon Tattoo

Ostensibly big stories erupt, command universal attention, and then evaporate like the dewfall on a summer morning, their place taken by the next equally big, no less ephemeral story. Call it the Michael Wolff syndrome. Just a year ago, Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House took the political world by storm, bits and pieces winging across the Internet while the book itself reportedly sold a cool million copies in the first four days of its release. Here was the unvarnished truth of TrumpWorld with a capital T. Yet as quickly as Fire and Fury appeared, it disappeared, leaving nary a trace.

Today, 99 cents will get you a copy of that same hardcover book. As a contribution to deciphering our times, the value of Wolff’s volume is about a dollar less than its current selling price. A mere year after its appearance, it’s hard to recall what all the fuss was about.

Smaller scale versions of the Wolff syndrome play themselves out almost daily. Remember the recent bombshell BuzzFeed report charging that Trump had ordered his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie about a proposed hotel project in Moscow? For a day or so, it was the all-encompassing, stop-the-presses-get-me-rewrite version of reality, the revelation — finally! — that would bring down the president. Then the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that key aspects of the report were “not accurate” and the 24/7 buzz created by that scoop vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

Immediately thereafter, Rudy Giuliani, once “America’s mayor,” now Trump’s Barney Fife-equivalent of a personal lawyer, announced on national television that he had never said “there was no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities in election 2016. Observers on the lookout for the proverbial smoking gun quickly interpreted that odd formulation as an admission that collusion must, in fact, have occurred.

The headlines were thunderous. Yet within hours, the gotcha-interpretation fell apart. Alternative explanations appeared, suggesting that Giuliani was suffering from dementia or that his drinking habit had gotten out of hand. With the ex-mayor wasting little time walking back his own comment, another smoking gun morphed into a cap pistol.

Fortunately for what little survives of his reputation, Giuliani’s latest gaffe was promptly eclipsed by video clips that seemed to show white students from an all-boys Catholic high school in Kentucky (Strike One!) who had just participated in the annual March for Life in Washington (Strike Two!) and were taunting an elderly Native American Vietnam War veteran using Tomahawk chops while sporting MAGA hats on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (Strike Three!).

The ensuing rush to judgment became a wind sprint. Here was the distilled essence of every terrible thing that Donald Trump had done to America. The pro-Trump baseball caps said it all. As a columnist in my hometown newspaper put it, “Like a white hood, that cap represents a provocation and a threat: ‘You know where we stand. You’ve been warned. And the president of the United States has our back.’ And, yes, I do equate MAGA gear with traditional Klan attire. The sartorial choices change, the racism remains the same.” For those too obtuse to grasp the underlying point, the title of the essay drove it home: “White America, come get your children.”

As luck would have it, however, the events that actually unfolded on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial turned out to be more complicated than was first reported. No matter: in TrumpWorld, all sides treat facts as malleable and striking the right moral posture counts for far more than balance or accuracy.

Anyway, soon after, with news that Trump confidant Roger Stone had been indicted on various charges, the boys from Covington could return to the obscurity from which they briefly emerged. To judge from the instantaneous media reaction, Stone’s first name might as well have been Rosetta. Here at last — for sure this time — was the key to getting the real dirt.

Rest assured, though, that by the time this essay appears, Stone and his Richard Nixon tattoo will have been superseded by yet another sensational Trump-related revelation (or two or three).

And so it goes, in an endlessly churning cycle: “breaking news” goes viral; commentators rush in to explain what-it-all-means; the president himself retaliates by lashing out on Twitter (“The Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country!”), much to the delight of his critics. This tit-for-tat exchange continues until the next fresh tidbit of “breaking news” gives the cycle another vigorous turn.

When Does a Hill of Beans Become a Mountain?

Do all of the words spoken or written result in citizens who are better informed and better able to reach sensible conclusions about the global situation in which our country finds itself? Not as far as I can tell. Granted, if I spent more time watching those gabbling heads on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, I might feel differently. But I doubt it.

Still, having been involuntarily shanghaied into TrumpWorld, I worry that my fellow citizens are losing their ability to distinguish between what truly matters and what doesn’t, between what’s vital and what’s merely interesting. True, Donald J. Trump has a particular knack for simplifying and thereby distorting almost any subject to which he gives even the slightest attention, ranging from border security to forest management. Yet almost everywhere in TrumpWorld, this very tendency has become endemic, with nuance and perspective sacrificed to the larger cause of cleansing the temple of the president’s offending presence. Nothing, it appears, comes close to the importance of this effort.

Not even wars.

I admit to a preoccupation with the nation’s seemingly never-ending armed conflicts. These days it’s not the conduct of our wars that interests me — they have become all but indecipherable — but their duration, aimlessness, and cumulative costs. Yet even more than all of these, what’s fascinating is the way that they continue more or less on autopilot.

I don’t wish to imply that political leaders and media outlets ignore our wars altogether. That would be unfair. Yet in TrumpWorld, while the president’s performance in office receives intensive and persistent coverage day in, day out, the attention given to America’s wars has been sparse and perfunctory, when not positively bizarre.

As a case in point, consider the op-ed that recently appeared in the New York Times (just as actual peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban seemed to be progressing), making the case for prolonging the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while chiding President Trump for considering a reduction in the number of U.S. troops currently stationed there. Any such move, warned Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, would be a “mistake” of the first order.

The ongoing Afghan War dates from a time when some of today’s recruits were still in diapers. Yet O’Hanlon counsels patience: a bit more time and things just might work out. This is more or less comparable to those who suggested back in the 1950s that African Americans might show a bit more patience in their struggle for equality: Hey, what’s the rush?

I don’t pretend to know what persuaded the editors of the Times that O’Hanlon’s call to make America’s longest war even longer qualifies as something readers of the nation’s most influential newspaper just now need to ponder. Yet I do know this: the dearth of critical attention to the costs and consequences of our various post-9/11 wars is nothing short of shameful, a charge to which politicians and journalists alike should plead equally guilty.

I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more than a little merit. Even more striking than Trump’s critique is the fact that so few members of the national security establishment are willing to examine it seriously. As a consequence, the wars persist, devoid of purpose.

Still, I find myself wondering: If a proposed troop drawdown in Afghanistan qualifies as a “mistake,” as O’Hanlon contends, then what term best describes a war that has cost something like a trillion dollars, killed and maimed tens of thousands, and produced a protracted stalemate?

Disaster? Debacle? Catastrophe? Humiliation?

And, if recent press reports prove true, with U.S. government officials accepting Taliban promises of good behavior as a basis for calling it quits, then this longest war in our history will not have provided much of a return on investment. Given the disparity between the U.S. aims announced back in 2001 and the results actually achieved, defeat might be an apt characterization.

Yet the fault is not Trump’s. The fault belongs to those who have allowed their immersion in the dank precincts of TrumpWorld to preclude serious reexamination of misguided and reckless policies that predate the president by at least 15 years.

 

Analysis: Northern Ireland, Brexit and New IRA violence

Last month, a car bomb attack in Londonderry attracted huge media interest, with journalists linking violence to Brexit.

February 5, 2019

by Matthew Symington

AlJazeera

Seven teenagers walked past a Ford Fusion car parked outside a court in Bishop Street, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, at 7.39pm on January 19.

CCTV footage captured the group laughing and joking as they walked down the street and out of vision.

Thirty minutes later, the same CCTV camera showed the car exploding in a ball of flames, the sound wave ricocheting throughout the small city nestled in the valley of the River Foyle, causing the windows and doors in houses two miles away to tremble.

Rewind the CCTV footage 46 minutes, and the car can be seen being driven into the street and parked before a young man wearing a hooded sweatshirt gets out and runs away.

Police efforts to investigate the attack in the following days were hindered by continued security alerts and hoax bomb threats. Nonetheless, the city’s chief police officer was sure who was responsible – the “New Irish Republican Army”.

International journalists were already scrambling to the city to report and analyse the significance of the car bombing.

The level of interest almost indicated that the attack was something new, but it wasn’t.

Since 2009, organisations that want to continue the Irish republican tradition of “armed struggle” against British rule have claimed responsibility for a string of killings of British soldiers, policemen and prison officers.

What journalists wanted to know was to what extent their activity now relates to the political drama of Brexit unfolding in London.

Northern Ireland, like Scotland, voted against Brexit in the June 2016 referendum, while Wales and England wanted to leave the bloc.

Since the vote, people in Northern Ireland have found themselves in front of TV cameras more than any time since a peace agreement ended 30 years of sectarian violence in 1998.

That conflict pitted pro-British, mostly Protestant unionists, dedicated to retaining Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom against Irish nationalists, mainly Catholic, who wanted to unite with the Republic of Ireland.

Peace was reached when the two blocs agreed to share power, and allow the constitutional future of the province to be decided by popular vote when the right time came.

It was facilitated by the UK and Republic of Ireland, both European Union member states, allowing their governments to remove trade and security barriers along the controversial border that reminds nationalists that the island of Ireland is still divided into two separate countries.

Britain’s withdrawal from the EU threatens to make that border more significant and more visible.

Justifiably, the media has been quick to point out the combustibility of the situation, and hawkish in spotting any signs that stability in the province might be deteriorating.

But suggestions that hardline Irish republicans intent on using force to achieve their goals are in some way motivated by Brexit is perceived almost as an insult by those paramilitaries who pride themselves on their ideological purity.

Infrastructure or none, the border that divides Ireland exists, and for them, it is a symbol of occupation.

The New IRA said as much when it eventually took responsibility for the Derry car bomb.

“All this talk of Brexit, hard borders, soft borders, has no bearing on our actions and the IRA won’t be going anywhere,” its statement read.

Republican hardliners who believe Sinn Fein has sold out to the British government have peeled away from mainstream republicanism at various stages of the peace process.

In 2012, a collection of these dissident groups joined forces and rebranded themselves simply, “the IRA”.

For everyone else, they became known as “the New IRA”.

Quite systematically, British intelligence has set about dismantling this group with surveillance and informers.

In the last seven years, they have identified a number of arms dumps and made arrests that have crippled the New IRA, everywhere but Derry

According to Allison Morris, security correspondent for the Irish News, Derry became a blackspot in the security services’ efforts to thwart dissident republican violence.

As such, the threat there has not just grown, but evolved.

“Elsewhere it’s just disenfranchised former members of the Provisional IRA, but that’s not the case in Derry. These are new recruits, people who were too young to be involved in the conflict,” she said.

That growth has seen Derry become something of an ideological battleground between the dissidents and Sinn Fein to win the hearts and minds of young working-class people in nationalist housing estates.

Where the dissidents have prevailed, violence has often followed.

Last summer, the New IRA was widely blamed for orchestrating sectarian rioting during the annual Protestant marching season.

For six nights in a row, the city’s only Protestant housing estate to the west of the River Foyle was pelted with petrol bombs.

Some of the most trenchant condemnation of last month’s car bomb came from the local Sinn Fein Member of Parliament, Elisha McCallion.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, she said: “Like the rest of the community, we’re absolutely disgusted by what has happened here … I would love to hear someone try to explain why they did what they did on Saturday night in our busy city centre with lots of people about… they have heard the outrage of the community.”

But for dissidents, this just reinforces their view that Sinn Fein has betrayed republicanism.

Packy Carty is a senior member of the dissident republican party Saoradh.

The group is accused of having formal links to the New IRA, and five of its members were arrested after last month’s bombing – all have been released.

It denies those associations, and saves its most stinging criticism for Sinn Fein, who Carty doesn’t regard as legitimate republicans.

“If it hadn’t been for armed struggle, Martin McGuinness would have been a butcher and Gerry Adams would have been pulling pints in a bar on the Falls Road,” he said. “For them to condemn young republicans now is the height of hypocrisy.”

Packy Carty is a senior member of the dissident republican party Saoradh.

The group is accused of having formal links to the New IRA, and five of its members were arrested after last month’s bombing – all have been released.

It denies those associations, and saves its most stinging criticism for Sinn Fein, who Carty doesn’t regard as legitimate republicans.

“If it hadn’t been for armed struggle, Martin McGuinness would have been a butcher and Gerry Adams would have been pulling pints in a bar on the Falls Road,” he said. “For them to condemn young republicans now is the height of hypocrisy.”

Not all of those who disagree with Sinn Fein’s politics would go as far as excusing or condoning continued violence.

In a lengthy blog post, former Provisional IRA member and Sinn Fein critic Anthony McIntyre wrote: “It seems unfathomable that there remain republicans so divorced from the concept of rights other than their own, that they would still consider detonating a car bomb in a population centre.

“If the Provisional IRA couldn’t succeed, and their campaign was an unmitigated failure, then what chance have these make-believe IRAs got?”

Ultimately this is the point, and it strikes at the heart of the differences between Sinn Fein’s pursuit of a united Ireland and the tactics of dissident republicans.

Brexit might not matter to the hardliners, but it has given Sinn Fein the political momentum to push for a public vote on Northern Ireland’s future.

 

Polar express: magnetic north pole moving ‘pretty fast’ towards Russia

Updates on its location – essential for everything from consumer electronics to runway names – are coming thick and fast

February 4, 2019

AP

Earth’s north magnetic pole has been drifting so fast in recent decades that scientists say that past estimates are no longer accurate enough for precise navigation. On Monday, they released an update of where magnetic north really was, nearly a year ahead of schedule.

The magnetic north pole is moving about 34 miles (55 kilometres) a year. It crossed the international date line in 2017, and is leaving the Canadian Arctic on its way to Siberia.

The constant shift is a problem for compasses in smartphones and some consumer electronics. Planes and ships also rely on magnetic north, usually as backup navigation, said University of Colorado geophysicist Arnaud Chulliat, lead author of the newly issued World Magnetic Model. GPS is not affected because it is satellite-based

The US military uses magnetic north for navigation and parachute drops and airport runway names are based on their direction in relation to magnetic north. Their names change when the poles are moved. For example, the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska, renamed a runway 1L-19R to 2L-20R in 2009.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and UK tend to update the location of the magnetic north pole every five years, but this update came early because of the pole’s faster movement. The movement of the magnetic north pole “is pretty fast”, Chulliat said.

Since 1831 when it was first measured in the Canadian Arctic it has moved about 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometres) toward Siberia. Since 2000, its speed jumped from about 9 miles a year (15km) to 34 miles a year (55km).

The reason is turbulence in Earth’s liquid outer core. There is a hot liquid ocean of iron and nickel in the planet’s core where the motion generates an electric field, said University of Maryland geophysicist Daniel Lathrop, who wasn’t part of the team monitoring the magnetic north pole.

“It has changes akin to weather,” Lathrop said. “We might just call it magnetic weather.”

The magnetic south pole is moving far slower than the north.

In general Earth’s magnetic field is getting weaker, leading scientists to say it will eventually flip, where the north and south pole change polarity like a bar magnet flipping over. It has happened numerous times in Earth’s history, but not in the past 780,000 years. “It’s not a question of if it’s going to reverse, the question is when it’s going to reverse,” Lathrop said.

When it reverses, it won’t be like a coin flip, but take 1,000 or more years, experts said.

 

The Cro-Magnon man: Fact and Fiction

February 5, 2019

by Christian Jürs

Cro-Magnon people were nomadic in nature, lived in tents and other man-made shelters in groups of several families. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials.

They included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and burial..

They were the first confirmed to have domesticated animals such as the horse and the dog, starting by about 15 thousand years ago. They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women. Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated. Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorized as hunting, fertility or other types of sympathetic magic.

Re-evaluations have put these great works of art in a more prominent place in art history.

They show evidence of motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of “impressionist” like style, perspective, and innovative use of the natural relief in the caves. Also possible, considering the new concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro-Magnon, are abstract representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer.

First of all, we still have the problem of a 60,000-year time lag between the appearance of the sub-Saharan modern type man whose descendants still live in Africa who was on the scene with no improvements in his technology for that length of time.

It should be noted that the Neanderthals did not have any form of art. And also that there was essentially no change in their stone tools for 100,000 years

If Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa, why isn’t there absolutely no trace of him in that land?

The most effective and popular way that sociologists and the public media deals with this potentially embarrassing issue  is to either ignore it,  deny it, or make an effort to twist facts to suit their fancy.   Many archaeologists continue to account for the cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human being from Africa. They propose a “second biological event” to explain this regardless of the fact that such a migration has left no trace whatsoever.

At the present time , it is socially acceptable to suggest that the other “modern men” of sub-Saharan Africa were not really fully modern. They were “near-modern”. Thus, they try to reason, Africa is preserved as the origin of all mankind, and the only thing necessary was a breakthrough in the African lineage, is some kind of a find that would prove that the decedents of Lucy has some kind of an event that would prove the Cro-Magon/Celt morphed from a thick-skulled, short legged and long armed African migrant.  Unfortunately for their hopes, no such proof has ever been found.

The Cro-Magnon were the first early modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) of the European Upper Paleolithic. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiocarbon dated to 35,000 years before present.

Cro-Magnons were robustly built and powerful. The body was generally heavy and solid with a strong musculature. The forehead was straight, with slight browridges and a tall forehead. Cro-Magnons were the first humans (genus Homo) to have a prominent chin. The brain capacity was about 1,600 cubic centimetres (98 cu in), larger than the average for modern humans.

 

15 years on, is it time to #DeleteFacebook?

What started as an online student directory aimed at ranking women by their looks quickly grew into the world’s most popular social media platform. But as DW’s Courtney Tenz argues, we might be happier Facebook free.

February 4, 2019

by Courtney Tenz

DW

Facebook was still in its infancy when I came to Germany from the US in 2005. A lecturer at university, over the previous year I’d heard my students talking about the website as a place to keep up with their friends away at other colleges. But I brushed it off as something only the young would do. And who really wanted to keep in touch with their high school friends when their lives were just getting started?

My, how times have changed.

Fifteen years after the platform got its start in a Harvard dorm room as an online student directory, Facebook now clocks more than 2.3 billion users worldwide (including, as of 2018, an estimated 116 million fake accounts and 255 million duplicates).

If I wanted to, I could likely connect with any one of the more than 1,000 students I roamed my high school’s corridors with. I could find my long-lost pen pal from Sri Lanka, or the Swedish girl I once shared a hostel room with in the south of France.

The question I keep asking myself, though, is: Do I want to?

Do I really want to see if that boy I had a crush on in fifth grade has aged well? Do I really want to be invited to a closed group where I can purchase a pair of cheap-yet-overpriced patterned leggings from my cousin? What’s more: Do I want these people to keep up with me?

Maybe, in this way, I really have adopted a German attitude towards social media, relationships and privacy.

Real life vs. Fakebook friends

When I first logged on to Facebook at the end of 2005, I used it solely as a way to keep up-to-date with my classmates from graduate school. I didn’t look for people I knew from my past, connecting with people from my hometown thousands of miles away or reaching out to former coworkers to hear where their careers were taking them.

And for those first few years in Germany, I couldn’t find anyone I knew personally on the platform. They were all registered on Studi.VZ, a Germany-wide student directory that resembled something like a yearbook: photo, name, age, school, year of graduation.

To me, Facebook served as a clear divider between the world I lived in here in Germany, my real life, and the one I’d left behind in the US. Through Facebook, I could keep up with the goings-on back home while leading my boring, everyday life grabbing coffee or meeting for book club with other people — in person.

When the Germans I knew finally did join, I could hardly find them, as they did it with strange nicknames: Al Exa; Thor Sten; Ann E. Bodey. Or they logged in under their own names and then posted nothing — not even a picture. So much for Facebook’s “real name only” policy

Going viral

On the other side of the Atlantic, my relatives flocked to Facebook, bombarding anyone whose acquaintance they may have made in recent years with wedding videos and birth photos, cryptically announcing breakups and makeups with the click of a button, posting memes more revealing of their personality than any joke told around the dinner table.

As Mark Zuckerberg himself has noted, we “have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” Things that I would have previously thought unthinkable — like telling strangers which pub you’re going to later or posting selfies while you’re sick — have become so commonplace as to be mundane.

While the jury is still out as to whether that level of sharing is a good thing (though many would argue it isn’t, especially for young children), Facebook has become, for many, more than just a sharing platform.  As Kalev Leetaru, a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security wrote in Forbes, “In some countries, Facebook has become the internet itself, its walled gardens effectively defining the limits of access.”

“Facebook,” he writes, “has become so integrated into our lives, so intertwined with how we keep in touch, follow the news, get business and governmental updates and conduct our lives, that it has passed the point of no return: we simply cannot leave it no matter how much we would like.”

#DeleteFacebook

That’s quite a shift from the throwaway “hot or not” ranking website that started it all. But is it true? Is it really impossible to #deletefacebook?

It isn’t, at least, for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who recently announced she was closing her popular account. And it wasn’t for me, several years ago, when I deactivated and logged off for good.

While my reasons for leaving the platform are personal, they center around the concerns that many people voice when it comes to both privacy and to the artificial aspects of these social media connections.

Now, if I want someone to know I’m getting married or having a baby, I have to write them a personal e-mail or letter or even — gasp — pick up the much-dreaded telephone.

If I want my friends to see what I ate for dinner on the sixth night of my stay in Bangkok, I have to subject them to a good old-fashioned slideshow. And though I may be missing out on news from Aric in Argentina, it’s just as well that our acquaintanceship has faded away, as real relationships take work. Communication.

That doesn’t necessarily mean meeting up in person. But is it really social to type into a void and expect that everyone you’ve ever met is listening?

And who knows? Deleting Facebook might actually do you some good. In a study titled The Welfare Effects of Social Media, researchers from NYU and Stanford found that logging off for 30 days led to greater well-being, measured subjectively. Those who logged off for the study reported they spent more time with friends and family and were less agitated when it came to their attention span.

If that small bit of happiness we glean from keeping in touch with long-distance friends and family is at the same time keeping us distracted and making us depressed, are we sure the trade-off is worth it?

 

Conspiracies Invented for Fun and Profit

February 5, 2019

by Christian Jürs

In February 2004, retired Army Col. Donn de Grand-Pre said on “The Alex Jones Show,” a radio talk show broadcast on 42 stations: “It [Flight 93] was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard. I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93.” LetsRoll911.org, citing de Grand-Pre, identifies the pilot: “Major Rick Gibney fired two Sidewinder missiles at the aircraft and destroyed it in midflight at precisely 0958.”

FACT: Saying he was reluctant to fuel debate by responding to unsubstantiated charges, Gibney (a lieutenant colonel, not a major) declined to comment. According to Air National Guard spokesman Master Sgt. David Somdahl, Gibney flew an F-16 that morning–but nowhere near Shanksville. He took off from Fargo, N.D., and flew to Bozeman, Mont., to pick up Ed Jacoby Jr., the director of the New York State Emergency Management Office. Gibney then flew Jacoby from Montana to Albany, N.Y., so Jacoby could coordinate 17,000 rescue workers engaged in the state’s response to 9/11. Jacoby confirms the day’s events. “I was in Big Sky for an emergency managers meeting. Someone called to say an F-16 was landing in Bozeman. From there we flew to Albany.” Jacoby is outraged by the claim that Gibney shot down Flight 93. “I summarily dismiss that because Lt. Col. Gibney was with me at that time. It disgusts me to see this because the public is being misled. More than anything else it disgusts me because it brings up fears. It brings up hopes–it brings up all sorts of feelings, not only to the victims’ families but to all the individuals throughout the country, and the world for that matter. I get angry at the misinformation out there.”

 

TWA Flight 800: The Gathering of the Nuts

Whenever a disaster happens that, unlike a volcanic eruption or a huge forest fire, cannot be immediately explained, a great gathering of self-serving individuals begin to spout forth theories, plans, tales of “secret documents,’ and “confidential communications” with unnamed “experts.” The purpose of expounding these weird tales generally is to draw attention to the expounder. That no reputable segment of any media bothers with discussing these theories is always attributed to control by an irate Government who are furious at the brilliance of the theorist and who spend endless hours spying on them, opening their solicitations from NAMBLA and installing microphones in their desks at the local Humane Society.

As a case in point, let us consider a well-known tragedy. First come the actual facts and then the actual fictions.

On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747-131 registered as N93119, took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport (New York) enroute to Charles De Gaulle International Airport (Paris).

The aircraft was flying more than eight miles off the cost of East Moriches, New York (part of Long Island) when the fuel tank exploded. The aircraft banked and the front part of the aircraft broke off. The wind pushed the aircraft into a climb. Then, the aircraft went into a dive, causing the wings to break off the aircraft. Pieces of the aircraft plummeted down into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 230 passengers on board.

After what has been billed as the longest and most expensive accident investigation in American aviation history, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board  (NTSB) investigation found that the flammable fuel/air mixture of the center wing fuel tank probably ignited due to electrical failure in the center fuel tank, causing the plane to explode in flight. The FBI agreed that there had been no criminal act after examining all the plane’s wreckage that had been recovered. In May of 1997, mechanics discovered a fuel leak in a Boeing 737-200 that they believed was caused by the kind of electrical arcing suspected of causing the TWA Flight 800 fatal explosion. NTSB investigators believed that the same kind of arcing from the wiring in the center fuel tank of TWA Flight 800 sparked the explosion that brought the plane down. As a result of extensive and very through testing, the NTSB issued an “airworthiness directive” requiring the immediate inspection of the wiring of older 747s. In April, it recommended further inspections and design changes in the wiring of 747s and in Boeing 707s and C-130 transport planes, as well.

Eight years after the crash, in February 2004, the FAA indicated that it would start the process of ordering airlines to install a fuel tank inerting system in most of their aircraft. It was stated that the order would probably actually be issued within two years, and then the airlines would be required to install the devices over the subsequent seven years. The FAA stated that, including the TWA Flight 800 crash, there had been three fuel tank explosions in airliners over the previous 14 years (the two others having occurred on the ground),

Various groups and individuals continue to maintain that the plane was downed by a bomb or missile, and that there was a subsequent cover-up to disguise the real cause of the crash.

The “terrorist theory” was, as usual, one of the first to be mentioned, especially due to the fact that the accident happened during the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, where a bomb exploded ten days later. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, these alternate explanations have been revisited, as some officials and commentators have mentioned this disaster among lists of terrorist attacks. Cmdr. William S. Donaldson, a retired Naval officer who conducted an independent investigation, disagrees with the official theory. According to Commander Donaldson, “jet airliners built by the American aerospace industry have logged at least 150 thousand years of flight time. Not once has there ever been a spontaneous fuel tank explosion on any fuel tank while airborne” (Letter to NTSB 11-14-97).

Donaldson concluded that the airplane was “shot down by missiles.” He interviewed hundreds of witnesses and said he reconstructed the flight paths of these missiles by triangulating the eyewitness accounts. Soon after, a photo that a passenger of a North American Airlines plane arriving at JFK supposedly took, seemed to support the missile theory because the “photo” showed a “missile” missing the NA Airlines jet narrowly.

Pierre Salinger, a former White House press secretary to President John F. Kennedy and ABC News journalist, prominently and repeatedly claimed he had proof that the flight was downed by a missile from a U.S. Navy ship. The documents on which he relied were later found to be vague rumors that had been distributed over Usenet, with attributions only to many “unnamed experts”. Some people briefly gave the name of Pierre Salinger Syndrome to the tendency to believe things that one reads on the bloggers of the Internet.

One such theory has the US Navy conducting tests of submarine-to-air missiles, accidentally hitting Flight 800, and then covering up the fatal error. After initial denials, the U.S. Navy later admitted that USS Wyoming (SSBN-742), commissioned only days before, was conducting sea trials in the area, and that USS Trepang (SSN-674) and USS Albuquerque (SSN-706) were conducting unspecified operations in the area. It should be noted that all three of these submarines lacked any surface to air missile armament as part of their standard munitions loadout (as do all submarines). It is possible that any of the three subs could have been carrying MANPADS missiles. However all three subs were more than 50 miles (80 km) away from the crash site, very far outside the range of any MANPADS missile in the world. One suggested possibility is that the type of missile involved may be classified.

Another possible alternate theory involving the US Navy is that a missile was fired from the USS Normandy (CG-60), operating 185 nautical miles (340 km) south of the TWA 800 crash site. This is well outside of the range of currently deployed Standard Missiles carried by US ships, almost double the range of the current Block IIIB versions, and just within the future Block IV ER versions. Even if this were a test of a Block IV version, although there is no evidence for this, at the extreme range in question the engine would have long burned out and the warhead would be gliding. This contradicts the main claim that a missile was involved, which is a number of eyewitness accounts claiming to have seen “a missile trail almost vertical under the explosion site.” Furthermore, inventories of USS Normandy’s missile complement immediately following the crash of TWA 800 showed no missiles missing from the inventory, according to the US Navy

Regardless of the very faint possibility of any number of missiles and missile launch platforms being in the vicinity of TWA 800 at the time of the accident, no evidence of any kind of a missile impact exists within the recovered wreckage, according to a study conducted by the Department of Defense’s Office of Special Technology

However, at least one individual involved at higher levels with the FBI’s portion of the recovery operations has stated publicly that he saw during his involvement predominant evidence in the state of the wreckage, the form of the wreckage field, the state of the victim’s remains, public and confidential actions by the airlines, investigation officials, and the Navy following the event, and other factors that convinced him the crash was the result of an “accidental missile strike.” Unfortunately, they have neglected to produce their evidence, claiming that the FBI and the CIA broke into their apartment and stole it, along with certain magazines, a picture of Matt Drudge in a leather thong and a six pack of warm beer.

One of the usual “reliable eyewitnesses” was a Malvina Tidwell of Long Island who claimed she and her husband, Oscar, (since deceased) “positively identified” an Arab submarine, firing rockets, from their vantage point of the beach where they were looking for driftwood. “I knew it was an Arab sub,” Tidwell said, “because they had men with beards running around the deck and a green flag with Arab writing on it.” Mrs Tidwell is legally blind and her husband, who also gave a long interview to the alternative media, was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s Disease and believed that he was the illegitimate son of Harry Truman.

For instance, an affidavit, dated January 2003 (and which looks very much like blogger information that was passed around the internet shortly after the crash), is being listed as one of the “articles of evidence” in recent FOIA suits pressed by Captain Ray Lahr against the National Transportation Safety Board: This document states he viewed “radar tapes” and took part in “phone conversations” which convinced him Flight 800 was a victim of friendly fire, and that he later passed on this information to Pierre Salinger (Note such anomalies as the doubling of every statement in the affidavit, the second half being a reworded version of the first half).

Elaine Scarry, in a number of articles in the New York Review of Books, has raised the possibility of electromagnetic interference being responsible for the accident. It has also been suggested that an electronic death ray developed by the brilliant Nicholas Tesla and utilized by a mysterious group calling itself the Hidden Hand brought down the plane in furtherance of a plan that no one seems to know about. The Hidden Hand was supposed to have  detonated an atomic bomb over Houston, Texas on Christmas Day of 2004 but apparently was unsuccessful as Houston, unfortunately, is still intact.

A number of strange “alternate theories” surrounding TWA 800 relied on so-called eye witness accounts as collected by the FBI. However, very few of the witnesses were within five miles (8 km) of TWA 800 at the time of the accident, according to a witness map provided by the NTSB. The vast majority of the witnesses were too far away from the accident scene to discern any significant details, and some witnesses describe events that are well beyond the visual acuity of humans

Ex- CBS Investigator Kristina Borjesson, (email: FKLB@aol.com) and co-workers (including Oliver Stone) were on a documentary project for ABC, until it was aborted. Ms. Borjesson’s “documentary” involved the scores of the usual “eyewitnesses” who were desperate for their fifteen minutes of fame and who claimed they saw “something streaking from the ocean toward the plane.” This documentary was for a show, Declassified, that was being produced by Oliver Stone and slated to air on ABC. But the Stone connection grew controversial, and ABC canceled the program. CBS also immediately dissociated itself from Ms. Borjesson. Josh Howard, a senior producer at 60 Minutes, said, “Her official relationship with CBS ended before she pitched that story. (About mythic ‘rocket fuel’ being found on a strip of cloth alleged to have come from one of the passenger seats on Flight 800) She had maybe a month to go on her contract. She was anxiously looking around for other projects to prolong her employment.”

The 800 flight number was retired and replaced with flight 924 after the crash, although TWA continued to operate flights between New York and Paris. In Spring 2001, TWA merged with American Airlines. Of the exposers of the Real Truth, throughly discredited Pierre Salinger has since died and Ms Borjesson has slipped into professional oblivion, along with many others.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

February 5, 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 publications.

 

Conversation No. 78

Date:  Monday, March 31, 1997

Commenced: 9:12 AM CST

Concluded: 9:28 AM CST

 

GD: I have been trying to work up an article on the BCCI and thought, Robert, you might have some knowledge of it, seeing as Corson told me you knew about them.

RTC: Bill has a motor mouth but yes, I know about them. What are you looking for?

GD: There has been quite a bit of comment on and off in the press about this and, as I said, Bill commented on this.

RTC: Well, BCCI was, is, a Paki bank, set up by a high-rolling con man and fraud expert named Abedi. We had connections with him and some of his people and he was willing to help us fund the anti-Russian rebels in Afghanistan but off the books. Critchfield had a hand in all of this gun business as you know. These people were a farce, setting up all kinds of off shore banks and basicially, it was nothing but a Ponzi scheme but one that we got into and were able to shut up a number of trouble makers along the way. And the Abedi people had connections with the Paki ISI…

GD: Pardon?

RTC: Called the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. A Limey set it up at the time the Pakis broke off from India in the late ‘40s,. They basicially were the power behind the throne in Pakistan…ran everything, took huge bribes from us on one hand and the Russians on the other. Typical bunch of worthless raghead scum. Never turn you back on any of them,, ever, Gregory, or you get a knife in it. My, what a game that turned out to be. We had such a stake in all of that mess that we had to make sure it was kept quiet, at least until we managed to get Ivan out of Afghanistan. Oh yes, there were complaints because the BCCI people were not only outright frauds but very obvious to the legitimate bankers here. Oh, a nice conversation there and someone falling off a cliff there but these greedy crooks just got too much hubris and finally it began to unravel. You must have read about this. F. Lee Bailey was a front for them and God knows how many throughly rotten Congressmen, regulatory people and so on were on the take. I mean there was so much bribe money flowing out of those people you couldn’t wonder how high it went. They dragged old Clark Clifford into it and others. Of course Clark has a great opinion of himself and had no problem taking money for his services.

GD: And your people?

RTC: I have pounds of filched files on this. Poor Trento thinks he’s going to get them and write a Pulitizer Prise winner out of it. I ought to send them to you. Would you like that?

GD: And have Paki assassins lurking on my front porch, cunningly disguised as piles of dog droppings? Probably not…although…

RTC: Well, Trento is far too stupid to know what to do with them so if I don’t send them to you, I might burn them. Emily shouldn’t have to deal with it when I’m gone and Greg…my son, not you…wouldn’t have a clue. Yes, I can send them to you and you can do what you want with them. My God, Gregory, billions of dollars in taxpayers funds lining pockets from here to Karachi.

GD: Critchfield?

RTC: Among others…but not me. Jim made so much money from the rag heads that I’m surprised he didn’t buy the Capitol as a barn for his stupid horses.

GD: And Atwood…

RTC: Small potatoes. The roster of the anointed reads like the Washington social calendar. Senator this and Director that.

GD: Kimmel?
RTC: Oh, God, no, not Dudley Doright. And don’t mention any of this to him. He wouldn’t have the fantest idea what to do with it and if he tried, he would join brother Colby in the boneyard. I tell you, Gregory, when we started the Company in ’48, believe it or not, we were a bunch of idealists. Of course the Cold War was a fake but we were really interested in fucking up old Joe Stalin and also thwarting the liberal kikes inside the Beltway. Still, idealists at heart. The thievery started later. Gregory, put a poorish man in a room full of gold coins and a few will stick to his feet. Sometimes more than a few. I ran the CIA’s business section and believe me, it was a wonderful rerlationship with the latter-day robber barons. The slide rule Shylocks. I rather like you, Gregory and if I gave you come of the papers I collected, you would either die or become very, very rich. I think they call it blackmail.

GD: One has to be careful what that, Robert. For instance, you tell me Angleton was in with the mob…

RTC: And the kikes too, don’t forget that. I really liked and admired Jim but…

GD: Yes. That’s like having a best friend from collegs who pimps autistic children to fat old men,

RTC: Yes, more or less but Jim had terrible friends. They got more out of him than he ever got out of them, let me advise you.

GD: I got the better of a Jew once and I thought the bugger would explode. On the other hand, I would never try to get the better of a Mafioso. I’ve known a few and I get on fine with them but try to screw them? I think not. Well, most of them have a really well developed sense of honor and the Jews do not. And they hate the Jews.

RTC: But Lansky…

GD: An exception. There is always an exception. Well, I might take some of your background material on the BCCI people if you have it to hand and it isn’t too much trouble. I always thought Clark Clifford was a triple plated phoney anyway. Him and Alan Cranston.

RTC: Agreed but why stop there?

GD: I’d be on this call for three days straight, just reading off the names. Isn’t America blessed to have to many thieves that get away with it?

RTC: Well, if you steal a dollar, you are a thief but if you steal ten million, you are a financier.

GD: Or a Republican.

 

(Concluded at 9:28 AM CST)

 

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