Archive for October, 2019

TBR News October 31, 2019

Oct 31 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 31, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for October 31:” Ever since the times of the great Malthus, it has been well recognized that since all species must eat to continue living, the existence of food sources is vital to the survival of any species, be it homo sapiens or others.
Food may, in short, be seen as a weapon as effective as a bullet or a bomb in an attack on a perceived enemy.
Let’s now consider the production of food stuffs as a weapon in a war, formal or informal.
I refer now to a growing struggle between the PRC (China) and the United States in which the PRC can clearly be seen as a challenger to the United States both in the military and economic spheres.
For example, the PRC has purchased very large financial holdings of the United States such as official U.S. Treasury bills and then also as holders of billions of American dollars worth of other financial holdings and long term investments.
These acquisitions are not intended for financial gain to the PRC but to be used as an economic and political lever when, and as, needed.
Also, the PRC has been known to be conducting a form of economic warfare against the United States by the production of counterfeit gold items, such as coinage and, most dangerously, as faked copies of American official U.S. Treasury gold bars. This has the dual purpose of enriching the PRC with badly-needed items such as oil and raw material it cannot, by itself, possess.
It is evident that the United States intelligence organs are entirely aware of these dangerous PRC activities and have been assiduously working both to blunt the economic warfare and then to counter with other methods.
The most important of these latter methods deals with the issue of food.
It is not certainly a secret that China has a number of growing, and potentially fatal, problems with her population and the care and feeding of it.
China’s basic supply of fresh water comes from the glaciers of the Himalayan mountains but these glaciers are not only melting rapidly but renewal of them does not occur due to obvious and growing planetary climate changes. The shrinking of glacial waters also strongly effects the hydroelectric programs of China.
Another of the PRC’s growing problems is the unchecked increase in population; the shrinkage of arable food (i.e. rice) production areas, a domestic and foreign economic “bubble” that is obvious will probably cause a disastrous implosion.

The Table of Contents
• U.S. House tees up first Trump impeachment vote
• Can the US government stem the tide of ‘fake news’ in a postmodern world?
• Hezbollah targets drone in south Lebanon: Al-Manar TV
• Don’t Be Fooled. Hezbollah Is Bigger and Badder Than Ever
• Why Israel Fears Iran’s Presence in Syria
• Missiles and Rockets of Hezbollah
• Past Cycles: Ice Age Speculations
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Encyclopedia of American Loons Continue Reading »

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TBR News October 30, 2019

Oct 30 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 30, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

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

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

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

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

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 30:”The impeachment drama is gaining strength in the House and causing spastic colon among very far right Republicans and also our beloved President. As it progresses, watch Republican Senators begin to waffle their support until a significant number of them break ranks and join the Democrats in their laudable effort to remove an unstable and very dishonest President.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • Democrats unveil impeachment inquiry plan detailing a ‘clear path forward’
  • An Imperfect Bit of Statecraft
  • The Windows of Wong Tai Sin
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons
  • Report on the President’s Surveillance Program 

Continue Reading »

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TBR News October 29, 2019

Oct 29 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. October 29, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for October 29:”Trump is not populat with many citizens and his Secret Service detail is very vigilant these days. A report of interest has been circulating in the White House and I am going to publish it, in toto, to show how the Secret Service operates. Trump likes to keep his bedroom door locked and not give the key to his bodyguards and he also likes to take excursions to a Macdonals fast food place to buy a bag of hamburgers to take home and eat. He is afraid someone in the White House kitchen might poison him! Odd person, that one.”

The Table of Contents
• Top Ukraine expert to testify Trump-Zelenskiy call ‘raised internal alarm’
• Federal judge blocks Alabama abortion ban from being enforced
• Protective Intelligence & Threat Assessment Investigations
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Encyclopedia of American Loons Continue Reading »

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TBR News October 28, 2019

Oct 28 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 28, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for October 28:” Baghdadi might well be dead but trust me, Trump had nothing to do with it. And there he is, braying like a hungry donkey, trying to take credit for the work. He lies so much he will, for sure, put his foot into it and ruin the effect. Trump can never tell the truth about anything because he lives in a fantasy world and in it, he is a glorious leader, peerless, brilliant and always right. He actually believes this and when he makes up more stories about his exceptional qualities, he thinks he is telling the truth. On top of his mental problems, Trump is as crooked as the proverbial dog’s hind leg and would steal tips off of cheap restaurant tables or boost cheap cigarette lighters from a mom and pop store. I have seen this type before and so have legions of policemen. A man who wants, secretly, to be crowned King of America at a glittering ceremony at the Washington cathedral will millions wept and cheered. Instead, he will either have a stroke and hit the carpet in the Oval Office or end up in a private clinic, talking to dead relatives.”

The Table of Contents
Doubts over Donald Trump’s dramatic account of Baghdadi raid
• Praising Himself for ISIS Raid, Trump Undermines His Own Victory
• Trump and the corrupt Deutsche Bank
• $85B Nuclear Missile Competition Gets Messier as Feds Investigate Northrop
• CIA Influence on the Internet
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

Doubts over Donald Trump’s dramatic account of Baghdadi raid
Footage relayed to US situation room was only overhead surveillance and had no audio
October 28, 2019
by Michael Safi
The Guardian
Footage of the US special forces raid on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Syrian compound reportedly consisted of overhead surveillance footage and no audio, prompting questions over the extent of the dramatic licence taken by Donald Trump in describing the final moments of one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.
US officials who also watched the feed have declined to echo details of Trump’s macabre account of the Isis’s leader death on Saturday, including that Baghdadi was “whimpering, crying and screaming all the way”.
Revelling in a major national security accomplishment in his press conference on Sunday morning, Trump said Baghdadi, 48, had “spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread” as a US military dog pursued him and three of his children down a dead-end tunnel.
Cornered, Baghdadi detonated his suicide vest, killing himself, his children and injuring the “beautiful” and “talented” dog, Trump said.
The White House monitored the Syria operation through video feeds that Trump said was “as though you were watching a movie”.
The footage piped into the situation room would have consisted of overhead surveillance shots of the dark compound with heat signatures differentiating between US fighters and others, intelligence and military officials told the New York Times.
Those cameras would not have been able to peer into the tunnel where Baghdadi died, nor provide audio proof of his conduct during the last minutes of his life.
The soldiers involved would have been wearing body cameras, but that footage was yet to be given to the White House at the time of Trump’s press conference, the Times report said.
The US defence secretary, Mark Esper, declined to endorse aspects of Trump’s cinematic account in an interview with ABC’s This Week programme on Sunday morning.
I don’t have those details,” Esper said, when pressed on how Trump knew Baghdadi had whimpered and cried. “The president probably had the opportunity to talk to commanders on the ground.”
The US national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, told the Meet the Press show that Baghdadi’s remains, which were said to have been mutilated by the explosion, would likely be disposed of at sea.
Asked if the body would be handled in the same way as Osama bin Laden’s, O’Brien said: “I would expect that to be the case.”
Kurdish officials claimed on Sunday night that a second US operation had taken place in Syria a few hours after Baghadi’s death, this time targeting the Islamic State spokesman, known as Abu Hassan al-Muhajir.
“Al-Muhajir, the right-hand of Baghdadi and the spokesman for IS, was targeted in the village of Ain al-Baydah near Jarablus, in a coordinated operation between SDF intelligence and the US army,” the Syrian Democratic Forces commander, Mazloum Abdi, tweeted.
American officials did not confirm the reports and it was unclear if the operation was pre-planned, or enabled by the material found in Baghdadi’s compound.
Trump said US fighters collected highly sensitive material and information, including on Isis’s future plans, before they left Baghdadi’s compound.
Muhajir issued his last statement in March, calling for retaliation for the mass shooting of 50 worshippers at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch allegedly by an Australian white nationalist.

Praising Himself for ISIS Raid, Trump Undermines His Own Victory
A rambling presser announcing the demise of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi saw Trump bowing to Russia, taking shots at Obama and generally squandering any bipartisan goodwill.
October 27, 2019
by Kevin Fitzpatrick
Vanity Fair
he fastest way to burn political capital after a military victory, it seems, is to have Donald Trump announce it. The president spent Sunday morning gleefully recounting the gory details of a U.S. Special Forces raid in Syria that claimed the life of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—indulging many of his own worst impulses in the process.
Trump presaged the White House announcement Saturday night over Twitter, boasting, “Something very big has just happened!” in a tweet that—according to a Defense Department official quoted by the New York Times—may have been premature, placing Trump’s eagerness for positive news coverage over conclusive identification of Baghdadi’s body. Word of the successful raid had nonetheless leaked to press by Sunday morning. Later, in a press event in the West Wing, Trump described Baghdadi as “a coward” who died “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” Only afterward did Trump specify that Baghdadi had died by detonating his own suicide vest, claiming the lives of three children in the process.
Trump’s revelry in the gruesome depiction of the ISIS leader’s end was poorly received by members of the press, as was his decision to first thank Russia, then Turkey, Syria and Iraq, for their cooperation in the operation, ahead of U.S. intelligence. The announcement was also complicated by the continued fallout from Trump pulling U.S. forces out of Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish allies, though Trump sheepishly acknowledged that Kurdish forces provided “information that turned out to be helpful.” Critics of Trump’s decision have also emphasized that the raid on Baghdadi underscores the argument for a continued U.S. presence battling ISIS in Syria, not the culmination of any objective.
With the House impeachment inquiry deepening and his polling underwater, Trump seemed especially eager to reset the news cycle in his favor. But as usual, he found ways to undermine what might have been a unifying moment. Perhaps most egregious, he made a point of boasting that the death of Baghdadi was more significant than the 2011 raid that killed 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden, as overseen by former president Barack Obama. “This is the biggest one perhaps that we’ve ever captured,” Trump said during the Q&A portion of his conference. “This is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country.”
Others took offense at Trump’s seemingly first-person account of the raid, which included vivid descriptions of U.S. helicopters entering Syrian airspace and ground forces “blowing a hole through the wall” of Baghdadi’s compound, as if Trump were leading the charge himself. It was “as though you were watching a movie,” Trump gushed of the Situation Room, where he huddled with Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The White House even helpfully staged a photo of the event, recalling a similar historic image of Obama watching the bin Laden raid.
Trump may yet succeed in temporarily boosting his poll numbers and repairing strained relationships with hawkish Republican lawmakers upset by the Syria withdrawal, though he naturally snubbed Democratic lawmakers by declining to inform speaker Nancy Pelosi or House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff of the raid—allegedly for fear of “leaks.” Instead, the gruesome, meandering affair ended as many Trump spectacles tend to—with loyal toadies like senator Lindsey Graham sent out to sing his praises.
“The president’s determination over time has paid off,” Graham told reporters, ignoring his prior break with the president over Syria. “We don’t give him enough credit for destroying the caliphate . . . . This is a moment when President Trump’s worst critics should say, ‘Well done, Mr. President.’

Trump and the corrupt Deutsche Bank
October 28, 2019
by Christian Juers
Three big American banks – Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup –have laundered shady financial flows from Russia. The interference of the Kremlin into the everyday life of America has been staying in the headlines for several years already. The Congress continuously introduces new sanctions against Russia for intervention in the US internal affairs. Even after the publication of results of the official inquest into the possible interference of Moscow into the American Presidential elections stating that the Kremlin has nothing to do with the victory of Donald Trump, American people still believe that the Russians are somewhere nearby
New York State Department of Financial Services fined Deutsche Bank almost $630 million for participation in so-called ‘matching deals’ – i.e. two simultaneous deals made at once – involving Russian shares. In the framework of the first deal amounting to some $10 million, the brokers were purchasing shares of Russian blue-chip companies (e.g. Lukoil) for Russian rubles. In the second deal, they had acted on behalf of a different company – normally, incorporated in offshore territories, including the British Virgin Islands, – and sold the same amount of the same Russian shares in London for dollars, pounds, or euros. Both the Russian and offshore companies belonged to the same owners. This is how the clients had purchased shares from themselves via Deutsche Bank and siphoned off the funds from Russia abroad.
Generally speaking, matching deals are not prohibited by the law. At the Moscow stock market, such operations are called “conversion”; in the English-language press, this scheme is known as “mirror trading”. There may be perfectly legal reasons for matching deals. Banks have special departments checking such operations and verifying their purposes. Deutsche Bank top manager Tim Wiswell agreed to assist in turning a blind eye to the true reasons behind the ‘mirror deals’ for a monthly reward of $100 thousand. According to Boris Fomin, ex-Chairman of the Board of Promsberbank, convicted in August 2018, he had personally delivered the money to Wiswell several times.
Fomin claims that:
• Russian Land Bank,
• Russian Credit,
• Sammit Bank,
• Deutsche Bank
were involved in the channeling of funds from the Russian Federation.
Promsberbank co-owner Oleg Belousov and its primary shady shareholder Ivan Myazin created companies accumulating cashed-out funds for subsequent bribery of Bank of Russia officers. In exchange for such ‘rewards’, the controllers had ignored illegal transfers of vast amounts of money abroad.
The General Administration of Criminal Investigation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) of the Russian Federation has recently completed its inquest against Ivan Myazin. The final charges are to be laid against him soon, and then the suspect will start reviewing the case file.
In March 2019, new facts popped up in relation to the laundering of Russian money via above-mentioned Deutsche Bank, Raiffeisen Bank, Citigroup, and Lithuania-based Ūkio Bankas. According to the OCCRP report, Troika Dialog private investment bank has established a network of some 75 offshore companies used to siphon off funds from Russia. This sophisticated financial chain had operated in 2006–2013; $4.6 billion were injected into the offshore network in this period and $4.8 billion withdrawn from it. The total volume of transactions made between the dozens of offshore companies in that period reaches $8.8 billion; this makes it impossible to track the origin of the money.
Some other big international banks, including Credit Suisse, ING Groep NV, and Standard Bank Group, had also run large-scale joint business projects with Troika Dialog.
The OCCRP reviewed transactions of companies having accounts in Ūkio Bankas – one of the largest Lithuanian banks belonging, up until the revocation of its license in 2013, to businessman Vladimir Romanov suspected of misappropriation of some €15 million by the Lithuanian authorities. Romanov fled the country in May 2013; he received asylum in Russia and currently resides there. At least 30 companies affiliated with Troika Dialog had accounts in Ūkio Bankas. In that period, Troika belonged to Ruben Vardanyan; he sold it to Sberbank in 2011.
According to Ruben Vardanyan, the OCCRP report is full of inventions, interpretations, and statements torn from the context. In March 2011, Sberbank purchased Troika Dialog and established Sberbank CIB on its basis. Sberbank CEO German Gref claims that the companies mentioned in the OCCRP report dedicated to the operations of Troika Dialog have nothing to do with Sberbank.
Still, the OCCRP report refers to a number of large-scale deals whose sole purpose was to siphon off funds from Russia and other suspicious operations.
The Troika Dialogue’s offshore system received over $27 billion from companies involved in the channeling of funds from Sheremetyevo International Airport and tax frauds. In 2006–2007, the scammers have earned at least $200 million on surcharges, while the budget did not receive some $40 million in taxes. Flight ticket prices raised as well. The funds were transferred to the offshore companies via bank accounts of a Vienna lawyer who later admitted that he had rendered financial services to Russian criminal groups. In 2012, he was abducted and killed. Offshore companies controlled by Troika Dialog have lent €14.7 million to an 80-year-old female Russian citizen without any securities or guarantees. The lady purchased a villa in Costa Brava, Spain. The female retiree had a residential registration at the very same address where Vladimir Artyakov, Governor of the Samara Region since August 2007 and until May 10, 2012, was registered. In 2014, Vladimir Artyakov’s son Dmitry and wife Yulia became the owners of the property in Spain. Currently, Artyakov senior is the first deputy of Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov.
A few months before the military conflict between Russia and Georgia in August 2008, offshore structures of Troika Dialog have transferred $85 million to Multiplex Energy Limited incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Multiplex Energy Limited has shipped water supply systems for several towns and villages in Georgia. The privatization deal was nontransparent; as a result, residents of Tbilisi, Mtskheta, and Rustavi were not aware who had supplied water to them. The funds were transferred by the three ‘key’ Troika Dialog companies and Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital.
In early 2019, the UK launched a special group for combating fraud, corruption, and money laundering. The primary targets of this group are financial flows from Russia, former Soviet republics, Asia, and Nigeria. The government is going to allocate £3.5 million (€3.9 million) to the special group in two years for improvement of the system used for identification of suspicious transactions.
At least $17 million were channeled to the offshore network by companies charged with tax evasion. According to the investigation, Russian citizen Sergei Tikhomirov was the mastermind behind this fraud. Based on the court materials, he had controlled a chain of dummy firms signing fictitious contracts with insurance companies. The insurance companies had paid Tikhomirov remuneration for his ‘services’. After a series of transactions, the funds ended up on accounts of offshore structures controlled by Troika Dialogue.
The end came in August 2015, when Deutsche Bank suspended American Tim Wiswell a US citizen and the former head of the Deutsche Bank Russian Trading Branch, due to an investigation into a theft of millions of rubles from Promsberbank. and then fired him. After that, he disappeared. There were Facebook postings from South-east Asia and Bali, where the Wiswells went with their two small children. He appeared to be on the run from US authorities and is now allegedly back in Moscow. One friend described him to The New Yorker as “finance’s Edward Snowden”.
In a wrongful dismissal suit Wiswell said he’d been scapegoated. Around 20 colleagues, including two senior managers in London, knew all about the trades, he said.
The affair was a grievous blow to Deutsche Bank’s reputation. The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) – which has the power to suspend any bank with a branch in New York – fined Deutsche $US475 million. London’s Financial Conduct Authority imposed a £163 million ($282.2 million) penalty. The bank carried out an internal review, Project Square.
The review did not identify the Russians behind the scheme. We don’t know who they were or where the billions went. Or where the money came from in the first place.
A Kremlin bank, VTB, had captured Deutsche Bank’s Moscow outpost. Deutsche’s London and New York divisions were economic beneficiaries of this arrangement. While this was going on, Deutsche Bank in New York lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the future president. What Democratic senators and representatives wanted to know was this: Was there a connection? It was a good question.
It wasn’t just Donald Trump who maintained a warm relationship with Deutsche. The German bank looked after his entire family. Jared Kushner, Ivanka, and Kushner’s mother Seryl Stadtmauer were all Deutsche clients.
The large German financial conglomerate Deutsche Bank, later to become one of Donald Trump’s favored institutions, became entangled with Russia after the bank bought boutique investment bank UFG in order to gain entry into Moscow’s financial markets. UFG’s chairman, Charles Ryan, was an American banker; his partner was Boris Fyodorov, formerly Russia’s Finance Minister in the Yeltsin administration. Deutsche’s future co-CEO, Anshu Jain, was the one who wants Deutsche to become more involved with Russia. Other investment banks soon found Deutsche’s business practices suspicious. Christopher Barter, at the time the CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow, said later: “They were doing some very curious things. Nobody could make sense of their business. We found the nature and concentration of their business with VTB (Vneshtorgbank) quite galling. Nobody else could touch VTB.” VTB was known to be deeply connected to Russian intelligence, the FSB.
2001-2014: Russians Own Over $98 Million in Trump Properties in Florida
At least 63 Russian oligarchs purchase $98.4 million in properties in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in South Florida. They include businessmen with deep ties to the Putin regime and suspected criminals.
None of the buyers are members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Alan Garten, the chief lawyer for the trump Organization, said the story of Russian oligarchs buying so much Trump property “is an overblown story that is media-created. I’ve been around this company and know the company’s dealings.” The Russian ownership is much higher than is publicly known, as about a third of the owners are LLCs (limited liability companies) who routinely hide the identities of property owners. And the nationalities of some of the buyers is not publicly known.
The South Florida area has a large concentration of Trump-owned and/or branded buildings. Sunny Isles Beach, which has six of the seven Trump-branded residential towers, has one of the highest concentrations of Russian-born residents in the US.
Six of those seven Trump properties in Florida are the result of an agreement between Trump and the father-and-son development team of Michael and Gil Dezer. Gil Dezer says that the project generated some $2 billion in initial sales, of which Trump received a commission, 4%, for an estimated profit of anywhere between $20 and $80 million. In March 2017, one of those properties, the Trump International Beach Resort, continued to generate profits for Trump. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said in 2017: “While [Trump] has denied having invested in Russia, he has said little or nothing about Russian investment in his businesses and properties in the United States or elsewhere. This should concern all Americans and is yet another reason why his refusal to release his tax returns should be met with considerable skepticism and concern.” Some of the Russians who own Trump-branded property are using the properties to “stow cash,” in the words of the team of Reuters journalists who authored the initial report. One buyer, Pavel Uglanov, is a former deputy minister for industry and energy in the Saratov regional government of central Russia. He bought a 3-bedroom apartment in Trump Hollywood for $1.8 million in 2012, and sold it for $2.9 million two years later. Uglanov struggled to keep businesses running in America. In August 2016, Uglanov posted a photo of himself on Facebook standing with Alexander Zaldonostov, leader of a motorcycle gang calling themselves the “Night Wolves.”
Both the “Night Wolves” and Zaldostanov personally were made subject to US financial and travel restrictions. The US government said that “Night Wolves” stormed a Ukrainian government naval base and a gas facility during Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
The “Night Wolves” have strong ties to the Kremlin.
Trump began doing business with the Bayrock Group, a real estate development organization with its headquarters in the Trump Tower. He met founder Tevfik Arif, a Russian born in then-Soviet Kazakhstan, and Russian-born American businessman Felix Sater, COO of Bayrock and a convicted felon, through a Trump Tower leasing agent. Bayrock arranged for the Trump Organization to become involved in multiple developments that were marketed under the Trump name.
The first Trump-Bayrock deal, a 19-story condominium tower and hotel complex in Phoenix, fell through in 2005 after organized resistance from residents. A follow-up project in Fort Lauderdale also collapsed after lawsuits and claims of criminal fraud tarnished the project’s reputation. Trump dodged the lawsuit by asserting he was not the developer and bore no responsibility for the problems.
Eventually, Trump and Bayrock engaged in a series of deals leading to the construction of the Trump SoHo in New York, which became the centerpiece of a RICO investigation. The firm’s organizational structure was deliberately designed to make it difficult to determine how it worked, or who profited from what business dealing.

$85B Nuclear Missile Competition Gets Messier as Feds Investigate Northrop
October 25, 2019
by Marcus Weisgerber
Defense One
Boeing is breaking up its ICBM team — just as the Federal Trade Commission begins looking into the company’s allegations that Northrop wasn’t playing fair.
The Pentagon’s effort to build a new ICBM just took another step toward a no-competition sole-source award — and the prospective lone bidder just came under federal investigation for anti-competitive behavior.
Two pieces of news broke late this week concerning the U.S. Air Force’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, whose total value has been estimated at $85 billion. First, the service stopped paying Boeing for ICBM-related technology-development work that began in 2017. In response, the company has begun to break up the specialized team of engineers it brought together to create a replacement for the Cold War-era Minuteman III, according to a Boeing source close to the project.
Second, a Northrop Grumman filing revealed that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into allegations that the company is not abiding by an agreement that allowed its 2018 acquisition of Orbital ATK, one of just two U.S. makers of solid rocket motors. Those terms required the company to sell rocket motors “on a non-discriminatory basis to all competitors for missile contracts.”
Until July, Boeing and Northrop had both been planning to bid on the ICBM contract. Then Boeing announced that it would withdraw, charging that it had been unfairly handicapped in the competition because Northrop had slow-rolled an agreement that would have paved the way for Boeing to buy rocket motors from Orbital ATK.
One of the factors in Boeing’s decision not to bid for the U.S. Air Force’s Ground based Strategic Deterrent program was our concern about Northrop Grumman’s compliance with a 2018 Federal Trade Commission order that prohibits it from discriminating in the sale of solid rocket motors,” Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said in an emailed statement. “Northrop Grumman has now acknowledged that the FTC is questioning its compliance with that order. We stand ready to support the FTC inquiry.”
But Boeing is also moving on from its efforts to build a new ICBM. Employees working on the project are being reassigned to other projects within the company, people close to the project said. Stop-work orders have also been issued to suppliers.
“The program on our side is being unwound,” said the Boeing source.
Inquiry into Northrop
The FTC inquiry was revealed on Wednesday in a Northrop Grumman regulatory filing.
“In October 2019, the company received a civil investigative demand from the FTC requesting certain information relating to a potential issue of the company’s compliance with the Order in connection with a pending strategic missile competition,” the filing states. “The company is working to respond to the request. We believe the company has been and continues to be in full compliance with the Order, but we cannot predict any potential impact on the pending competition.”
There’s only one publicly known “strategic missile competition” right now: the Air Force’s effort to replace the Minuteman III with a new ICBM called the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
Northrop CEO Kathy Warden went a bit farther in an earnings call on Thursday, saying, “We do not currently expect any change to the Air Force acquisition strategy as a result of this inquiry.”
Air Force leaders have repeatedly refused to discuss the issue, citing a policy not to comment during the bid-solicitation process.
In September, Northrop announced its suppliers for the new ICBM, which includes most of the large U.S. defense contractors, but not Boeing.
Boeing has argued that the government should create a ”national team” in which the Air Force chooses the suppliers, not an individual company.
“We are not receiving any pressure to engage in a national team, because I would point out that we do have…what we’re calling nationwide team that includes many large and small companies across the country, who are bringing strong capability that will support our GBSD bid,” Warden said.
Bids for the new ICBM are due in December.

CIA Influence on the Internet
from a 2019, August CIA paper on the subject

1 Internet access can be controlled or its use directed according to the server configuration, thus creating an excellent disinformation weapon. In previous times, a national media report that was deemed to be offensive or problematical to the government could be censored, or removed at governmental request. Now, however, the government cannot control the present Internet in the same manner in which it has previously controlled the public media. The Internet permits uncensored and unfiltered versions of events, personalities and actions to be disseminated worldwide in seconds and the so-called “blogs,” chat rooms and websites are almost completely uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This unfortunate situation permits versions of events to find a far wider and far more instantaneous audience than the standard print and, to a lesser degree, the television mediums ever could.
2. The Internet can be used to send coded messages that cannot be interdicted by any government or law-enforcement agency. If man has devised a code or protection program that is supposed to be unbreakable, it is axiomatic that another man can break it. Even the DoD’s algorithmic field codes were easily broken by the Russian GRU during the initial stages of the Iraqi war and it is now known that CIA/USIA codes were also broken, allowing hostile entities to read Top Secret messages. In unfortunately many cases, individual computer experts are more skilled than their counterparts in the government and while, indeed, their encryptions can be broken, they can only be done so by exerting a great deal of effort and when this happens, new encryptions and firewalls can be almost instantly re-erected.
3.The Internet can be utilized to steal and disseminate highly damaging, sensitive government or business data. Although highly sensitive official websites are routinely put under strict control, it seems that intruders always seem to succeed in breaking into them. Once this has happened, highly sensitive, and even damaging, information can, and has, been removed and put out on the Internet without any form of control
4.The Internet permits anti-government groups or individuals with few resources to offset the efforts of far larger, and far better funded, government and its national media sources. This is known as the ‘David and Goliath’ syndrome and is a subject of constant concern to all government agencies. Hitherto secure systems can be broken into, information can be extracted or the site (s) can be infected with malicious viruses and destroyed. All it takes to do this is a relatively inexpensive computer, programs that unfortunately are available to individuals seeking them. The best and most effective manner to deal with this kind of threat is the dummy site, designed to lure potential dissidents into joining with it. Skillful questioning of new members has been known to develop important leads to be followed up by conventional law enforcement methods.
5.The Internet can be used to create serious disruptions of governmental agencies and the business communities. It is known that certain dissidents, either as individuals or as groups, have developed devastating computer viruses. These viruses, which are capable of destroying large banks of computer information, both governmental or business. These rumors are very persistent and it is strongly believed that they exist as a dormant entity that can lie concealed in a target system until activated by some kind of a trigger mechanism.
6. The Internet can serve as an excellent tool for organizing groups of anti-government individuals. (Redacted)
7. The Internet can be used to expose government actions and military operations in advance of said actions. The immense proliferation of Internet sites has made it possible for adverse elements to break into hitherto secure systems, extract highly sensitive information and either supply it to foreign intelligence agencies such as the Russian SVR or the Israeli Mossad or simply to either publish it or mail it out. A discussion of foreign-based official U.S. computer hacking can be found elsewhere and this study deals solely with ad hoc domestic dissidents.
8. The Internet is capable of hiding the identities of those launching attacks on the actions and personnel of various government agencies. (Redacted)
9.The Internet can materially assist an underfunded, anti-government group to raise money for continued operations. The use of such firms as PayPal facilitate the relatively secure transfer of money. Again, although it is possible to pressure such firms officially, if one agrees to cooperate, it is only a matter of time that this information will be leaked. We have once had excellent cooperation from SBC, ATT and AOL in conducting overview of millions of system users but lawsuits and Internet activists have published this information, rendering this valuable cooperation null and void.
10.The Internet can be utilized to locate and publicize the personnel of government agencies. It is routine practice in the CIA to have the DoS Passport Division issue official U.S. passports to our operatives working outside the country in names other than their own. The discovery of the real names of the passport holders could result in this material being maliciously posted on the Internet and this could not only subject the agent to serious compromise in the country they are operating in but can also subject them to local exposure and often contempt and harassment.
11. The Internet is capable of limiting the risk of identification of the members of anti-government groups. The FBI, which is responsible for overview and action against counter-terrorism inside the United States. With the advent of the Internet, identification and penetration of anti-government groups has proven to be nearly impossible. The main cause of this failure is due almost entirely to the Internet which has proven a haven for dissidents of all kinds. Given that all domestic telephone calls and all Internet email is readily available to various domestic law enforcement agencies, it is still a monumental task to track and identify possible activists and other anti-government individuals or groups. We have assisted in setting up dummy anti-government sites, peopled them with professionals and provided them with almost-believable information to post for the purpose of establishing importance and also in disseminating disinformation. Persons viewing these sites can readily be identified and tracked, Further, we have an ongoing relationship with several information sites, such as Google, and whenever any viewer seeks information on subjects we deem as potentially negative, this information is automatically forwarded to the concerned agency.
12. The Internet, while impossible to control, is also an excellent recruiting ground for sympathetic or easily-convinced “bloggers” who will quickly disseminate official dissemination for pay or public acclaim. It is invaluable to distract the public from questioning various governmental actions, both domestic and foreign. For this reason, our organization, and others, have “disinformation” centers that prepare information of a sensational nature which is then released to paid sources who, in turn, disseminate it onto the Internet. The purpose of this is to create a cloaking movement that will point the curious into innocuous areas. As a case in point, it was imperative to prevent the public sector from looking too deeply into the origins of the 9/11 attacks. To prevent exposure of the actions of members of the top levels of government in this attack, many stories were released, over a long period, to the public through wholly-controlled sites. Claims of devious plots, mystery methodologies, and often laughable conclusions have proven to be extraordinarily effective in constructive diversion. The collapse of the WTC buildings have been attributed to Thermite bombs, clouds of plasmoid gas and other nonsense but a very gullible American public has easily swallowed all of the fictions. As another example, the DoD has always under-declared its casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan because a full accounting could easily lead to public discomfiture and resulting action.
13.The Internet can be utilized to create an atmosphere of fear or of compliancy in furtherance of official policy. This is a particular ploy that worked very effectively during the two Bush administrations. A constant, on-going threat of vague “terrorist” actions inside the United States was material in gaining, and keeping, public support for the actions of the aforesaid administration. However, it must be noted, that threats must occasionally be proven to be true or too many “duds” tend to dull the public sense and, if continued, will lead to disillusion and anger.
…….

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
October 28, 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. 50
Date, Friday, November 29, 1996
Commenced: 11:20 AM CST
Concluded: 11:55 AM CST
Conversation No. 24

RTC: Good day, Gregory.
GD: And a good day to you, too. How are you doing?
RTC: A decent day today. And you?
GD: Busy with the new Mueller book.
RTC: Anything of interest to me?
GD: No, probably not at this point. I am working on the real origins of the Second World War at this point. Not the he-said or they-said fictional crap and pap but the real meat. Taylor 1 covered much of this in his book on the subject but there is more. I discuss the threat of Poland in 1932 to physically invade Germany if Hitler were not silenced. They moved troops to the borders but the threats gradually subsided. Hitler, on the other hand, did not forget this. And Beck, their foreign minister, was an idiot and could easily have diverted the German threat of aggression. But I look more into the economic aspect of the war. Germany lost all her gold reserves after the war because she had to pay everyone in sight for a war she did not start. Then the western states kept the corrupt Weimar government afloat with short-term and high-interest loans. Weimar was corrupt and degenerate but Germany was a great producer of saleable goods so she was encouraged to work more. All of this post-Wilsonian manipulation was directly responsible for the conditions that allowed Hitler to assume power. There were two things he did that assured eventual war with England and the United States. One, he instituted the barter system whereby Germany would trade, let us say, new locomotives to the Argentine in exchange for their beef and wheat. Normally, Germany would have gone to the London banking houses for a loan, high interest of course. Or the Argentine people would have done the same. The barter system completely bypassed them and they stood to lose billions of pounds thereby. And, do not forget, that the British bankers were almost all Jewish and there was on-gong anti-Semitism in Germany. It wasn’t Hitler’s aim, postwar bullshit pseudo-historians to the contrary, to kill off all the Jews. He only wanted to root them out of German society and force them to emigrate.
RTC: But to where? No one wanted any of them. Jews are not liked, you know.
GD: Nor trusted. Müller set up training schools so that Jews could learn farming and go to Palestine. Wonderful! The Arabs howled and so did the British. They did not want Jews there at all. Diplomatic representations were made and Ribbentrop ran to Hitler so the useful project was stopped. Then, Mueller told me he chartered the SS. St. Louis to take 900 Jews to Havana. Everything OK except that when Roosevelt found out about this, he forced the Cubans to cancel their landing permits. Isn’t that wonderful of him? And Roosevelt and Breckenridge Long did everything they could to keep Jewish Germans out of the country. Even little children. And parenthetically, note that in 1941, Roosevelt seized over two hundred million dollars in Jewish assets in this country and kept them. Never gave a penny back either. His son got some of it. Oh, all in the archives but believe me, Robert, not a word then, now or ever in our press. Can’t do that. It was all the evil Hitler, not Roosevelt.
RTC: You say that if Hitler were not such an anti-Semite, there might not have been a war?
GD: Hitler was institutionally anti-Semitic, Robert. You see, the Germans had always gotten along with their Jews who had been in the country for a long time. No, after Pilsudski, the same one who threatened to invade Germany in ’32, came to power in Poland, he forced out huge numbers of Polish Jews, most of whom fled either to Germany or the United States. The German Jews were Sephardic, Semitic and cultured but the Polish Jews were Khazars, Mongoloid Turks, brutal, nasty and detested by both the Polish and the Imperial Russians. I have met a few in situ and believe me, they are all vicious swine. So, they flooded into a prostrate Germany in the early ‘20s and stole everything they could. By the way, these so called eastern Jews were detested by the German ones. But these were the Jews that enraged their German hosts and brought down the active persecutions and expulsions. Interesting to note that after the war when many of the Polish Jews were released from the detention camps, they tried to go back to Poland where they were promptly subjected to pogroms and wholesale death. No, they then went to Israel where they make up most of the population and now practice their filthiness on the defenseless Arabs. But that’s off the topic here. It was Hitler’s attitude towards the Jews coupled with the potentially lethal barter system that spelled his doom. The Jewish bankers both in Britain and here got together and started a huge propaganda campaign against the Germans and egged both Roosevelt and Churchill into making trouble.
RTC: But Churchill was not in power in the late ‘30s.
GD: I know but he had influence and wrote for the press. These bankers hired Winnie to front for them and whore that he was, he went right along with them. You can find some of this in Fuller and the rest in other unnoticed publications but it’s all there. Marx was right when he discussed the economic backgrounds to major wars. Yes, Robert, make room for General Fuller in your library and you will have a much clearer view. Of course none of this will ever get into the American press because guess who owns it?
RTC: I well know, Gregory. But they work with us and I see no Don Quixote-like necessity to cut my own throat or that of the Company. The Jews have a great power in this country now and one does not attack them; one works with them if you take my drift.
GD: Oh, I understand fully. Do you like them, Robert?
RTC: Evil little rats, Gregory, treacherous, envious and dangerous in the extreme. I know this sounds terrible but even though I am well aware that Hitler never gassed them, he should have. All of them and then there would be peace. There will never be peace in the Middle East unless and until Israel grabs up all the useful Arab lands and expels them from the area the way they were expelled from Poland and Germany. Remember, Gregory, that the abused child becomes the abusing parent. Send me the references on Fuller and I will send you a stack of papers on this subject. And if you choose to use them, for the Lord God’s sake, keep me out of it. The Jews would make my life miserable here.
GD: I know. They would insert a newly discovered chapter into the fake Ann Frank diaries all about you visiting Holland during the war and shoving plump Jewish babies into bonfires. By the way, all seriousness aside, I have discovered rare documents that at least partially supports the silly Holocaust stories. Would I bore you?
RTC: No, certainly not.
GD: In April of 1943, all the Jews of Europe were transported to Berlin and when there, were jammed into the Alexander Platz in Berlin. At the stroke of noon on April 20th, his birthday, Hitler came out onto his balcony and addressed an immense crowd of German Girl Scouts and school children. A cannon was fired and this huge army of girls, all armed with weenie forks, charged into the Alexander Platz and butchered at least thirty million screaming Jews. My God, the Swedish Ambassador wrote that huge raging rivers of blood roared down the Berlin streets, swamping cars and drowning thousands of Berliners before running into the Spee and Havel rivers. Ah, Robert, the truth is worse than the fictions. And the SS and Postal Employees barbecued the remains, after removing interesting tattoos for the lampshade makers, and Berlin feasted for weeks afterwards.
RTC: (Loud and prolonged laughter) Gregory, you are really a terrible person. You will kill me with these stories. No, I know it isn’t true. I mean I knew that when you mentioned the Postal employees. If you ever told that story to a Jew, he would either beat you to death with his purse or literally explode with anger. Do tell that to Tom Kimmel, why don’t you? I would love to hear him when he rang me up, babbling about how psychotic you are. Or, better still, why not tell it to Wolfe?
GD: Oh, I think not. Bob is very old and getting senile and he might just melt down like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving only a pair of sodden dignity pants and a beanie behind. No, I just thought you would like to hear what that nut Irving calls the Real Truth for once.
RTC: Well, such a nice history, lesson Gregory. The Hebrews should be happy you have a limited audience or they might get agitated.
GD: Pascal once said that to destroy a man, make a fool out of him. Humor is a great weapon and as I have said before when I tell my little stories, always look for the truth in the jest!

(Concluded at 10 :11 AM CST)

1. A.J.P. Taylor March 25 1906 – September 7, 1990 was a renowned English historian of the 20th century. Taylor’s work, ‘The Origins of the Second World War’ conflicted with the official American and British scenarios but is considered by reliable historians as a landmark work on the subject.

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

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Stephen Sinatra

Though he is, indeed, a cardiologist, Stephen T. Sinatra is better known as one of the most prominent and comprehensively lunatic woo-meisters, or “integrative medicine” practitioners, working in the US at present. In addition to being a cardiologist, Sinatra is a “certified bioenergetic psychotherapist”; we can probably safely assume that the certification is worth about as much as the bioenergetic psychotherapy it certifies. He also the proud owner of certifications from the Massachusetts Society for Bioenergetic Analysis, the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists and the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine, a discipline that is emphatically not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties or the American Medical Association. All the certifications mentioned are of the kind that conveys less credibility on any practitioner bothering to obtain them. Sinatra is furthermore the author of the monthly newsletter Heart, Health & Nutrition and founder of Heart MD Institute, and proprietor of the “Healing the Heart” workshop, the psychospiritual component of a “healing” program where patients would, among other things, request guidance from “spiritual powers”. Sinatra is frequently featured on questionable talkshows, broadcasts and media outlets, including the Dr. Oz show and Suzanne Somers’s dangerously crazy book of cancer woo.
Bioenergetic psychotherapy is crackpottery based on the lunatic ravings of Wilhelm Reich, and has nothing to do with bioenergy as it is understood in real sciences – even practitioners occasionally admit that it is not science but instead “informed by science.” (It is not informed by science in any legitimate sense of the word “informed”.) Bioenergetic psychotherapy is, however, a classic tooth-fairy science underpinned by “worthless studies designed to generate false positives – the kind of in-house studies that companies sometimes use so that they can claim their products are clinically proven.”
In his books and newsletter, Sinatra otherwise promote a broad palette of quackery, from nutritional supplements to detoxification. In particular, according to Sinatra, to maintain good health you need to resolve your “emotional blockages” as well as physical ones: “whenever you confront a person with an illness, you have to involve everything, including the spiritual.… Every illness has a psychological and a physical component.” (Or put more succinctly: if you’re sick, or the advice you take from him doesn’t work, it’s your own fault.) His “metabolic cardiology” seems to be a kind of energy medicine – Sinatra is a disciple of James Oschman – focusing on the use of electroceuticals such as grounding or “earthing”, ostensibly to improve the body’s capacity to heal at the cellular level (Sinatra is one of the most prominent promoters of the quackery of earthing in the US). This is not how anything works, of course.
And by the way, apparently the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes is also directly caused by rubber-soled shoes, which insulate us from Mother Earth’s vital 3.83 Hz vibrations, a frequency that “thins our blood so it’s like red wine, not ketchup.” You don’t want your blood to be like ketchup.
So what is the rationale for earthing? As Sinatra explains it, the Earth is a reservoir of free electrons, and without a connection to this reservoir, our cells are unable to balance harmful positive charges; he also includes pictures from live cell microscopy to illustrate how positive charge makes blood cells clump. Of course, our cells don’t need an infusion of electrons and live cell microscopy is a bogus test – Sinatra’s pictures are also unable to show a positive charge, and the blood cell clumping is an artifact that anyways would be irrelevant to the alleged health effects.
Sinatra also claims that we are bombarded by electromagnetic radiation from modern technology, which may disrupt subtle electrical communications in our body; grounding reduces these induced voltages. In reality, of course, there is no evidence that EMF disrupts communication in our body or that grounding would offer any help whatsoever if it did (“subtle” is probably a key term here). Ultimately, however, it’s all about the New Age: earthing is important since our connection with the earth carries information that helps align us with the greater network of intelligence of our planet. Try finding scientific evidence to contradict that, ye philistines. And the point about aligning with an intelligence network is wild imagination not supported by anything in science or reality.
But, ah, yes, the part of Sinatra’s claim you were waiting for: vibrations. Perhaps the (current) core idea in Sinatra’s otherwise somewhat amorphous medical philosophy is vibrations. According to Sinatra, “the whole essence of life is really vibration … when people are sick, their vibration goes down,” but “if we can increase the energy of our cellular framework … our lives will thrive … Vibration is the key to life.” What it means, or how Sinatra measures decreasing vibrations, is of course unclear (we have, of course, left the world of real medicine – or reality – far behind at this point). But he is pretty clear about what causes lowering of your “vibrational energy”:

– “Toxic energy fields – WiFi, smart meters, cellular and cordless phones, etc.
– Drugs/Alcohol/Sugar
– Chronic illness
– Negative emotions – hostility, fear, anger, shame, resentment, depression …
– Over-vaccination in the newborn and infants [Sinatra is of course anti-vaccine; what did you expect?]
– Living in the energy of entitlement
– Living in a false self – My life is a lie
– Any misrepresentation of … The Truth!”
That last one is rather revealing, though: This is cult-speak. Stephen Sinatra is trying to build a cult. Otherwise, you should in particular avoid consuming veal, since the angry vibrations in the flesh of animals raised inhumanely can be passed on to those who consume them. Fortunately, you can also increase your vibrations by eating “high vibrational foods,” many of which you can coincidentally and conveniently find in his online store. “[G]rounding the body, FIR sauna and the utilization of very low frequency pulsed electromagnetic waves” also help “assist the quantum energy of the body.” According to Sinatra “[t]his is the new wisdom that will assist us in the good vibe/bad vibe technological age.” “Wisdom” is certainly not an apt term for any of it.
As for EFM, “the chaotic, unseen, and unfelt environmental electrical fields we humans are increasingly exposed to from all the electronics, appliances, and telecommunications in our lives,” what is Sinatra’s evidence for harm? Well, Sinatra will baldly assert that the evidence shows that power lines cause leukemia in children, which is false, and that cell phones cause brain cancers, which is equally untrue. Primarily, however, Sinatra will point out that “[i]llnesses like multiple sclerosis, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and autism have been proliferating in recent years. The incidence of cancer is up, particularly among young people,” so electropollution must be the cause. Correlation is causation, even when there is, in fact, no correlation.
Sinatra has promoted other kinds of pseudoscientific nonsense, too, of course. He is for instance co-author, with Jonny Bowden (proud holder of a “degree” from the diploma mill Clayton College of Natural Health), of the book The Great Cholesterol Myth: Why Lowering Your Cholesterol Won’t Prevent Heart Disease-and the Statin-Free Plan That Will. Though less flagrantly nonsensical than his vibration woo, the book – which, to emphasize, hardly enjoys any better foundation in science than his claim that misrepresenting his claims may cause you ill-health by lowering your vibrations – is probably even more likely to cause actual harm to people than his vibration nonsense.
Diagnosis: Egregious nonsense and lunatic New Age ravings, all of it. Of course, if you are able to distinguish evidence-based medical claims from lunatic New Age ravings, you are probably not in Sinatra’s target audience, and he does seem to have found one, for whom the fact that he is, indeed, an MD will probably give him some unwarranted credibility. And make no mistake: despite their laughable silliness, Sinatra’s advice has the potential to cause real and serious harm. Dangerous.

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TBR News October 27, 2019

Oct 27 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. October 27, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for October 27:” The Internet is a wonderful source of valuable news but it is also a sewer filled with the droppings of very sick or very badly informed sources. Deliberate lies, official government disinformation designed to distract from ugly issues and the so-called social media whose sold raision d’etre is to suck out personal information they can offer for sale to greedy merchants of sleaze products.”

Warning!
Any site marked ‘honeypot’ on returned sendings is known to be a child pornographic site, generally S/M in nature, and subject to government surveillance and prosecution. If you encounter such a site during the course of a send-out, abandon it at once and remove the address from your files. Also, be sure to round-robin this information, i.e., the indicated email address, to your legitimate contacts to prevent problems. Ed

The Table of Contents
• Ex-CIA spy flees from Italy to U.S. fearing for her safety: paper
• All the President’s Women review: Donald Trump, sexual predator
• Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies
• Bad Mortgage originators
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Encyclopedia of American Loons Continue Reading »

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TBR News October 26, 2019

Oct 26 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 26, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

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

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

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

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

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 26:” Washington is turning into a Lewis Carroll world with hysterical Republicans, an obviously mad President and a cast of characters, soon to be forgotten, lending their off-key voices to a loud symphony of madness. Knowing that he might very well be impeached and thrown out of his high office, Trump is resorting to crude, gangster methodology to save his skin and a shabby army of toadies is right behind him, croaking and hissing in tune with Trump’s hysteria. How this will play out no one knows but the American public is rapidly becoming disenchanted with Crazy Donald.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • S. House impeachment testimony resumes with State Department witness
  • Disorder and chaos’: Trump and Republicans mount furious impeachment fight
  • Trump frustrated as White House effort to defy impeachment inquiry fails to halt witness testimony, advisers say
  • The Final Outcome of the Multiple Syrian Wars Is Now in Sight
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • The Pash Papers
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

Continue Reading »

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TBR News October 25, 2019

Oct 25 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 25, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

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

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

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

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

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 25:” Today, entirely by accident, I heard President Trump, coming out of a conference with lawyers, say loudly, ‘America should have a king and I am willing and able to fulfill this role. They can never touch me then.’ He is a narcissist for sure and a megalomaniac as well. Maybe we could sell him to the Saudis for camel food but we do not need that sort of nut anywhere near the levers of power or a loaded gun.”

 

 

The Table of Contents

  • Judge orders State Department to release documents on Trump dealings with Ukraine
  • Imperial Capital but America-First Nation
  • Trump and his lawyers think he can get away with anything. It’s outlandish.
  • Trump’s presidency is built on lies. Does he actually believe them?
  • The Orange Revolution and other games
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

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TBR News October 23, 2019

Oct 23 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

 

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 23, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

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

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

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

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

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 24:” I hve been out of the country for a week and during that time, I have acquired some most interesting information. Once I translate it and put it into proper English, I will be publishing it here.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • Chaos erupts as Republicans barge into Trump impeachment inquiry hearing
  • Republicans are finally realising Trump is his own worst enemy – and theirs
  • US military interventions from 1890 to 2014.
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

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TBR News October 16, 2019

Oct 16 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 16, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

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

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

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

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

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 16:”Because of his erratic actions in the Mid-East, Trump and Trump alone is dragging the entire area into a chaos that will affect everyone on the planet. Seeing a wonderful opportunity, Putin moved into the uproar. It’s a pity the United States does not have a leader who leads his country as effectively as Putin leads his. Now Putin is moving south, into rich oil country, and gaining access to the Indian Ocean, an area the US does not want him interfering in. Diego Garcia is an important military base and when, not if, Putin sets up his new naval base on the Indian Ocean, he will be in a strong position vis-à-vis making useful observations of a once-secret military base.”

 

The Table of Contents

More government-approved ripoffs from poor Americans

  • Struggling Americans are haunted by zombie debt. Will you be next?
  • The Should-Be Solution to the Student-Debt Problem
  • Trump impeachment inquiry gathers pace as more officials testify
  • Trump sanctions fail to slow Turkey assault; Syrian troops move on Manbij
  • Russian and Iranian Mutual Assistance Treaty
  • An Open Letter on Zionism
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

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TBR News October 15, 2019

Oct 14 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 15, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

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

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

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

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

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 15:” In 1984, over 2,000 extremely rare, nearly mint condition, ancient Greek silver coins, dating from 465 BC, were unearthed near Elmali in Turkey. The horde of coins, in violation of Turkish law, quickly circulated into the international marketplace, and many coins sold for huge sums of money. Discovering that their national treasures had apparently been looted, the irate Turkish government forced the return of most of the horde through legal and diplomatic means. The British Museum inspected some of the rarer specimens and concluded that the entire collection had been recently manufactured at the Bulgarian State Mint in Sofia by that country’s intelligence agency to raise much-needed Western currency. Following this revelation, the value of rare Greek coins toppled as quickly as the British pound had fallen in 1945.

 

The Table of Contents

  • Jihad
  • Trump and Syria: the worst week for US foreign policy since the Iraq invasion?
  • Russia-backed Syrian army sweeps in after U.S. announces abrupt exit
  • Russian and Iranian Mutual Assistance Treaty
  • Unfit for Office
  • ‘Talking in Tongues’ for Fun and Profit.
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons
  • Official Report on corruption in pre-Putin Russia

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