From a comment line post yesterday by our very own Woodrow:
[Washington Examiner] Former top FBI officials pointed to an order from President Barack Obama to explain an effort to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The new revelations were contained in the heavily redacted 158-page bipartisan report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, which concurred with the January 2017 assessment by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential contest to help then-candidate Donald Trump and to harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
But also contained within the mostly blacked-out tome were new details about the effort by the FBI’s leadership to use Steele’s unproven allegations in the Russian interference assessment. The revelations are especially relevant days after declassified footnotes from a Justice Department watchdog report strongly suggested the FBI was warned in 2016 and 2017 about the possibility of Russian intelligence services compromising Steele’s work through a Kremlin disinformation campaign. Although officials stressed that Steele’s research was not used as a basis for the 2017 Russian meddling assessment, at least some of the dossier claims made their way into a still-classified, two-page annex attached to the spy community report.
The Senate report revealed the Intelligence Community Assessment began at the behest of Obama himself in early December 2016 during a meeting of the National Security Council, with the president instructing then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to prepare a comprehensive report on Russian interference. The report stated Obama "directed that the report include everything the IC knew about Russian interference in the 2016 elections."
Clapper told the committee, "I don’t think we would have mounted the effort we did, probably, to be honest, in the absence of presidential direction, because that kind of cleared the way on sharing all the accesses."
The Senate report noted that Obama asked for the intelligence assessment to cover a wide range of Russia-related topics and be completed by the end of his second term in late January 2017. The report notes, "There was no document memorializing this presidential direction."
The committee found that the information Steele gave to the FBI "was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments." However, "a summary of this material was included in Annex A as a compromise to FBI's insistence that the information was responsive to the presidential tasking." What exactly that summary says is classified.
#2
Zero's fingerprints are all over the garbage ICA "assessment" -- really a high school-caliber brief report on the television station RT - that was released Jan. 6, 2017. It's all of 25 pages, full of white space and even screen grabs of RT. Get that: screen grans of a fooking broadcasting network. This is the sum and substance of these shitheads' "evidence" of massive subversion of our democratic election system. A TV STATION.
The other half of the report is the repetition of the bizarre conclusion - unsupported by either logic or evidence - that Putin wanted Hillary to lose to OrangeMan.
Right: the guy who's done more than US president, ever, to pressure Russia on every front, who expanded the sanctions, who sold missile defense systems to the Poles and even Sweden, whose pressure forced the allies to increase their anti-Russian defense spending...
The fact that this "Assessment" is so retarded is the smoking gun.
Only Zero could have been stupid enough to demand such a transparently stupid, unwarranted, obviously politicized conclusion based on such ridiculously thin reeds.
#3
And now they're trying to claim it was Wascally Wusskies' dezinformatsiya to blame.
No: the disinformation came from Zero, his girl Hillary, our idiot "ICA" and their army of shitheads across cable and print media and Congress. That's the subversion campaign and the troll farm that we need to focus on.
We've listened to their retarded nonsense for nearly four f---ing years. ENOUGH.
#4
While Champ was responsible as the presumptive leader and certainly this all bears the Alinsky tactics of community organizing that are his hallmarks, or not lose sight of the ValJar Rice, Brennan and islam linkages that weave into this traitorous miasma. Our government weaponized against its people for political transformation and corruption. Can even the hackneyed race card keep them from Justice?
#5
"There was no document memorializing this presidential direction."
This alone is proof. What honest person would mount such a massive and illegal effort without a documented order? How are you going to justify hiring, expenses and payrolls? Or does it not work that way?
#6
I'm sick of all this shit being "redacted", classified and blacked out. I want to know what they're hiding. The people have a right to know what their government is doing.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/23/2020 12:27 Comments ||
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#7
Maybe after the election. [crosses fingers]
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/23/2020 14:43 Comments ||
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Original article is a "long" article but worth that cup of coffee.
[Off-Guardian] In Part 1 we looked at the reasons why questioning the coronavirus lockdown, despite the ever present allegation, does not demonstrate a callous disregard for human life. We are going to expand on why it doesn’t in this article.
I am based in the UK so much of this discussion relates to the decisions of the British State, but this is a global policy agenda and similar policies are found across the developed world. Effectively a small group of policy decision makers have placed an estimated 3.5 billion people under house arrest. It is only possible for them to do so with our consent. Consent is carefully cultivated by controlling the information we are given....
I apologise for the article's length but I hope you will read it in its entirety. There's a lot of ground to cover, so please grab a coffee before we begin.
LOCKDOWN ADVISED BY WHO?
The World Health Organisation (WHO) is financed through a combination of assessed and voluntary contributions.
Assessed contributions are paid by nation states for WHO membership and figures are released quarterly.
Voluntary contributions are additional contributions from member states and "other partners." For some reason these figures haven't been reported for more than three years.
About 80% of the WHO's finances come from voluntary contributions.
In its most recent 2017 voluntary contribution report the WHO accounted for the $2.1 billion it received from private foundations and global corporations.
This compared to just over $1 billion voluntarily provided by governments.
Contributors included GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer AG, Sanofi, Merck and Gilead Sciences whose drug remdesivir is currently being trialled, along side the off patent hydroxychloroquine, as a possible preventative treatment for COVID 19.
The remdesivir trial is part of the WHO's SOLIDARITY trials....
OffGuardian was launched in February 2015 and takes its name from the fact its founders had all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ sections.
Our editors & admins are based around the globe in North America, Britain, and Southern and Eastern Europe.
[American Thinker] The Wuhan virus has ended the game China has been playing for the past three decades to rise from Marxist-rooted poverty to the world's biggest manufacturer. Virtually all of the world's advanced economies and many of the less developed countries now realize that China is not a trustworthy partner. Donald Trump may have been the first world leader to call the Chinese out, but he now has plenty of company:
With a series of high-level summits culminating in a visit to Germany in the fall by President Xi Jinping, this was supposed to be the year of Europe-China diplomacy. Instead, Europeans are warning of a damaging rift.
Diplomats talk of mounting anger over China's behavior during the coronavirus pandemic including claims of price gouging by Chinese suppliers of medical equipment and a blindness to how its actions are perceived. The upshot is that Beijing's handling of the crisis has eroded trust just when it had a chance to demonstrate global leadership.
"Over these months China has lost Europe," said Reinhard Buetikofer, a German Green party lawmaker who chairs the European Parliament's delegation for relations with China. He cited concerns from China's "truth management" in the early stages of the virus to an "extremely aggressive" stance by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing and "hard-line propaganda" that champions the superiority of Communist Party rule over democracy.
China's leaders used tactics that it learned the hard way more than three centuries ago, when it tumbled from millennia-long status as the "middle kingdom," incomparably more powerful than any rivals, to a helpless victim of more powerful foreigners, able to impose their will on and extract vast wealth from it. Virtually all Chinese people are marinated in the history of its decline and impoverishment at the hands of the West. The two Opium Wars led to the forcible opening of China to untrammeled trade, including the mass importation of opium, one of the few products that found a ready market there. Britain conveniently was able to produce opium in its Indian colony and sell it to the Chinese, who sought escape from their misery.
One of the keys to Western dominance of China was the creation and growth of a class of Chinese merchants who worked with the foreigners, making huge fortunes as their nation declined into poverty and subservience. They were called "compradors" ("Mǎibàn" in Chinese) — a term originally from Portuguese, meaning "buyers" — and are reviled in Chinese culture as traitors who sold out their country. Some became so wealthy that they even helped finance railway development in the United States. I still recall the lectures half a century ago of John K. Fairbank, widely regarded as a "dean of Sinologists," informing me that the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad ("The Burlington Route"), a system I had traveled on extensively as a child, was built in part with capital coming from a major comprador in Canton (called Guangzhou by today's China).
#6
They were called "compradors" ("Mǎibàn" in Chinese) — a term originally from Portuguese, meaning "buyers" — and are reviled in Chinese culture as traitors who sold out their country. Some became so wealthy that they even helped finance railway development in the United States.
Fascinating history lesson. So the Chinese view us the way we viewed the Nazis, and any pro-western figures from prior periods as equivalent to the way we view Nazi collaborators.
btw Fairbank was one of our great scholars in the last century who slapped down Howard Zinn and his New Left fellow morons; need to go back and read Fairbank's US And China
We're learning a great deal about Why They Hate Us.
#8
Chinese commercial habits - as tool of state, precede their encounter with post-Renaissance Europeans, by a considerable margin.
And cheating's been their national sport for thousands of years.
#11
US troops invaded China and burned down the emperor's palace. US also kept gunboats on the Yangtze to intimidate China into compliance. Imagine Chinese doing the same on the Mississippi. And Americans cooperating with them and making a fortune. Would that make you angry, or not? Why?
[Breitbart] On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s "Hannity," White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro stated that the coronavirus was "probably" spawned in a lab in China.
Navarro said, "They spawned the virus, probably in that P4 lab right there in China, and then they hid the virus behind the shield of the World Health Organization. And Sean, what that did over a six-week period is allow hundreds of thousands of Wuhanians, basically, to get on aircraft and seed the world."
He continued that China bought up PPE supplies and is "profiteering" off the outbreak and is "sending us counterfeit tests."
[TheHill] Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.
#5
The spike could easily occur because quarantines are not absolute and many catch it and spread it without symptoms.
This was accounted for with the lowering the curve charts which show the virus lasting longer on the right side of such charts. the point is not to get free of the virus but to limit the overwhelming of hospitals.
#6
What we are really debating, although most don't know it, is how high we can get the curve (and thus reduce the overall time the virus is a fact of our lives) without overwhelming those hospitals.
Remember, one major hospital system in southeast Michigan's now laying off thousands of healthcare employees. NY didn't need all the ventilators it received and sent them to other states. Etc etc
#8
And of course the people that have already had it is very important to these calculations but they seem generally reluctant to produce those numbers.
#9
Here's a Q for our brilliant leaders: how many preventable non-COVID deaths do you expect will result from your shuttering your operating rooms and laying off a huge % of your staff? From diverting urgent care away from people at risk of dying from other illnesses?
Have you geniuses even bothered to gather relevant data and do some accurate calculations of the trade-offs?
Why is there zero in the way of any cost-benefit analysis -- none whatsoever, from anyone -- about various policy alternatives during this episode?
#2
Funny thing, it might have actually happened. Be it not a dragon possibly a dinosaur or some variation.
Another Antiquated Dinosaur Engraving
Founded in the 12th century, the Carlisle Cathedral has served as a meeting place for the people of northwest England for 900 years. One of the bishops of Carlisle in the 15th century was Richard Bell. He served in this position for 17 years, resigned in 1495, and died one year later (see Pryde, et al., 1996, p. 236). Bell’s body was then laid to rest in a tomb along a main aisle inside the cathedral. His tomb is inlaid with brass and currently is covered by a protective rug in order to preserve the brass engravings as much as possible. In 2002, the Canon Warden of the cathedral removed the rug in order for United Kingdom resident Philip Bell (apparently no relation to Richard Bell) to examine the tomb. According to Bell,
The brass shows Bishop Richard Bell (1.44 m or 4 ft 8½ inches long) under a Gothic canopy (2.9 m or 9 ft 5 in long), dressed in his full vestments, with his mitre (bishop’s cap) and crosier (hooked staff).
But it is the narrow brass fillet (2.9 m or 9½ ft long), running around the edge of the tomb, that contains the items of particular interest. Owing to the passage of time (and countless thousands of tramping feet!) parts of the fillet have long since been lost, including the entire bottom section. However, in between the words of the Latin inscription, there are depictions of various...fish, an eel, a dog, a pig, a bird... (2003, 25[4]:40).
Most remarkable, however, is an engraving of two animals with long necks and long tails. Although some of the brass engraving is worn due to 500 years of wear and tear, these curious creatures are clearly of some extinct animal. In truth, more than any other creature, they resemble the sauropod dinosaurs that once roamed the Earth.
Kurt at Townhall
[Townhall] If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now — shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity.
It’s fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking is economic ruin. The indisputable fact is that they’re totally cool with that if that is what gets them back into power.
Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes can’t abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of "RACISM!" and "RUSSIA!" and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.
So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.
Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade. I think he's giving them too much credit for intelligence and ability to plan. IMO: they just, automatically, oppose anything Trump proposes. Plus, a lot of them couldn't resist letting their inner Stalin out.
Perfectly true, actually: not planned but a gift from their China-God.
And they've responded predictably: blame Trump for everything and above all, plunge us into not a brief dip but a full-blown Depression so that the voters turn against Trump in November.
#4
Democrats love poor people. That's why all their policies are aimed at creating as many of them as possible.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
04/23/2020 8:57 Comments ||
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#5
If trump can recover the economy (and I think he has a better shot than any President we've ever had) there is no way the Dems can take credit (as Obama tried to take credit for Trump's economy) or deny the success (as other Democrats tried to claim Trump's economy wasn't so good despite solid numbers in everything they track.)
Democrat economic policies will exposed as horrible just as Republicans have said and they are currently terrified of that.
[Frontpage] Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they "adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute," is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wearing the boot. Behind their facade of therapeutic concern for the "people" and the "oppressed" lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for "power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force."
Thankfully, those impulses so far have been checked by our Constitutional order, which was created to inhibit the concentration and excesses of power that threatens citizen freedom. But as we have seen over the last century, at times of crisis the technocratic progressives have chipped away at those Constitutional guardrails and serially encroached on our freedoms. The current virus crisis is the latest opportunity for the Dems to indulge their inner despots.
We’ve all seen the catalogue of overweening unilateral diktats enforced by police power coming down from Democrat governors. Under the guise of enforcing social distancing in order to slow the spread of the disease, governors have quickly violated the Bill of Rights: closing gun stores at the same time they release felons from prison; shutting down church services while leaving liquor stores open; criminalizing the right to peaceful assembly; arbitrarily deeming some economic activities as "essential," like abortion clinics and pot dispensaries, while proscribing others like buying paint or vegetable seeds. Even our freedom of movement that doesn’t endanger others, such as surfing alone or playing with our children in a deserted park, has been interdicted by overzealous police.
At one level, this permanent temptation to seek and abuse power is part of human nature, as both our Judeo-Christian and Classical traditions recognized. The story of the Fall in Genesis is about choosing power to exercise our free will as we see fit, over being obedient to our Creator: "Ye shall be as gods," Satan lies to Eve. The Greeks invented tragedy to make the same point about power. Success and achievement lead to hubris that makes us cross the lines defining our humanity and its limits. Instead we believe we can be like gods and use our power to tyrannize our fellows: "Hubris breeds the tyrant," as Sophocles said of Oedipus.
On a more mundane level, we have all experienced the effects of power-hunger, from playground bullies to arrogant bosses, from despotic teachers to power-drunk cops, from petty tyrants at the DMV to Stalinoid school administrators. But progressivism and its leftist cousins go far beyond that all-too-human tendency to abuse power. It endorses an ideology predicated on the assumption that those properly trained in the "human sciences" can be trusted with expanded power, for their aims are the fruit not of unscientific religion, tradition, practical wisdom, or common sense, but of reason and science. As such, the progressive policies are self-evidently true and rational, and anyone who resists them are like flat-earthers to be reeducated, ostracized, or if necessary eliminated, but at least subjected to the superior knowledge of the technocratic elite.
[The Hill] President Trump's approval numbers on jobs and the economy remain in the upper 50s even as unemployment skyrockets and market volatility continues amid the coronavirus crisis, according to the latest Hill-HarrisX poll.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[American Thinker] The Wuhan virus has ended the game China has been playing for the past three decades to rise from Marxist-rooted poverty to the world's biggest manufacturer. Virtually all of the world's advanced economies and many of the less developed countries now realize that China is not a trustworthy partner. Donald Trump may have been the first world leader to call the Chinese out, but he now has plenty of company:
[Breitbart] On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s "Hannity," White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro stated that the coronavirus was "probably" spawned in a lab in China.
[Frontpage] Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they "adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute," is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wearing the boot. Behind their facade of therapeutic concern for the "people" and the "oppressed" lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for "power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force."
