TBR News March 29, 2019

Mar 29 2019

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

Washington, D.C. March 29, 2019: “When Dr. Calhoun wrote about increasing crazy behavior in overcrowded rat popultions in 1962, these observations are now bearing fruit among another species.

Homo sapiens to be specific.

Random mass killings in churches, mosques and schools are becoming common and the public we find growing interest in such lunatic matters as the discovery of alien mummies in Peru, belief that the planet is flat, rejection of healh vaccines as poisonous, and in the Unites States, the belief by many Amerians that President Tump is a great man who will make America a white and truly Christian country.

There is a Latin observation that whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

On the brighter side, there are still reasonably free elections in the United States and the bulk of the population are still reasonably sane.

One hopes at least.”

 

The Table of Contents

Lunatics Abounding

-‘There’s more to this story’: NRA staffer contacted conspiracy theorist about Parkland shooting

-Encyclopedia of American Loons

  • Michael Rivero
  • Alex Jones
  • Bill Posey
  • Kerri Rivera

-A Very Incomplete List of Sinister Things Vladimir Putin/Russia/ ‘the   Russians’ Have Been Accused of Doing

-Who Will Guard the Guardians?

-‘Hoarder’ pleads guilty in one of biggest breaches of U.S. secrets

-Thousands of mental health professionals agree with Woodward and the New York      Times op-ed author: Trump is dangerous

-Trump overrides advisers, backs funding for Special Olympics after uproar

-Shape-shifting Jesus spent his last supper with Pontius Pilate, claims just-deciphered 1,200-year-old ‘Egyptian manuscript’

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

‘There’s more to this story’: NRA staffer contacted conspiracy theorist about Parkland shooting

Emails emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit by Sandy Hook parents against the Infowars host Alex Jones

March 28, 2019

by Lois Beckett

The Guardian

An NRA employee corresponded with a prominent Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist the day after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, speculating that the gunman had not acted alone.

“Just like [Sandy Hook], there is so much more to this story,” the NRA employee, Mark Richardson, told the conspiracy theorist, according to emails obtained by HuffPost. “He was not alone.”

“Thank you for all the information. And for what you do. STAY SAFE.”

Since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, conspiracy theorists who claim grieving family members of shooting victims are “crisis actors”, and that mass shootings are staged to advance gun control, have continued to harass victims’ families. This confrontation is sometimes very direct: a Florida woman was sentenced to five months in prison for sending threatening messages for one Sandy Hook father that death was coming for him “real soon”. New theories targeting family members of the most recent victims emerge immediately after each high-profile shooting, and generate online and in-person harassment.

The emails from Richardson, who was using his official NRA email address, emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit by Sandy Hook parents against the Infowars host Alex Jones, who used his show to air Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Wolfgang Halbig, the conspiracy theorist Richardson emailed, has contributed to Infowars.

The same day Richardson emailed Halbig, the InfoWars site published a post alleging that a second shooter had been reported in the Parkland attack, HuffPost found.

In one of several Sandy Hook parent lawsuits, in which Halbig is named as a defendant, a complaint alleges that Halbig has made at least 22 trips to Connecticut to “investigate” the shooting, that he deluged officials with public records requests and that when a father asked him to leave victims’ families alone, the man was informed: “Wolfgang does not want to speak with you unless you exhume [you son’s] body and prove to the world you lost your son.”

The NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify Richardson’s role within the organization, or whether the NRA has policies about employees promoting mass-shooting conspiracy theories. Richardson’s name is listed on an NRA website as a “training counselor program coordinator” in the organization’s education and training division.

A spokeswoman for the NRA’s political arm did not comment on the specifics of Richardson’s emails, but said that “any suggestion” that the Sandy Hook shooting was faked was “insane”.

“Sandy Hook was a horrific tragedy, and any suggestion that the unspeakable atrocities committed by an evil lunatic were faked as part of an elaborate hoax are insane,” Jennifer Baker, of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in an email on Thursday. “The men and women of the National Rifle Association grieve for the innocent people who were killed, the families ripped apart, and the entire Sandy Hook community.”

Halbig suggested in a separate email to friends in early 2018 that he had been trying to get in touch with the NRA for four years, and that Richardson’s email was the first contact he had had with the organization, HuffPost reported.

In a statement to HuffPost, Richardson defended his email as raising a “legitimate question”. He did not respond to a request for further comment via his official NRA email address, which was still active as of Thursday afternoon.

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

March 29, 2019

#2165: Michael Rivero

What Really Happened (WRH) is a website run by one Michael Rivero. The website, which sports the tagline “Putting America First, Second, And Third!” claims to be telling you “what really happened,” which is rarely what really happened. Rivero credulously endorses more or less any conspiracy theory he comes across, and the website is particularly heavy on 9/11 conspiracy theories, Jewish banker conspiracies, JFK assassination conspiracies, Bin-Laden-is-alive conspiracy theories, the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, global warming conspiracy theories (dominated by a large number of links to articles about days with cold weather and snow), as well as a range of conspiracy theories and nonsense related to various types of pseudohistory and survivalism. He also has a podcast – until recently on a shortwave radio and carried by the Genesis Communications Network – and a wiki.

As for his climate change denialism, Rivero thinks you should take his collection of weather reports seriously since “I come from a science background myself” (he does not), and knows that science is corrupt and arrogant. “Why should you not trust science?” Well, according to Rivero, science was wrong before: “Alchemy, for one [which is decidedly pre-scientific]. Phlogiston Chemistry, for another.” Moreover, “[p]rior to the 14th Century Astronomers thought the Earth was the center of the universe, because, well, that’s what the church wanted,” which would count as an instance of the science-was-wrong-before fallacy only if you count church-appointed theologians living before the discovery of scientific methodology as “scientists” (one would think that Rivero, an unrelenting atheist, would be observant of that difference). Indeed, “18th Century Geologists thought the Earth was 6000,” which they did not, and “[P]rior to the 1950s, scientists thought proteins carried our heredity,” until the hypothesis was falsified by … independent conspiracy theorists? In any case, the main gist is that because science is wrong you should reject the scientific consensus about climate change because Rivero can show you news articles about cold days in North Carolina and climategate.

Rivero claims to have started the website as well as his radio show as a result of wondering (i.e. blindly endorsing a conspiracy perspective on) what happened to Vince Foster. Of course, Foster was not the only troublesome character assassinated by the Clintons, and WRH website dutifully keeps records.

Diagnosis: At least his rants tend to be grammatical and internally mostly coherent. Which is more than one can say about a lot of people pushing the kind of nonsense Rivero pushes. His website has been called “a poor man’s version of Infowars, which sums it up pretty wel

197: Alex Jones

Alex Jones is the guy who has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t endorse, no matter how batshit insane it is (and, interestingly, no matter how much it conflicts with other conspiracy theories he already believes). For at least ten years he has predicted, in his rather popular radio program, the imminent roundup of Americans by the New World Order.

In addition to his radio program, he is also the director of several straight-to-video documentaries, and he runs the websites Infowars and PrisonPlanet (for those who wish to avoid the site itself, it is detailed here).

Some conspiracy theories endorsed by PrisonPlanet are:

  • The Bilderberg Group (or Skull and Bones, or the Freemasons – it depends on the day, it seems) controls some/most/all governments in the world as well as the economy.
  • The New World Order will kill almost everyone. Vaccine programs seem to be just one of their methods – of course Jones has endorsed Andrew Wakefield as a martyr. To get a feel for the level it is pitched at, you may want to check out this one – or then again, maybe not.
  • In fact, Hurricane Katrina was merely an opportunity to test out the FEMA concentration camps.
  • And the tsunami in south-east Asia in 2004 was man-made.
  • 9/11 was (of course) an inside job.

This is, of course, only a selection; in general it is hard to find a loon that Jones does not take seriously. He is basically a living embodiment of whale.to.

Other bizarre antics are chronicled on his wikipedia page. Apparently the ravingly mad and utterly dense (but British) Vicount Monckton views PrisonPlanet as a legitimate news outlet. That explains a lot.

The interesting thing about Alex Jones’ reasoning is that he does not seem to run with the common fallacy ‘authorities (e.g. scientific) say X; I don’t like X; hence there must be a conspiracy’, but rather with the inference rule ‘everything is part of a conspiracy; authorities say X; hence X is false’ (which is a fallacy as well, of course, but a somewhat more interesting one).

Now, some may think Alex Jones is batshit crazy, and he is. But surely he is beaten by Lorie Kramer, who believes that Alex Jones is a pawn created by the New World Order to divert attention. Seriously. And if that is not enough, this site, run by Gary & Lisa Ruby, claims that Jones is part of a scientologist conspiracy to take over the world and demolish Christianity. I guess this is what you risk when you start to gain notoriety in the hyper-paranoid and chaotic field of conspiracy theory.

Among Jones’s more notable collaborators is the equally insane Paul Joseph Watson, who may consider himself indicted by this entry as well (he does not deserve a separate one). Watson is, among other things, behind this, uh, illuminating screed.

  • Diagnosis: The ur-loon. Extremely famous and frighteningly influential, but one suspects that he would be able to convince anyone who were not already at least mildly unhinged. Jones may be partly in it for the money, but there is little question that he actually believes much of whatever falls out of his mouth.

December 31, 2018

#2124: Bill Posey

William Joseph Posey is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 8th congressional district, member of the Freedom Caucus and Congress’s resident (main) anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist after the departure of Dan Burton.

Together with Carolyn Maloney, Posey – who has received significant donations from the anti-vaccine movement – sponsored “The Vaccine Safety Study Act”, which would direct the National Institutes of Health to conduct a retrospective study of health outcomes, including autism, of vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated children, and to determine whether exposure to vaccines or vaccine components are associated with autism spectrum disorders, chronic illnesses, or other neurological conditions. The bill should, according to Posey, “bring an answer to this decades-long question.” Of course it won’t, and of course Posey knows that it couldn’t. For, of course, the “decades-long question” has long been settled; there is accordingly no scientific rationale for the suggested studies, in particular since there is no evidence suggesting that the problem exists (but plenty showing it doesn’t) – antivaxx delusions really don’t count. The purpose of the bill was, in other words, not to settle anything but to legitimize antivaxx conspiracy theories by suggesting otherwise. Posey has been pushing similar resolutions for a long ti

He is, however, particularly famous for pushing the utterly debunked CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory (still popular in antivaxx circles) in Congress, attempting to initiate apparently formal investigations, without providing any documentation whatsoever of any wrongdoing to be investigated, for obvious reasons; he claimed to have a bunch of documents, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing interesting in any of them – no whistle to blow, in other words. Posey also suggested that there is – despite near-conclusive evidence to the contrary – a link between vaccines and autism (it is worth pointing out that Posey doesn’t care one whit about autism, however). He has also pushed the Poul Thorsen gambit, which is pretty ridiculous (a Danish coauthor on one of numerous studies showing that vaccines are safe once misused grant money to cover personal expenses; therefore all research showing that vaccines are safe is invalidated). Posey denies being anti-vaccine, however; he just pushes antivaxx conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine legislatio

Now, pseudoscience and conspiracy theorizing rarely come in isolation, and Posey is also a climate change denialist. At a 2018 hearing in the Science, Space and Technology Committee, Posey claimed that climate scientists in the 1970s believed that the Earth was cooling, which is a myth but at least shows what kinds of sources Posey is using to inform his policy decisions. At the hearing Posey expressed skepticism that humans contributed to climate change, asked whether climate change was occurring because carbon dioxide captured in permafrost was now leaking out, and suggested that global warming would be being beneficial (it won’t). “I don’t think anybody disputes that the Earth is getting warmer,” said Posey, but “I think what’s not clear is the exact amount of who caused what, and getting to that is, I think, where we’re trying to go with this committee.” God forbid that the question is left to scientists, who, unlike Posey, have some ineffable agenda. It really isn’t not clear.

He is also consistently opposed to gay rights or legal protection from discrimination. And to top it all, Posey was the sponsor of H.R. 1503 to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 requiring the campaign committee to give documents proving that a candidate for president is actually eligible for the office – yes, if not a birther himself, Posey was one of the major birther conspiracy theory enablers in Congress. He declined to provide documents to disprove rumors about his own past, however.

  • Diagnosis: Perhaps the leading conspiracy theorist in Congress at the moment, and that says quite a bit. Posey is anti-science and pro-pseudoscience to the core, and if you scratch any denialist position even superficially, a deranged conspiracy theory appears. But Posey also wields quite a lot of influence and power, and though his wild-eyed conspiracy rants still appear to be mostly ignored, he may cause serious damage to civilization.

March 27, 2019

#2164: Kerri Rivera

The Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) is, essentially, industrial strength bleach (28% sodium chlorite) that, when diluted in acidic juices, results in the formation of chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. As a treatment for medical conditions (and other things) MMS should rank as among the most dangerous and delusional pieces of quackery out there, yet according to proponents, MMS can cure almost anything from cancer to AIDS and anything in between and beyond. There is no biological plausibility to any of these claims, and no evidence, either preclinical or clinical, that MMS can do what its proponents claim it can do. According to Kerri Rivera, one of the most dangerous and insane people on the planet, MMS can – in particular – cure autism, and her abhorrent insanity has unsurprisingly made significant inroads in already severely reality-challenged antivaxx communities, whose members, demonstrably mistakenly, still think that vaccines cause autism. Rivera was for instance invited to talk at the 2012 Autism One Quackfest to convince parents to torture their autistic children by giving them painful bleach enemas. As Rivera sees it, “autism means that your child has virus, bacteria, Candida, inflammation, heavy metals and food allergies … [this is, hopefully needless to say, insane nonsense],”therefore these children take (her) poison, which would do nothing to address these issues if they had anything to do with autism, which they don’t. At the conference, Rivera boasted about 38 children who purportedly recovered in 20 months (by 2018 the number is allegedly in the hundreds, and if you need proof that her numbers are nonsense, here it is).

Needless to say, her presentation was short on documentation but rich on paper-trail-less anecdotes. Among the attendees it seems to have been sufficiently popular to get her reinvited in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Indeed, media attention to her dangerous nonsense prompted the Illinois attorney general to send agents to her presentation at the 2015 conference and serve her with a subpoena; unable to present evidence for MMS’s benefits, Rivera was forced to sign an agreement barring her from further promoting MMS or appearing at conferences in the state of Illinois. Rivera has since announced that she will no longer do MMS consultations for autistic kids. MMS remains popular in antivaxx communities, however, and central players like Julie Obradovic and JB Handley quickly ran to Rivera’s defense when she was “attacked” by skeptics. Rivera herself addressed critics by telling them that “You have your science all wrong. The websites that you site are incorrect.” Short and sweet, in other words.

Rivera runs, or at least used to run, a clinic in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, called AutismO2 Clinica Hyperbarica (Rivera is also fond of hyberbaric oxygen therapy), where she would expose autistic children to MMS by mouth and enema – at her AutismOne presentation she also discussed “recent protocol developments around MMS and Autism, such as loading the dose, the baby bottle, the baking soda mix, enemas, baths, and how to handle a fever.” One would think that parents bathing their babies in bleach and putting bleach in their bottles would face some social condemnation. Occasionally, Rivera uses the letters “D Hom” after her name. D Hom is not a real degree. But as a homeopath, perhaps Rivera could at least dilute her bleach to the point where there is not a molecule left before serving it to children? According to homeopathic theory doing so shouldn’t decrease its effectiveness, quite the reverse.

Apparently, children undergoing the therapy she recommends will often experience diarrhea (which is “good” since it is a “detox diarrhea”) and fever, which according to Rivera is also good since it is “waking up the immune system” to realize that there’s “autism in the house.” This is, hopefully needless to say, not how this works. And what do you think is her evidence that the regime has any benefits? Nothing, of course – Rivera has some undocumented anecdotes, which really, really means nothing. She also has leaflets and handouts with the fake Schopenhauer quote about truth “passing through three stages”, which is, of course, false but a surefire sign that we are dealing with a quack. There is a horrifying account of one of her clients undergoing her treatment regime here, and a good takedown of her dangerous nonsense here. A response from (insane) MMS and Rivera apologist Adam Abraham is discussed here.

Ultimately, and as mentioned above, attaining good health is (apparently), according to Rivera, mostly a matter of getting rid of toxins and parasites. As described in her book Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism, “[a]lmost all of the people with autism have high levels of pathogens; virus, bacteria, parasites and heavy metals. Chlorine dioxide kills pathogens and helps the body to detoxify itself. It is considered safe at doses we use for weight.” It is not considered safe, and Rivera has no remotely reliable test for “levels of pathogens” beyond the a priori, of course. But this is really a matter of religion – what she is promoting is a cleansing ritual – not evidence, truth or reality; indeed, seeing how no player in the antivaxx community can bring themselves to criticize even feeding bleach to kids with autismshould really, really illustrate how much of a cult the antivaccine movement has become (unity against criticism from the outside is a familiar hallmark of cults).) None of the parasites in question actually exist, of course, which is good, since MMS would presumably not have had helped deal with them anyways – the rationale behind MMS is that bleach unsurprisingly can kill microbes in petri dishes; therefore it can kill them in the body, too, without harm; and therefore all disease, also autism, is caused by microbes. Needless to say, none of those steps in that piece of reasoning are anything but idiotic. There is a good resource on Rivera and her crazy here.

Currently, Rivera also runs CD Autism, a “grassroots movement” devoted to marketing and selling her products and services. More recently, she has also launched ketokerri™, a company selling supplements (particularly targeted at kids with autism who have already suffered through her bleach enemas) supposed to aid with “natural healing processes.” Apparently she is enjoying both recognition and influence in a variety of quackery group. And her MMS insanity continues to be used, despite demonstrably causing irrevocable harm to children.

  • Diagnosis: As sane and scientific as the flat earth movement, but far more harmful. Now, Rivera’s base is in Mexico, and we cannot say with any confidence that she’s actually American. But she has at least enjoyed plenty of popularity in the US, and what really matters is presumably ultimately that her insanity – and the cult that has grown up around her and her crazy – is exposed.

 

A Very Incomplete List of Sinister Things Vladimir Putin/Russia/‘the Russians’ Have Been Accused of Doing

March 27, 2019

The Gray Zone

According to the finest minds of Western media and political life, “The Russians” have been responsible for everything from sowing discord with sex toys to weaponizing humor, sexual assault allegations, and “black America’s experiences.”

Editor’s note: A friend of the site has been keeping tabs on everything that Russia, “The Russians,” and Vladimir Putin have been blamed for in the past two years or so. We thought this list was a perfect window into the hysteria of Russiagate and published it with a few additions of our own.

  • Forcing Donald Trump to hire Rex Tillerson (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor).
  • Forcing Donald Trump to fire Rex Tillerson (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor, eight days later).
  • Forcing Donald Trump to give concessions to North Korea (Rachel Maddow, MSNBC anchor).
  • Meddling in the 2018 Italian parliamentary election (George Soros, billionaire; Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former president of Denmark, former secretary general of NATO; and Michael Chertoff, former U.S. secretary of homeland security).
  • Winning the 2018 Italian parliamentary election (Haaretz, The Hill).
  • Hacking the 2017 French presidential election (Michael Rogers, NSA director, Politico, numerous other outlets).

No, really, hacking the 2017 French presidential election (Jamie Raskin, U.S. congressman, after French government denied Russian involvement, stating the hack was “so simple it could have practically been anyone”).

  • Brexit (New York Times, numerous other outlets).
  • Helping rise of far-right AfD party in the 2017 German election (Time).
  • Causing the 2019 U.S. government shutdown (Haaretz).
  • Making the New York Times editorial board criticize Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko (Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine).
  • Weaponizing sexual assault accusations in order to attack Kremlin critics (George Takei, Kremlin critic accused of sexual assault).
  • Weaponizing information (Theresa May, UK prime minister).
  • Weaponizing misinformation (NPR).
  • Weaponizing the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe (Philip Breedlove, U.S. general, NATO, John McCain, U.S. senator).
  • Weaponizing humor (CNN, BBC).
  • Weaponizing “black America’s experiences” (Slate).
  • Using the popular cartoon Masha and the Bear as “soft propaganda” to indoctrinate British children (The Times of London).
  • “Promoting sex toys on Instagram to sow discord in the US” (Quartz).
  • Influencing the Standing Rock movement (Buzzfeed).
  • Making “‘useful idiots’ of unwitting environmental groups and activists” (U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology).
  • Targeting the U.S. embassy in Cuba with “some kind of microwave weapon, that is so sophisticated, that the Americans don’t even fully understand it” (Ken Dilanian, MSNBC reporter) [The microwave weapon turned out to be crickets. As in actual insects].
  • “Infiltrating” America’s Christian conservative homeschooling movement (Casey Michel, Think Progress).
  • Inflaming “race wars” across America with Facebook ads (Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic).
  • Assassinating self-exiled Russian journalist Sergei Babchenko (Ukrainian government) [Babchenko turned up alive the following day and revealed that he had faked his death in cooperation with Ukraine’s security services].
  • Whatever the hell Jonathan Chait was trying to explain with a Glenn Becksian diagram – “a plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion” (Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine).
  • Arming the Taliban (John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan; Nick Patton Walsh, CNN) [Nicholson’s claim was debunked by a two star US general speaking under oath. The report by Patton Walsh was thoroughly demolished by Task and Purpose].
  • Employing U.S. senator Rand Paul (John McCain, U.S. senator).
  • Interfering in the Catalan referendum (US Congressional Democrats).
  • Planning to interfere in Israel’s 2019 elections (Israeli Shin Bet General Security Service).
  • Recruiting Princeton/NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen to influence U.S. policy (Bill Browder, CEO Hermitage Capital) [Browder’s tweet was deleted after people pointed out that casually calling for Americans to be investigated by the FBI is not a good idea].
  • Funding The Intercept (Howard Dean, former Vermont governor and DNC head).
  • Spreading disinformation about Ukrainian neo-Nazis carrying out Roma pogroms (Howard Dean, former Vermont governor and DNC head).
  • Inflaming the NFL kneeling controversy “to make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue” (James Lankford, U.S. senator).
  • Inflaming ICE detaining immigrant children in cages controversy – “using the current family separation & immigration debate to sow discord among Americans” (James Lankford, U.S. senator).
  • Orchestrating the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic lawmakers and liberal figures (Chuck Todd, MSNBC anchor).
  • Tricking Guardian journalist Luke Harding into writing a questionable, thinly-sourced story in order to make it look like Harding is an untrustworthy journalist (“Alex Finley”, ex-CIA officer writing under fake name).
  • Using “Soviet-era tricks to evoke racist white fears” (Terrell Starr, Washington Post).
  • Harvesting “American rage to reshape U.S. politics” (New York Times).
  • Dividing America (New York Times).
  • Using “vaccine debate to sow discord” (New York Times).
  • Sowing discord in the 2018 elections (Dan Coats, director of national intelligence).
  • Targeting African-Americans to suppress 2016 election turnout (New York Times).
  • Amplifying “existing divisions in American society” (USA Today).
  • Hacking “the mindset of the American people” (Malcolm Nance, MSNBC contributor and grown man).
  • Tricking Americans into thinking Jesus hates Hillary Clinton (New York Times).
  • Supporting Bernie Sanders (New Knowledge, which was later caught interfering in the 2017 Alabama Senate election).
  • Tricking Americans into voting for Bernie Sanders, via Facebook ads featuring drawing of buff Bernie Sanders (New York Times).
  • Turning Jill Stein into a Russian agent (Zac Petkanas, Democratic strategist, former Hillary Clinton campaign director of rapid response).
  • Is Putin using his influence to support/oppose [insert whatever you want here]? You’re probably right! For more information, please contact the appropriate Putin disinformation warriors:
  • Anything that can be sprinkled with meaningless terms like “active measures,” “useful idiot,” and “kompromat” and repackaged as expert analysis – Atlantic Council’s Disinfo Portal.
  • Things even the Atlantic Council won’t touch – Louise Mensch.
  • Game Theory – Eric Garland.

 

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Plots and Counterplots cleverly exposed by more ‘experts’

March 29, 2019

by Christian Jürs

 

The Toronto Citizens’ Inquiry will be the most ambitious such inquiry held in the world to date. It is anticipated that more than 1000 people will attend over the scheduled six-day event. The Inquiry will be held at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre and at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto. 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani, who is suing George W. Bush for the loss of her husband on September 11th, will address the Inquiry, as will her lawyer, Phil Berg.

Other leading 9/11 skeptics that will be speaking include: Michael C. Ruppert ¬ former Los Angeles police detective; Thomas Kimmel ¬ retired FBI Agent and US Navy officer; Michel Chossudovsky ¬ author of War and Globalization, the Truth behind 9/11; Thierry Meyssan ¬ author of 9/11 The Big Lie; Mathias Broeckers ¬ best-selling German author/journalist ¬ Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories, and the Secrets of September 11 There are more than 20 other presenters confirmed. Please check our web-site for more details

The San Francisco Inquiry (Phase 1), held March 26-28, was attended by more than 1,500 people and was front-page news in California.

Am important speker was Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr.  A graduate of the US Naval Academy, Tom served on three warships during the Vietnam War and attended John Marshall Law School prior to joining the FBI in 1973, where he continued to serve his Country as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than 25 years.

Tom investigated organized crime in Cleveland, served on the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations Staff at CIA Headquarters, headed the FBI in East Texas, headed the Labor Racketeering Unit at FBI Headquarters, headed the National Drug Intelligence Center in Johnstown, PA, and served on the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency. Tom was also the Assistant Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia FBI Division heading the Foreign Counterintelligence and Terrorism Programs during the 1st attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Upon retiring from the FBI, Tom served as a consultant to the Bureau addressing major spy scandals in the FBI and CIA. Tom has appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, twice on 60 Minutes, on War Stories Investigates with Oliver North, and spoken throughout the United States, Canada, Columbia, and Japan to hundreds of groups of all ages frequently as a repeat speaker.

Tom Kimmel knows firsthand how federal government debates over use of wiretaps, exchanges of data between agencies, the hoarding of intelligence and the use of grand jury testimony can prevent cohesive responses to terror. He worked for the FBI in 1995 when the infamous memo was written by Jamie Gorelick of the Clinton Justice Department that created the so-called ,wall, banning certain cooperation between the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA.Kimmel has studied another intelligence and bureaucratic squabble, Pearl Harbor, the surprise attack that ruined the career of his grandfather and catapulted the United States into war with Japan.

,The seeds of 9-11 were planted at Pearl Harbor,, said Kimmel, whose grandfather and US Army General Walter Short were made scapegoats for the failure to anticipate the Japanese surprise attack. ,Good intelligence fell on deaf ears then, and in the case of 9-11, policy failed when the many government agencies tracking terrorists failed,or were prevented from,exchanging data., Ironically, Kimmel noted, Gorelick served on the 9-11 Commission whose report found no one person or agency accountable for Al-Qaeda’s attack.

 

‘Hoarder’ pleads guilty in one of biggest breaches of U.S. secrets

March 28, 2019

by Mark Hosenball

Reuters

(Reuters) – A former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, portrayed as an eccentric hoarder by his lawyers, pleaded guilty in a Baltimore, Maryland court on Thursday to stealing classified documents in a deal likely to put him in prison for nine years.

Harold Martin, 54, who worked for several private firms and had clearances to access top secret information, was arrested over two years ago for what may have been the biggest breach of classified information in history.

When Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his home south of Baltimore in 2016 they found stacks of documents and electronic storage devices amounting to 50 terabytes of files, including classified ones, prosecutors said.

U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors said in a statement that Martin’s actions risked the disclosure of top secret information to America’s “enemies.” One of their allegations was that Martin talked online with people in Russian and other languages but they never found proof he shared stolen information with anyone.

His lawyers said he was a hoarder who liked to take work home with him.

“His actions were the product of mental illness. Not treason,” lawyers Deborah Boardman and James Wyda said in a statement.

Martin and the government agreed that if the federal court in Baltimore accepted the plea agreement, he would be sentenced to nine years in prison on the charge of willful retention of national defense information, prosecutors said. Sentencing was set for July 17 by U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett.

Reporting By Mark Hosenball; additional reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Grant McCool

…And coming soon, the Life and Times of Captain Wierdbeard, Israel’s True Friend and a 32-page psychiatrist’s report on Donald Trump who was interviewed for an insurance company in 2010. This report is devastating and is nick-named ‘The back wards beauty.’

 

Thousands of mental health professionals agree with Woodward and the New York Times op-ed author: Trump is dangerous

September 6, 2018

by Bandy X. Lee, Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University

The Conversation

Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” describes a “nervous breakdown of Trump’s presidency.” Earlier this year, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” offered a similar portrayal.

Now, an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous “senior White House official” describes how deeply the troubles in this administration run and what effort is required to protect the nation.

None of this is a surprise to those of us who, 18 months ago, put together our own public service book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

My focus as the volume’s editor was on Trump’s dangerousness because of my area of expertise in violence prevention. Approaching violence as a public health issue, I have consulted with governments and international organizations, in addition to 20 years of engaging in the individual assessment and treatment of violent offenders.

The book proceeded from an ethics conference I held at Yale, my home institution. At that meeting, my psychiatrist colleagues and I discussed balancing two essential duties of our profession. First is the duty to speak responsibly about public officials, especially as outlined in “the Goldwater rule,” which requires that we refrain from diagnosing without a personal examination and without authorization. Second is our responsibility to protect public health and safety, or our “duty to warn” in cases of danger, which usually supersedes other rules.

Our conclusion was overwhelmingly that our responsibility to society and its safety, as outlined in our ethical guidelines, overrode any etiquette owed to a public figure. That decision led to the collection of essays in the book, which includes some of the most prominent thinkers of the field including Robert J. Lifton, Judith Herman, Philip Zimbardo and two dozen others. That decision was controversial among some members of our field.

We already know a great deal about Trump’s mental state based on the voluminous information he has given through his tweets and his responses to real situations in real time. Now, this week’s credible reports support the concerns we articulated in the book beyond any doubt.

These reports are also consistent with the account I received from two White House staff members who called me in October 2017 because the president was behaving in a manner that “scared” them, and they believed he was “unraveling”. They were calling because of the book I edited.

Once I confirmed that they did not perceive the situation as an imminent danger, I referred them to the emergency room, in order not to be bound by confidentiality rules that would apply if I engaged with them as a treating physician. That would have compromised my role of educating the public.

The psychology behind the chaos

The author of the New York Times op-ed makes clear that the conflict in the White House is not about Trump’s ideology.

The problem, the author sees, is the lack of “any discernible first principles that guide his decision making … his impulsiveness [that] results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back, and there being literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next.”

These are obviously psychological symptoms reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration, narcissism and recklessness. They are identical to those that Woodward describes in numerous examples, which he writes were met with the “stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters.”

They are also consistent with the course we foresaw early in Trump’s presidency, which concerned us enough to outline it in our book. We tried to warn that his condition was worse than it appeared, would grow worse over time and would eventually become uncontainable.

What we observed were signs of mental instability – signs that would eventually play out not only in the White House, as these accounts report, but in domestic situations and in the geopolitical sphere.

There is a strong connection between immediate dangerousness – the likelihood of waging a war or launching nuclear weapons – and extended societal dangerousness – policies that force separation of children from families or the restructuring of global relations in a way that would destabilize the world.

Getting worse

My current concern is that we are already witnessing a further unraveling of the president’s mental state, especially as the frequency of his lying increases and the fervor of his rallies intensifies.

I am concerned that his mental challenges could cause him to take unpredictable and potentially extreme and dangerous measures to distract from his legal problems.

Mental health professionals have standard procedures for evaluating dangerousness. More than a personal interview, violence potential is best assessed through past history and a structured checklist of a person’s characteristics.

These characteristics include a history of cruelty to animals or other people, risk taking, behavior suggesting loss of control or impulsivity, narcissistic personality and current mental instability. Also of concern are noncompliance or unwillingness to undergo tests or treatment, access to weapons, poor relationship with significant other or spouse, seeing oneself as a victim, lack of compassion or empathy, and lack of concern over consequences of harmful acts.

The Woodward book and the New York Times op-ed confirm many of these characteristics. The rest have been evident in Trump’s behavior outside the White House and prior to his tenure.

That the president has met not just some but all these criteria should be reason for alarm.

Other ways in which a president could be dangerous are through cognitive symptoms or lapses, since functions such as reasoning, memory, attention, language and learning are critical to the duties of a president. He has exhibited signs of decline here, too.

Furthermore, when someone displays a propensity for large-scale violence, such as by advocating violence against protesters or immigrant families, calling perpetrators of violence such as white supremacists “very fine people” or showing oneself vulnerable to manipulation by hostile foreign powers, then these things can promote a much more widespread culture of violence.

The president has already shown an alarming escalation of irrational behavior during times of distress. Others have observed him to be “unstable,” “losing a step” and “unraveling.” He is likely to enter such a state again.

Violent acts are not random events. They are end products of a long process that follow recognizable patterns. As mental health experts, we make predictions in terms of unacceptable levels of probability rather than on the basis of what is certain to happen.

Trump’s impairment is a familiar pattern to a violence expert such as myself, but given his level of severity, one does not need to be a specialist to know that he is dangerous.

What next?

I believe Woodward’s book and the revelations in the New York Times op-ed have placed great pressure on the president. We are now entering a period when the stresses of the presidency could accelerate because of the advancing special counsel’s investigations.

The degree of Trump’s denial and resistance to the unfolding revelations, as expressed in a recent Fox interview, are telling of his fragility.

From my observations of the president over extended time via his public presentations, direct thoughts through tweets and accounts of his close associates, I believe that the question is not whether he will look for distractions, but how soon and to what degree.

At least several thousands of mental health professionals who are members of the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts share the view that the nuclear launch codes should not be in the hands of someone who exhibits such levels of mental instability.

Just as suspicion of crime should lead to an investigation, the severity of impairment that we see should lead to an evaluation, preferably with the president’s consent.

Mental impairment should be evaluated independently from criminal investigations, using medical criteria and standardized measures. A sitting president may be immune to indictments, but he is subject to the law, which is strict about public safety and the right to treatment when an individual poses a danger to the public because of mental instability. In the case of danger, the patient does not have the right to refuse, nor does the physician have the right not to take the person as a patient.

This evaluation may have been delayed, but it is still not too late. And mental health professionals have extensive experience assessing, restraining and treating individuals much like Trump – it is almost routine.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on September 7, 2018; it reflects new information about the author’s contact with White House staff.

 

Trump overrides advisers, backs funding for Special Olympics after uproar

March 28, 2019

by Steve Holland

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump overrode his budget team and backed funding for the Special Olympics on Thursday after his proposed cuts to the athletic program drew heavy fire from both Republicans and Democrats.

Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2020, which he released earlier this month, would have zeroed out funding for the Special Olympics, which has an allocation of $17.6 million this fiscal year.

There was no sign that Congress was going to agree to defund the popular Special Olympics program in spite of Trump’s proposal. He had sought to cut funding last year as well and lawmakers added the funding back into the budget.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had struggled to defend the proposal in testimony to Congress and both Trump’s Republicans and opposition Democrats had denounced the move.

The Special Olympics is the world’s largest sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities or physical disabilities.

Talking to reporters on the White House South Lawn, Trump said he had just heard about the controversy on Thursday morning.

I’ve been to the Special Olympics, I think it’s incredible and I just authorized a funding,” Trump said. “I heard about it this morning. I have overridden my people. We’re funding the Special Olympics.”

(This story corrects amount in paragraph 2 to $17.6 million from $17.6 billion)

Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Dan Grebler

 

Shape-shifting Jesus spent his last supper with Pontius Pilate, claims just-deciphered 1,200-year-old ‘Egyptian manuscript’

  • Claim explains why Judas used a kiss to betray Jesus, since he could have transformed to foil any attempt at description
  • Manuscript also claims that Pontius Pilate offered his own son for crucifixion in place of the Messiah – but Jesus declined

March 14, 2013

by Damien Gayle

Daily Mail/UK

A 1,200-year-old ‘Egyptian manuscript’ tells the story of the crucifixion with incredible plot twists – including the revelation that Jesus could change shape.

The ancient illuminated text’s claim explains why Judas used a kiss to betray Jesus, since the Christian Messiah had the ability to transform his appearance.

It also claims Jesus in fact spent his last supper with the man who ordered his execution, Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who is said to have offered to sacrifice his own son in Jesus’ place.

And it defies the official Easter timeline by putting the day of Jesus’ arrest on Tuesday evening, rather than the canonically agreed Thursday.

The translation from the original Coptic has been revealed for the first time in a new book by Roelof van den Broek, emeritus professor of the History of Christianity at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

In the commonly-accepted Bible story it is claimed that the apostle Judas agrees to betray Jesus in exchange for cash, then kissed him to reveal his identity.The newly-deciphered text explains that, far from a sign of affection or guilt, the kiss was Judas’ way of forestalling any shapeshifting confusion.

‘The Jews said to Judas: How shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man…’ it reads.

For a man who could walk on water, raise the dead, feed 5,000 people with just a single loaf of bread and a fish, and turn water into wine, such abilities are perhaps unsurprising.

But shapeshifting is not the only superpower the ancient manuscript attributes to Jesus – it also says that he could even turn himself invisible.

It claims that on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus ate dinner with Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect who decided his sentence – who, it is said, remarkably offered his son to be crucified in place of the Messiah.

Jesus declined the offer, explaining that if he could escape from his fate if he wanted to.

‘Pilate, then, looked at Jesus and, behold, he became incorporeal: He did not see him for a long time,’ the text says.

Later that night, according to the manuscript, Pilate and his wife dreamed of an eagle representing Jesus being killed.

The incredible text, which is thought to be some 1,200 years old, is written in the name of St Cyril of Jerusalem, although, Professor van den Broek says, it was probably written by someone else.

Back then it was looked after by monks at the Monastery of St Michael in the desert of north-west Egypt, south of Cairo.

The text was rediscovered in 1910 and, the following year, it was bought along with other manuscripts by the wealthy Wall Street financier JP Morgan.

Morgan’s collections were later given to the public and they are now kept in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

Professor van den Broek told LiveScience that the Bible was already canonised in Egypt by the time the text was written, but that such apocryphal stories nevertheless remained popular among believers.

He said he was not convinced that the monk who wrote down the story necessarily believed all the details in it, ‘but some details, for instance the meal [Pontius Pilate had] with Jesus, he may have believed to have really happened.’

‘The people of that time, even if they were well-educated, did not have a critical historical attitude,’ he added. ‘Miracles were quite possible, and why should an old story not be true?’

Professor van den Broek’s book, Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ, is out now, published by Brill.

 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2293301/Shape-shifting-Jesus-spent-supper-Pontius-Pilate-claims-just-deciphered-1-200-year-old-Egyptian-manuscript.html#ixzz2No8Q52cV

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

March 29, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Conversation No. 45

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 1996

Commenced: 8:02 AM CST

Concluded: 8:23 AM CST

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. I’ve pretty well firmed up our meeting. Everyone can make it and we’ll have lunch. You’ll need to be at the University Club before noon and we can talk for a while before lunch.

GD: I’ll make a note of it, Robert. Is the food good? I have a great liking for crab cakes, Maryland-style.

RTC: They certainly have that, Gregory. Want wine to go with that?

GD: I’m not much of a drinker but wine will be fine. A nice white wine. Will you have the Allende hit letter with you?

RTC: Oh yes but we can deal with that out of sight and earshot of the others.

GD: But these are your friends.

RTC: Well at least one of them isn’t yours.

GD: A nice book on ‘Bringing True Democracy’ to some backward country. Very inspiring. Robert, you’ve been walking in the corridors of power and you have a first hand knowledge of such things but I think I could tell you the basics in governmental change. I mean securing some natural resource-rich but otherwise insignificant country. Would I offend with some satire here?

RTC: I’m not in harness any more, Gregory. Let’s see what you’ve learned in school, why not?

GD: Here we have a country. Call it Flavia. Not much but goats, much incest, but huge deposits of swan guano. An American firm, Sawney Bean Inc, has the permanent rights to mine the precious swan guano. And eventually, some Flavian intellectual decided that only the President and his family shared in that wealth so he leads a campaign, is successful and is elected to Holy Office. Norman Crotchrott, who owns Sawney Bean, believes that he is going to have to pay bigger bribes to the new president-elect but is horrified to discover that the new leader is a genuine populist and wants to seize the guano and exploit it for the people of Flavia. Shock, rage and horror in the boardroom of Sawney Bean. But, we have a possible salvation just down the road. Mr. Crotchrott went to Harvard with the DCI. He invites him up to a lavish weekend in the Hamptons and closets himself with your former boss for over two hours. Certain matters are discussed, drinks raised and hands shaken. Almost immediately afterwards, the CIA prepares a horrifying report that names the new president of Flavia as a Communist who went to the Lenin School. Shock and horror! The report states that if Flavia falls to the Communists, they will set up a power base and take over all the countries within earshot, to include, shock and horror, one country that produces uranium. My God, Robert, the DCI makes a personal trip to the White House, with a phalanx of aides and experts, all armed with charts, pointers and reports. Once the President is told that the situation in Flavia is critical and the evil Russians might get their Slavic hands on the uranium, he agrees to special action. The CIA starts the ball rolling by having doom-laded and alarmist reports published on the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and about twenty lesser papers. Communists take over Flavia! More shock and horror. The president gives a press conference and says we must save Flavia and the entire region from the evil Communists. In the meantime, the CIA, who has bribed dissident groups in Flavia, regardless of the fact that most of them are pedophiles and chronic alcoholics, supplies them with Chinese weapons, purchased through one of their front companies from Turkey and sends a new cultural attaché to Flavia to spread bags of bribe money. There is a coup, led by U.S. Navy personnel dressed in native costume, the new president and his whole family are set on fire and a newer president is quickly installed. Return of democracy to Flavia is the watchword in the media. Several weeks later, Mr. Crotchrott deposits several million dollars in the black Swiss bank accounts of the top CIA people and sends a Steuben glass bowl to the President as a token of respect for his quick action. The new head of state signs a permanent contract with Sawney Bean and the papers and the boob tube show pictures of happy laughing Flavians cheering the American ambassador as he drives down the street in his armored limousine, surrounded by a battalion of Marines from the embassy. Now, Robert, tell me how far off I am?

RTC: You are a very wicked person, Gregory.

GD: Is that a negative comment?

RTC: Not really. You have Chile in mind specifically?

GD: More like Guatemala, Robert. My uncle was involved with that game and that’s where I got my baptism in bringing true democracy to a backward country with wonderful natural resources.

RTC: A word of caution here, Gregory. At lunch, do not bring up such subjects around Tom. He would start a file on you as a Communist agitator.

GD: Robert, Communism is a dead issue. The Arabs are our new enemies now. The Israelis have told us so and they own the papers. How about a Muslim sympathizer?

RTC: Well, you take my drift, Gregory. Better safe than sorry. Then the FBI will start looking into your garbage.

GD: They ought to feed them better.

 

(Concluded at 8:23 AM CST)

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

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