TBR News January 18, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. January 18, 2020:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

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

Commentary for January 18: “There are questions and there are answers.
When men came down out of their caves and stood on their hind legs, questions began to form in their small minds.
Would they live forever?
Where would they go when they stopped breathing and began to smell bad?
And other men, more clever, told them what they wanted to hear so desperately.
Yes, they would live forever and in a wonderful place.
Yes, they would see their dead family again who would be waiting for them, smiling.
Of course in order to get to this wonderful place and see smiling dead family members they would have to become a paying member of a certain religious group.
They would have to believe just what the leaders of this religious group told them to believe or they would go to some cold, wet and nasty place when they died and have to sleep with dead rats.
And because they wanted to believe these entertaining and entirely invented stories, they did.
Those who promised paradise got rich and those who believed were content. But when they died, they slept with the worms.
Of course they weren’t aware of anything at that point.”

Trump’s Approval/Disapproval rating January 18 reporting
Source     Approve     Disapprove
____________________________
YouGov      40%            53%

The Table of Contents
• Ahead of tinder box Virginia gun rally, Trump says Constitution under attack
• Guns Instead of Butter
• Trump’s is the third impeachment in US history and no case has been stronger
• The Broken Sword of Langley
• Accidents on Purpose
• A Russian Base on the Indian Ocean
• Water Problems
• The Season of Evil
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

Ahead of tinder box Virginia gun rally, Trump says Constitution under attack
January 18, 2020
by Brad Brooks
Reuters
Reuters) – President Donald Trump took aim at Virginia Democrats and their push to stiffen the state’s gun laws, saying that the U.S. Constitution was under attack just as thousands of armed militia members began arriving in Richmond for a Monday gun rally.
Trump doubled down with his support of gun enthusiasts in the state, which Hilary Clinton won in 2016 and where Democrats took full control of the state legislature for the first time in a generation in November, as candidates made passing stronger gun control laws a central campaign theme.
“Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter Friday night, referring to the amendment in the Bill of Rights that gives Americans the right to keep and bear firearms. “That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away.”
The Virginia Senate late on Thursday passed bills to require background checks on all firearms sales, limit handgun purchases to one a month, and restore local governments’ right to ban weapons from public buildings and other venues.
Gun-control activists have reported a growing number of online death threats as the lawmakers press on and ahead of a rally by arms enthusiasts on Monday in Richmond, the state capital, which authorities are trying to keep from becoming violent.
Both Virginia legislative houses are expected to pass the new laws including universal background checks, a ban on assault rifles, and “red flag” laws that would allow courts and local law enforcement to remove guns from people deemed a risk to communities, among other measures.
Supporters say more restrictive laws would help decrease the number of people killed by guns each year. Gun-rights activists assert that the constitution guarantees their right to possess any firearm.
Militias, neo-Nazis and other groups have vowed to swarm the capital and police are expecting several thousand people at the pro-gun rally on Monday.
On Thursday, the FBI arrested three members of a small neo-Nazi group who authorities said hoped to ignite a race war through violent acts at the rally, reminiscent of a 2017 white supremacist rally in nearby Charlottesville.
That rally proved a critical moment in the rise of the “alt-right,” a loose alignment of fringe groups centered on white nationalism and emboldened by Trump’s 2016 election. Trump was criticized from the left and right for initially saying there were “fine people on both sides” of the dispute between neo-Nazis and their opponents at the rally.
Reporting by Brad Brooks in Austin, Texas; Editing by Leslie Adler

Guns Instead of Butter
January 18, 2020
by Christian Jürs
The Nationalist Front, an umbrella organization for numerous groups, wants the establishment of a white “ethnostate” in the US and eradication of the Jews as well as other races. Its founder, the late William Pierce, has inspired dozens of domestic terror attacks with his book “The Turner Diaries.” Internal fighting has meant a frequent waxing and waning of neo-Nazi groups.
The policy of the supporters of the far right groups is to exacerbate latent racism in the United States to the point where public violence erupts and the political polarization of the public becomes manifest. By encouraging and arming the far right and neo nazi groups, the Scavenius group is laying the groundwork for an acceptable and militant government reaction, the institution of draconian control over the entire population and the rationale for national and official government control, all in the name of law and order. It is planned that the far right and neo nazi groups be taken into the law enforcement structure and used to put down any public demonstrations that the government deems to be a potential threat to their policies.
Who are these groups? Here is a listing of only some of them:
• ACT for America
• Alliance Defending Freedom
• America’s Promise Ministries
• American Border Patrol/American Patrol
• American Family Association
• American Freedom Party
• American Renaissance
• Aryan Brotherhood
• Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
• Aryan Nations
• Blood & Honor
• Brotherhood of Klans
• Center for Security Policy
• Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
• The Creativity Movement
• The Sovereign Citizen Movement of the US and Canada
• The Dominonist Movement of America
• National Alliance
• National Coalition for Immigration Reform
• National Socialist Movement
• National Vanguard
• Oath Keepers
• Stormfront
• The Aryan Terror Brigade.
• The neo-Confederate League of the South.
• Traditionalist Worker Party
• White Revolution
The basic plan of the planners is to supply activist neo-nazi groups in the United States with weapons smuggled into the US. These weapons originate with the Chinese firm, NORENCO, The China North Industries Corporation. This is a Chinese company, located in the Xicheng District, Beijing, China that manufactures civil and military firearms and ammunition.

Trump’s is the third impeachment in US history and no case has been stronger
In contrast with Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, no chicanery was needed to ensnare Trump. He brought this on himself
January 17, 2020
by Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
The trial of Donald Trump, which opens in earnest on Tuesday, is the third presidential impeachment in US history – and the most legitimate. For the first time, an American president will face the ultimate sanction not because he walked into a legal trap set by his opponents, or because of some broader, underlying rift in society, but because of the actual “high crimes and misdemeanors” on the charge sheet. Legally, the Senate has never confronted a stronger case for the removal of a sitting president than the one it is about to hear.
Of course, none of this means that Trump is about to be removed. But it is worth bearing in mind, as you watch 53 Republican members of the Senate – now remade as a jury, every senator having sworn an oath to “do impartial justice according to the constitution and laws” – echo the vocabulary of the accused and blithely dismiss the whole business as a “hoax” or “witch-hunt”.
They’re wrong because Trump’s is the standout case in a category of notoriety that is already vanishingly small. Andrew Johnson was the first president to be impeached – in effect, indicted – by the US House of Representatives, back in 1868. No one would want to defend Johnson or his politics. He was a foul-mouthed, racist drunk, the accidental president who’d only been vice-president for a few weeks when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, leaving him in the top job. Johnson was only ever meant to be a symbolic number two: the governor of Tennessee who until a year earlier had been a slave owner, he’d been picked by Lincoln as a gesture of reconciliation towards the slave-owning south defeated in the civil war. With Lincoln dead, Johnson found himself facing a Congress determined to grant at least a modicum of rights to 4 million former slaves. Johnson was bent on thwarting that effort at every turn.
Still, you don’t have to feel a shred of sympathy for Johnson to recognise that his foes on Capitol Hill set for him what the constitutional law expert, Noah Feldman, calls “an impeachment trap”. They passed a law compelling him to keep in post appointees of his predecessor – including officials willing to grant basic liberties to newly freed black Americans. Congress even wrote into law that any violation would constitute a “high misdemeanor”, ensuring that such a violation would automatically count as an impeachable offence. So when Johnson sacked his secretary of war, he promptly walked right into the impeachment trap.
The circumstances for the second impeachee, Bill Clinton, were rather different, but he, too, could claim entrapment. Remember, he was asked under oath whether he had had a sexual relationship with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. His inquisitors knew what he did not: that they had DNA evidence proving just such a relationship. Clinton denied it, lying under oath. He had walked into a perjury trap, and it was for that crime that he was tried in the Senate more than 20 years ago.
No such chicanery was necessary to ensnare Trump. Of his own volition and requiring no prodding, he made that fateful 25 July phone call to the president of Ukraine in which he pressured him to dig up dirt on Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, on pain of losing $400m in essential military aid or forfeiting a coveted meeting at the White House. That is as clear an abuse of power as it is possible to imagine, using the muscle of the US government for personal gain. It took no canny drafting of laws or sneaky questioning under oath. Unlike Johnson and Clinton, Trump did this all by himself.
Trump has no access to the hiding places where his predecessors in the presidential dock took refuge. He cannot claim, as Johnson could, that any violation of the law was on a narrow technicality. By way of confirmation, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office ruled on Thursday that the White House broke the law when it froze funding to Ukraine, cash whose release had been legally mandated by Congress.
As it happens, the US’s founders did not require a formal or specific law to be broken for a president to be impeached. They conceived of “high crimes and misdemeanors” much more broadly: merely to break the public trust should merit removal. But as a matter of political reality, impeachment has tended to come down to a balder question: has a law been broken? And with Trump the answer could not be louder or clearer.
The Trump case is more straightforward than the others in another sense, too. The Johnson episode was all about race, about a nation emerging from the smoking ruins of a civil war fought over slavery. That argument was not over; Johnson’s trial simply opened up a new front.
With Clinton, it’s tempting to see his impeachment as a battle in the gender wars, a precursor of #metoo, turning on issues of power imbalance and consent. More accurately, given that Clinton’s Republican prosecutors were hardly motivated by feminist outrage, it was a climax of a contest that had been raging since Clinton first ran for president, if not before: a culture war in which Clinton was cast as the embodiment of the moral permissiveness of the 1960s, dodging the draft and smoking dope (even if he didn’t inhale). His impeachment was the culmination of a near-decade-long effort to suggest that Clinton’s character alone made him unfit for the White House and therefore an illegitimate president.
You could probably build an impeachment case against Trump that rested on either race or gender. On the former, his record of white supremacism is ample, dating back to the discrimination cases brought against him as a New York landlord in the 1970s, through to his proposed ban on all Muslims entering the US, to his baiting of African-American public figures and praising of neo-Nazis as “very fine people”. On gender, this is a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault and who bragged of doing so. Similarly, there are those who see Trump, like Johnson or Clinton before him, as an essentially illegitimate occupant of the White House, not least because in 2016 he won 3m fewer votes than his defeated opponent.
And yet the actual impeachment case against Trump does not relate to, or depend on, any of that. You could strip all of that wider context away, and the charges against Trump would still stand. That is not true of Johnson or Clinton. “This is a case like no other and Trump is a president like no other,” says Adam Smith, professor of US political history at Oxford.
Perhaps the closest precedent is the president who quit rather than be impeached and removed. Like Trump, Richard Nixon was guilty of an abuse of power that went way beyond a technicality. Like Trump, Nixon stonewalled Congress’s investigation of his crimes, though, as Feldman writes: “Nixon engaged in far less obstruction than Trump.” But unlike Trump, Nixon lived in a time when partisanship did not blind members of the House and Senate to their constitutional, even patriotic, duty. Trump is guiltier than his predecessors – but he’s also far, far luckier.

The Broken Sword of Langley
by Christian Jürs

The first serious, and successful, U.S. direct interference in Russian leadership policies was in 1953. An ageing Josef Stalin, suffering from arteriosclerosis and becoming increasingly hostile to his subordinates, was poisoned by Laverenti P. Beria, head of his secret police. Beria, was a Mingrelian Jew, very ruthless and a man who ordered and often supervised the executions of people Stalin suspected of plotting against him, had fallen out of favor with Stalin and had come to believe that he was on the list of those Stalin wished to remove. With his intelligence connection, Beria was contacted by the American CIA through one of his trusted agents in Helskinki and through this contact, Beria was supplied dosages of warfarin The first drug in the class to be widely commercialized was dicoumarol itself, patented in 1941 and later used as a pharmaceutical. potent coumarin-based anticoagulants for use as rodent poisons, resulting in warfarin in 1948. The name warfarin stems from the acronym WARF, for Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation plus the ending -arin indicating its link with coumarin. Warfarin was first registered for use as a rodenticide in the US in 1948, and was immediately popular; although it was developed by Link, the WARF financially supported the research and was assigned the patent.
Warfarin was used by Lavrenti Beria to poison Stalin. Stalin’s cooks and personal bodyguards were all under the direct control of Beria. He acknowledged to other top Soviet leaders that he had poisoned Stalin, according to Molotov’s memoirs. Nikita Khrushchev and others to poison Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Warfarin is tasteless and colorless, and produces symptoms similar to those that Stalin exhibited. Stalin collapsed during the night after a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders, and died four days later on 5 March 1953.
Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, in his political memoirs (published posthumously in 1993), claimed that Beria told him that he had poisoned Stalin. “I took him out,” Beria supposedly boasted. There is evidence that after Stalin was found unconscious, medical care was not provided for many hours. Other evidence of the murder of Stalin by Beria associates was presented by Edvard Radzinsky in his biography Stalin. It has been suggested that warfarin was used; it would have produced the symptoms reported.
After the fall of Gorbachev and his replacement by Boris Yeltsin, a known CIA connection, the Russian criminal mob was encouraged by the CIA to move into the potentially highly lucrative Russian natural resource field.
By 1993 almost all banks in Russia were owned by the mafia, and 80% of businesses were paying protection money. In that year, 1400 people were murdered in Moscow, crime members killed businessmen who would not pay money to them, as well as reporters, politicians, bank owners and others opposed to them. The new criminal class of Russia took on a more Westernized and businesslike approach to organized crime as the more code-of-honor based Vory faded into extinction.
The Izmaylovskaya gang was considered one of the country’s most important and oldest Russian Mafia groups in Moscow and also had a presence in Tel Aviv, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, Miami and New York City. It was founded during the 1980s under the leadership of Oleg Ivanov and was estimated to consist of about 200 active members (according to other data of 300–500 people). In principle, the organization was divided into two separate bodies—Izmailovskaya and Gol’yanovskaya which utilized quasi-military ranks and strict internal discipline. It was involved extensively in murder-for-hire, extortions, and infiltration of legitimate businesses.
The gangs were termed the Oligarchy and were funded by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Israeli-owned Bank of New York all with the assisance of the American government.
The arrival of Vladimir Putin as the new leader of Russia was at first ignored in Washington. A former KGB Lt. Colonel who had been stationed in East Germany, Putin was viewed as inconsequential, bland and colorless by the purported Russian experts in both the Department of State and the CIA.
Putin, however, proved to be a dangerous opponent who blocked the Oligarchs attempt to control the oil fields and other assets, eventual control of which had been promised to both American and British firms.
The Oligarchs were allowed to leave the country and those remaining behind were forced to follow Putin’s policies. Foreign control over Russian natural resources ceased and as both the CIA, various foreign firms and the American government had spent huge sums greasing the skids, there was now considerable negative feelings towards Putin.
The next serious moves against Russia came with a plan conceived by the CIA and fully approved by President George W. Bush, whose father had once been head of the CIA.
This consisted of ‘Operation Sickle’ which was designed to surround the western and southern borders of Russia with states controlled by the United States through the guise of NATO membership. Included in this encirclement program were the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia and a number of Asiatic states bordering southern Russia. It was the stated intention of the NATO leadership to put military missiles in all these countries. The so-called “Orange Revolution” funded and directed by the CIA, overthrew the pro-Moscow government in the Ukraine, giving the United States theoretical control over the heavy industrialized Donetz Basin and most importantly, the huge former Soviet naval base at Sebastopol.
The Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP) was an American-sponsored 18-month, $64-million program aimed at increasing the capabilities of the Georgian armed forces by training and equipping four 600-man battalions with light weapons, vehicles and communications. The program enabled the US to expedite funding for the Georgian military for Operation Enduring Freedom.
On February 27, 2002, the US media reported that the U.S. would send approximately two hundred United States Army Special Forces soldiers to Georgia to train Georgian troops. The program implemented President Bush’s decision to respond to the Government of Georgia’s request for assistance to enhance its counter-terrorism capabilities and addressed the situation in the Pankisi Gorge.
The program began in May 2002 when American special forces soldiers began training select units of the Georgian Armed Forces, including the 12th Commando Light Infantry Battalion, the 16th Mountain-Infantry Battalion, the 13th “Shavnabada” Light Infantry Battalion, the 11th Light Infantry Battalion, a mechanized company and small numbers of Interior Ministry troops and border guards.
Eventually, responsibility for training Georgian forces was turned over to the US Marine Corps in conjunction with the British Army. British and American teams worked as part of a joint effort to train each of the four infantry battalion staffs and their organic rifle companies. This training began with the individual soldier and continued through fire team, squad, platoon, company, and battalion level tactics as well as staff planning and organization. Upon completing training, each of the new Georgian infantry battalions began preparing for deployment rotations in support of the Global War on Terrorism
The CIA were instrumental in getting Mikheil Saakashvili, an erratic policician, pro-West, into the presidency of Georgia but although he allowed the country to be flooded with American arms and “military trainers” he was not a man easily controlled and under the mistaken belief that Ameriacn military might supported him, commenced to threaten Moscow. Two Georgian provinces were heavily populated by Russians and objected to the inclusion in Georgia and against them, Saakashvili began to make threatening moves.
The 2008 South Ossetia War or Russo-Georgian War (in Russia also known as the Five-Day War) was an armed conflict in August 2008 between Georgia on one side, and Russia and separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the other.
During the night of 7 to 8 August 2008, Georgia launched a large-scale military offensive against South Ossetia, in an attempt to reclaim the territory. Georgia claimed that it was responding to attacks on its peacekeepers and villages in South Ossetia, and that Russia was moving non-peacekeeping units into the country. The Georgian attack caused casualties among Russian peacekeepers, who resisted the assault along with Ossetian militia. Georgia successfully captured most of Tskhinvali within hours. Russia reacted by deploying units of the Russian 58th Army and Russian Airborne Troops in South Ossetia, and launching airstrikes against Georgian forces in South Ossetia and military and logistical targets in Georgia proper. Russia claimed these actions were a necessary humanitarian intervention and peace enforcement.
When the Russian incursion was seen as massive and serious, U.S. president George W. Bush’s statement to Russia was: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.” The US Embassy in Georgia, describing the Matthew Bryza press-conference, called the war an “incursion by one of the world’s strongest powers to destroy the democratically elected government of a smaller neighbor”.
Initially the Bush Administration seriously considered a military response to defend Georgia, but such an intervention was ruled out by the Pentagon due to the inevitable conflict it would lead to with Russia. Instead, Bush opted for a softer option by sending humanitarian supplies to Georgia by military, rather than civilian, aircraft. And he ordered the immediate evacuation of all American military units from Georgia. The huge CIA contingent in the Georgian capital fled by aircraft and the American troops, mostly U.S. Marines, evacuated quickly to the Black Sea where they were evacuated by the U.S. Navy. British and Israeli military units also fled the country and all of them had to leave behind an enormous amount of military equipment to include tanks, light armored vehicles, small arms, radio equipment, and trucks full of intelligence data they had neither the time nor foresight to destroy.
The immediate result of this demarche was the defection of the so-called “NATO Block” eastern Europeans from the Bush/CIA project who saw the United States as a paper tiger that would not, and could not, defend them against the Russians. In a sense, the Russian incursion into Georgia was a massive political, not a military, victory.
The CIA was not happy with the actions of Vladimir Putin and when he ran for reelection, they poured money into the hands of Putin’s enemies, hoping to reprise the Ukrainian Orange Revolution but the effort was in vain.
And when the Poles, nervous about the apparent speed with which the US forces had abandoned their bases in Georgia, were in the progress of establishing a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, the CIA moved to prevent this. The top Polish government was slated to fly into Smolensk for a ceremony to mark the killing by Stalin of many Polish officer prisoners of war. Someone, the Russians are sure was CIA, tampered with the landing signals on the airfield so that the foggy landing strip appeared to be at a lower altitude. The plane, with the entire upper level of the Polish government, slammed into the ground, killing all of the passengers.
Elegant diplomacy executed by true gentlemen! And never let your children anywhere near any of them.

Accidents on Purpose
by Christian Jürs

Pity the poor Ukrainians, so far from God and so close to the United States.
When the Ukraine separated from Russia, it was with the assistance of the American CIA and when a pro-Russian president came into office there, the same CIA moved to remove him.
The Ukraine is important to the United States because she then controlled the strategically important Crimea with its extensive offshore oil deposits and, more important, the large former Soviet naval base at Sevastopol. One of the demands of the CIA when it worked to remove the pro-Russian president was that the lease the Russians had on this base would be cancelled and the U.S. Navy given the same lease.
This would give the US a naval presence in the Black Sea, part of the encirclement of Russia. To facilitate this, a CIA-trained unit started protest meetings in Kiev and to sharpen their demands, on February 20, 2014, a large public meeting in Kiev’s Maidan square had hidden snipers shoot into the crowd, killing over 50 people. This created the necessary push for a successful anti-Russian putsch.
Acts of violence resulting in the deaths of many people seemed to be the norm in the encirclement campaign against Russia
On 10 April 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft of the Polish Air Force crashed near the city of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board. Among the victims were the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria, the former President of Poland in exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, the chief of the Polish General Staff and other senior Polish military officers, the president of the National Bank of Poland, Polish Government officials, 18 members of the Polish Parliament, senior members of the Polish clergy and relatives of victims of the Katyn massacre. The group was arriving from Warsaw to attend an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the massacre, which took place not far from Smolensk.
The pilots were attempting to land at Smolensk North Airport – a former military airbase – in thick fog, with visibility reduced to about 500 meters (1,600 ft). The aircraft descended far below the normal approach path until it struck trees, rolled inverted and crashed into the ground, coming to rest in a wooded area a short distance from the runway.
In this case, a man code-named ‘Corey’ was able to alter the signals on the airport landing area to show the ground twenty-seven feet lower than it actually was.
‘Corey’ was a member of a CIA group called ‘Summerfield II’ that was run by a CIA officer named Russle.
His real name is George Macalister, his date of birth is 5.29.42 and his American Social Security number SS # 465-80-9315, his email address is :
george_macalister@hotmail.com (G137596.)
The reason why the aircraft was destroyed is because the US wanted Poland to be a supportive member of countries facing Russia who were to form a bloc of American-supportive entites designed to threaten Russia both militarily and economically. The Poles were flying to Smolensk to take part, with Russian officials in a memorial to the Stalin-killed Polish officers at Katyn during the Second World War. This rapproachment was anathema to the CIA and had to be somehow disrupted. Hence we had the entire Polish government wiped out in a single action as an object lesion to others.
After the installation of a CIA-friendly government in the Ukraine and a pending revoking of the Russian lease on the Sebastopol naval base, on April 15, 2014, CIA Director John Brennan and is staff flew into Kiev and met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and First Deputy Prime Minister Vitaliy Yarema to discuss the formation of new, more secure channels for sharing U.S. intelligence with the country now fighting pro-Russian secessionists in its eastern cities.
Shortly after this, on July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board. The rocket projectors used in this attack were of Russian origin but had been sold to the Ukrainian military ten years earlier.
This operation was also run by the ‘Summerfield II’ people.
And note that the two ships that caught on fire were dealing in oil from a country that the US had sanctioned. It has been reliably reported that external sabotage was the reason for the explosions and fire and that the group responsible for the sabotage are headquarted in the same building in Kiev that also houses the large CIA unit.
Mr. Macalister, now retired, lives in Vienna, Virginia and no doubt enjoys leafing through his scrapbook filled with photographs and old newspaper clippings depicting international incidents involving large death tolls.

A Russian Base on the Indian Ocean
In a highly secret response to American and Israeli threats of war, the current regime in Tehran has, within the week,made a formal agreement with Russia to provide them with a long-term naval base on the Indian Ocean, superior to their former naval base in northern Yemen.

The base will be located at Gwdadar Bay, an area used by both Iran and Pakistan.
Connecting transportation routes, i.e, roads and rail, that will connect adjacent Russian territory with the projected naval base, will be installed by Iran.
This projected base will also enable the Russians to better observe, and prepare against, military activity from the Diego Garcia islands, currently used by American military units, located in the Indian Ocean to the south.
Russia’s ‘Maritime Doctrine until 2020’ views the Indian Ocean as one of “regional priorities and formulates three long-term objectives of the Russian policy in the region:
a) developing shipping and fisheries navigation as well as joint anti-piracy activities with other states;
b) conducting marine scientific research in Antarctica as the main policy direction aimed at maintaining and strengthening Russia’s positions in the region;
c) promoting the transformation of the region into a zone of peace, stability and good neighborly relations as well as periodically ensuring naval presence of the Russian Federation in the Indian Ocean.”

Water Problems

Water covers 70% of our planet, and it is easy to think that it will always be plentiful. However, freshwater—the stuff we drink, bathe in, irrigate our farm fields with—is incredibly rare. Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use.
As a result, some 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion find water scarce for at least one month of the year. Inadequate sanitation is also a problem for 2.4 billion people—they are exposed to diseases, such as cholera and typhoid fever, and other water-borne illnesses. Two million people, mostly children, die each year from diarrheal diseases alone.
Many of the water systems that keep ecosystems thriving and feed a growing human population have become stressed. Rivers, lakes and aquifers are drying up or becoming too polluted to use. More than half the world’s wetlands have disappeared. Agriculture consumes more water than any other source and wastes much of that through inefficiencies. Climate change is altering patterns of weather and water around the world, causing shortages and droughts in some areas and floods in others.
At the current consumption rate, this situation will only get worse. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages. And ecosystems around the world will suffer even more.
Droughts in Somalia. Water rationing in Rome. Flooding in Jakarta and Harvey-battered Houston. It doesn’t take a hydrologist to realize that there is a growing global water crisis. Each August, water experts, industry innovators, and researchers gather in Stockholm for World Water Week to tackle the planet’s most pressing water issues.
What are they up against this year? Here’s a quick rundown on the growing global water crisis.
1) We’re Changing the Climate, Making Dry Areas Drier and Precipitation More Variable and Extreme.
Climate change is warming the planet, making the world’s hottest geographies even more scorching. At the same time, clouds are moving away from the equator toward the poles, due to a climate-change driven phenomenon called Hadley Cell expansion. This deprives equatorial regions like sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Central America of life-giving rainwater.
Paradoxically, climate change is also increasing precipitation in other areas, and people who live near rivers and streams have the most to lose. Currently, at least 21 million people worldwide are at risk of river flooding each year. That number could increase to 54 million by 2030. All countries with the greatest exposure to river floods are least developed or developing countries – which makes them even more vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters. This summer, extreme flooding submerged over a third of Bangladesh, claiming over 115 lives and affecting 5.7 million citizens.
2) More People + More Money = More Water Demand.
It’s a simple equation: As populations increase and incomes grow, so does water demand. The world’s population, now at 7.5 billion, is projected to add 2.3 billion more people by 2050. How can the planet satisfy their thirst? Growing incomes also exacerbate the water problem, because of the water-intensive products—like meat and energy from fossil fuels—that richer populations demand.
3) Groundwater Is Being Depleted.
About 30 percent of Earth’s fresh water lies deep underground in aquifers. And it’s extracted daily for farming, drinking and industrial processes – often at dangerously unsustainable rates. Nowhere is this more evident than India, which guzzles more groundwater than any other country. 54 percent of India’s groundwater wells are decreasing, meaning that water is used faster than it’s replenished. Unless patterns shift, in 20 years, 60 percent of India’s aquifers will be in critical condition.
Unlike an incoming hurricane or a drained lake, the naked eye cannot see when groundwater reserves in aquifers are declining. Global water supplies are susceptible to this hidden and growing threat.
4) Water Infrastructure Is in a Dismal State of Disrepair.
Having enough water to go around is only the beginning. That water also needs to be transported, treated, and discharged. Around the world, water infrastructure―treatment plants, pipes, and sewer systems―is in a state of disrepair. In the United States, 6 billion gallons of treated water are lost per day from leaky pipes alone. Built infrastructure is notoriously expensive to install and repair, meaning that many localities ignore growing infrastructure issues until disaster strikes, as it did in California earlier this year.
5) And Natural Infrastructure Is Being Ignored.
Healthy ecosystems are ” natural infrastructure” and vital to clean, plentiful water. They filter pollutants, buffer against floods and storms, and regulate water supply. Plants and trees are essential for replenishing groundwater; without them, rainfall will slide across dry land, instead of seeping into the soil. Loss of vegetation from deforestation, overgrazing and urbanization is limiting our natural infrastructure and the benefits that it provides. Forested watersheds around the world are under threat: watersheds have lost up to 22 percent of their forests in the past 14 years.
6) Water Is Wasted.
Although it’s true that water is a renewable resource, it’s often wasted. Inefficient practices like flood irrigation and water-intensive wet cooling at thermal power plants use more water than necessary. What’s more, as we pollute our available water at an alarming rate, we also fail to treat it. About 80 percent of the world’s wastewater is discharged back into nature without further treatment or reuse. In many countries, it’s cheaper to receive clean drinking water than to treat and dispose of wastewater, which encourages water waste. This brings us to the next issue:
7) The Price Is Wrong.
Globally, water is seriously undervalued. Its price does not reflect the true, total cost of service, from its transport via infrastructure to its treatment and disposal. This has led to misallocation of water, and a lack of investments in infrastructure and new water technologies that use water more efficiently. After all, why would a company or government invest in expensive water-saving technologies, when water is cheaper than the technology in question? When the price of receiving clean water is closer to its actual service cost, efficient water use will be incentivized. And on the flip side, the poor often end up paying disproportionately high prices for water, stunting development.
It’s Not Too Late
Amidst these seven deadly water sins, there is good news: governments, businesses, universities and citizens around the world are waking up to water challenges, and beginning to take action. Each year brings more solutions – like using wastewater for energy, using restoration to bring water back to dry topographies, and monitoring groundwater levels more closely. However, even the best solutions will not implement themselves. Along with fresh water, political will and public pressure are critical resources in ensuring a sustainable future for all.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas
Preface

This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.

To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 61

As they were talking, a gigantic iceberg, roughly the size of New Hampshire, part of a massive Antarctic ice sheet, broke loose from the land with a series of earsplitting roars and slowly began to drift to the northeast and out into the shipping lanes.
Chuck could make sarcastic anti-environmentalist jokes about the fictional Global Warming but there certainly was a warming trend at the South Pole.
This warming, however, was not due to pollution or evil factory owners but was the result of volcanic activity located two miles beneath the ice cap.
Boiling magma was melting the cap from below and it was impossible to detect this directly with infrared photography but the boiling water caused by contact of molten magma with the enormous mass of ice above it was slowly heating up the water near the Ross shelf and causing parts of this thick crust of ice to break off and drift into the southern ocean.
The ocean was indeed warming up by several degrees and the salinity dropping but the sea level was also rising throughout the world, though at an uneven rate. Enormous and continuing beach erosion was one sign of the elevated sea level and a change in weather patterns was another.
Because an incalculable amount of expensive ocean-side property was potentially destined to be under water, no official agency wished to talk about the pending disaster.
Employees of these agencies calculated that if the hidden volcanic activity continued and the entire Antarctic ice cap melted, the level of the world’s oceans could well be raised by over thirty feet.
The changing weather patterns guaranteed massive amounts of snow in some areas and searing drought in others. Normally, the winters in upper Minnesota were bitterly cold but this year, while there was still a thick pack of snow on the ground, the days were much warmer than usual and LeBec was beginning to soften, even before New Years Day.
The last of the hamburgers had vanished and everyone had finished a number of large glasses of beer.
Alex was not particularly sober but he concealed this and tried to match the others, drink for drink.
Finally, noticing him beginning to slur his words, Gwen pushed her chair back.
“I think it’s time for all of us to go to bed. At least I think our new guest ought to get some rest. Say goodnight to everyone, Alex.”
He blinked at her and tried to stand up.
It was difficult and Gwen got an arm around him and began to move him to the kitchen door.
He turned and waved to the blurry table.
“Hey, dudes, have a good night. OK?”
They watched him go, his feet dragging.
“I think the kid’s plastered,” Claude said as he drained his glass and poured another one.
Lars was staring intently at his fork and Chuck managed to pour out the rest of the pitcher into his glass, with some foaming beer splashing onto the table.
“Drunk? Who’s drunk? I’m not drunk. Gentlemen, this is Kulmbach beer. Thirteen percent alcohol and it does go down like mother’s milk! Cheers! The kid can hold his booze like a man.”
He actually could not and Gwen had a problem getting him up and into his bed. Alex kept trying to stand up on the bed and had to be prevented by force.
Finally, he lost whatever energy he had and allowed himself to be tucked in.
Gwen sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.
“Get some sleep, Alexis, and we can all have a nice breakfast in the morning. I think maybe I’ll get you some new clothes tomorrow. We can burn the old ones, don’t you think?”
He didn’t answer and looked seriously at her with his one good eye.
“You’re very pretty, did you know that?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true. My mother is pretty but she’s a mean bitch.”
“Now, that’s enough of that talk. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Nope, just me. Do you?”
She said nothing for a moment.
“Yes, I had a little brother once.”
“What happened to him?”
“What happened to him was that one night he got sick and died. My family was off somewhere and my father hadn’t paid the phone bill so I couldn’t get a doctor and he just died while I was holding him.”
“I’m really sorry, Gwen, I really am.”
She put a finger tip on the end of his nose and snuffled.
“I’m sure you are, Alex. You’re very sweet in case you don’t know.”
“Did you love him?”
“Oh yes,” she said, her eyes filling, “I loved him very much and I raised him all by myself because my family were almost never home. And I couldn’t do anything for him and he died in my arms. How old are you Alex?”
“Fifteen.”
“You look younger. If he had lived, he would be the same age as you. Now be a good boy and go to sleep. Hear me?”
He smiled and was immediately asleep, oblivious of the fact that the bed seemed to be slipping away from under him.
Gwen turned off the room light and went out into the hall. She leaned her forehead against the wall until she could get control of herself and then went out into the kitchen.
“Shame on you stupid assbites for getting that boy drunk! We won’t ever do that again, will we?”
Everyone was shaken by her fury and there were sheepish mumblings punctuated by Lars becoming violently sick on his very own lap.
Sometime during the night, shortly after four by the luminous dial of his watch, Claude heard muffled shouting from somewhere and came entirely awake.
It was coming from next door and he shuffled down the hall and opened the door to the next guest suite. When he flicked on the room lights, he saw Alex thrashing around on the bed, shouting incoherently. A few words were understandable and they consisted of:
“No…go away….get away…no!”
Claude knew better than to touch anyone having a nightmare so he put one bare foot on the mattress and gave it a good shove. This had some effect and the boy stopped shouting and woke up with a great start.
“Who are you? Get him out of here!”
“It’s Claude, kid. You’re having a bad dream.”
Alex pointed to the curtained windows.
“He came in there, Claude! I think he wants to kill me this time.”
“Ernie Koslowski?” Claude had looked at the wallet contents earlier.
“Yes. I guess it must be a dream but I saw him coming through the window.”
Claude sat down on the edge of the big bed.
“Listen, Alexis, old Ern is in no shape to come up here. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if old Ern was dead by now. Look, we have excellent security here. Mr. Shitface would have to get out of bed with a smashed face and broken leg, not to mention a few ribs and serious mouth damage. He would have to drive all the way up here with his leg in a cast, climb over a really high chain-link fence, get his fat ass all sliced up with the razor wire on top of it, not to mention tripping the alarm system. That window has solid wood shutters over it and by the time this miracle man managed to rip them open, I, Claude the Wonderful, would be in here with a hockey stick and I would personally smash what was left of his head clean off. Got all that?”
Alex grinned.
“I guess I do, Claude. I’m sorry I made noise and woke you up.”
Claude reached across the bed and took the boy by the shoulder.
“Listen, after what you went through, I don’t blame you for making noise. Just don’t wet the bed or Gwen and Chuck will have a shit fit.”
“Hey, I don’t wet the bed!”
“Just a figure of speech. You are glad to be out of all of that, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes I am! You know, you just don’t know how shitty things really are until you get away from them.”
Claude thought of the orphanage and the liberating hurricane.
“I know just what you mean about that. What’s the matter with your head?”
Alex had put both of his hands to his temples.
“I got a bad headache. I think it’s the beer.”
“Yeah, well that was a mistake. We shouldn’t have let you drink so much. Anyway, you’re happy, aren’t you?”
“Well, sort of. Claude, I had to leave some things behind that I really want to go back and get. Do you think I could do that? If Ernie’s in the hospital like you say, I could go down with you when my mom is at work and get the stuff back.”
“I don’t think that’s a real good idea, kid. What kind of stuff?”
“All my CDs and some personal things.”
Claude envisioned a stack of well-thumbed girlie magazines but said nothing.
“Where are they?”
“There’s a drawer under the couch where I used to sleep. Ernie didn’t know about it because he bought the couch second hand. I found it and I keep things in it that I don’t want him to find.”
“What kind of records?”
“My music. I used to save up my money that I got from mowing lawns and I bought most of them at the second hand store. Ernie didn’t know about the lawns or he would have taken all the money from me.”
Claude rubbed the side of his nose in reflection.
“You live on Melissa Court still?”
“Yeah.”
“And where’s the couch?”
“In the living room.”
“And your mother works? Today is Saturday, remember.”
“No, not this Saturday. She’ll work next.”
“OK, kid, I’ll see what I can do. I think maybe I can take a drive down there and have a nice little talk with your mama.”
Alex sat up in bed, his headache forgotten for the moment.
“Are you going to kill her, Claude?”
“Would you care?”
“No. Are you?”
“No, I’m going to see what I can do for you. Killing old ma ain’t part of that. You want to go to sleep now? Everything’s OK and I’m right next door.”
“Can you leave the light on? I know it was a dream but it was so real.”
Claude got up, turned off the light and went back to the bed.
“Move over kid and make some room. I’ll sleep in here tonight, but just tonight, and make sure Ernie doesn’t come in. How does that sound?”
(Continued)
This is also an e-book, available from Amazon:

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Edward Sopcak

CanCell, also known as Entelev or Cantron, is one of many utterly useless purported cancer cures. Ostensibly CanCell is “an assembly of synthetic chemicals” – they are secret, though the assembly has apparently also changed over the years – that react with the body “electrically” rather than “chemically”, and the fact that it doesn’t work doesn’t prevent people with poor moral compasses and/or poor critical thinking skills from promoting it. Indeed, in addition to cancer, CanCell is promoted for a variety of diseases, including AIDS, cystic fibrosis, MS, emphysema, Parkinson’s disease, hemophilia, and mental illness (except schizophrenia). Its inventor, James Sheridan, claimed that the formula was revealed to him by God in a dream in 1936, and that he therefore cannot charge people for using it, but instead established the Eden Foundation, a nonprofit corporation, through which people could pay him instead. Edward Sopcak, another promoter, was less worried about personal gain, and continued to promote the “remedy” at least until 1992, when the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan found him to be in contempt of a January 1990 decree to stop manufacturing and distributing the product. (Two associates, Diane Petrosky and Bonnie Sue Miller, were also warned to cease their violative activities.) Sopcak had then been promoting CanCell as a cure for a range of diseases, claiming for instance that all symptoms of AIDS disappear will in 28 days with CanCell. They would, needless to say, not.
According to Sopcak (here he departs from Sheridan’s teachings) there is only one type of cancer, which is caused by a mutated anaerobic cell: an improper diet will cause electrical and chemical damage and open the way for the microbe Progenitor cryptocides (an imaginary cancer-causing germ invented by the late Virginia Livingston-Wheeler), and CanCell ostensibly acts by changing the vibrational frequency and energy of cancer cells, thereby “reducing their voltage,” until they reach the “primitive” state described by Sheridan. Sopcak also claims to “tune” the liquid to correct vibrational frequency in some secret fashion. He seems, in other words, to have tried to be careful to avoid phrases that are actually medically meaningful, which would be required for saying anything demonstrably false and therefore legally actionable. Evidence? Well, according to promoters, human and animal studies have in fact been done proving CanCell’s efficacy – the FDA did a “secret and illegal” study resulting in 80–85% cure rates, for instance – but you won’t find any trace of those studies since they have been suppressed by “the establishment”. In other words: none. So it goes.
Sopcak has also claimed that he believes all medicine in the future will ultimately be practiced by adjusting vibrational frequencies, and has even made forays into homeopathy, with a homeopathic version of CanCell called … “CanCell”, no less. Which could potentially be a source of confusion. Fortunately, the homeopathic version is probably no less efficacious than the standard version, and probably less prone to cause harm.
The product has certainly not gone away – woo rarely does, given that it was never a matter of evidence anyways – but is sold in bottles claiming that “Cantron® is an amazing bio-electrical wellness formulation [a meaningless phrase, and thus potentially not legally actionable]. It provides astonishing health benefits like no other substance on Earth. It is the world’s most potent antioxidant [it isn’t, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing if it were, but “antioxidant” sounds like “health” to the intended target audience] and scavenger of abnormal proteins [nonsense] which accumulate in the blood, tissues, organs and joints. Cantron is known to dramatically aid the body’s own natural defenses [yes: it “boosts the immune system”]. Since 1984, it has received rave reviews from those who have taken it. One customer summed it up perfectly on an Internet chat site when she emphatically stated: ‘How blessed we are to know about Cantron.’”
Diagnosis: Admittedly, we haven’t heard from Sopcak for a while, and aren’t completely sure he’s still around. But the product certainly is, and deserves to be covered, and since we do entries by name, Sopcak’s seemed as good as any. A real threat to health and well-being.

Frank Simon

The American Family Association is a group of bigoted, unhinged fundamentalists. The national leaders are crazy enough, but the wild-eyed Talibanists you find in their various state chapters might occasionally be even crazier. Frank Simon is the director of the Kentucky chapter, and he believes that the 1962 Supreme Court decision prohibiting government-led prayer in schools led to “the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture” (as well as teen pregnancy and violent crime). Accordingly, legalizing government-led school prayer is “one of the best ways of returning God’s protection to America,” Simon thought, and promptly started a petition to change the Constitution.
No fan of gay people, Simon has a long history of anti-equality activism that borders on the, shall we say, unhinged, in particular through his group Freedom’s Heritage Forum, which in practice is just a de facto lobbying wing for his church. He has for instance promoted, in addition to pseudoresearch by Paul Cameron, Scott Lively’s The Pink Swastika, a piece of Holocaust revisionism that claims not only that gays weren’t systematically murdered by the Nazis, but were rather the architects of the Holocaust. And as Simon sees it, the evil continues: “There are hundreds of children in America who are dying of AIDS because they were sexually abused by homosexuals,” Simon said back in the early 2000s, based on data he found in the place where he usually finds data for his claims. There really are not, and it should be unnecessary to point that out.
In his anti-gay campaigns, Simon is locally famous for using any means possible to win, and has a long history for instance of paying for anti-equality ads where he tries to link homosexuality to pedophilia. In 2004 he mailed what was more or less gay porn (graphic descriptions of sexual acts) to 65,000 households as part of his attempt to prevent renewal of the Kentucky Fairness Ordinance. The move seems to have backfired somewhat.
Diagnosis: Raging maniac. But Simon is resourceful and desperate enough to use any tricks at his disposal, and has been doing so for decades. So yes, he’s had an impact. It is less clear whether he is overall helping his cause or not.