Puppet MastersS


2 + 2 = 4

Tim Hayward: Should universities care about the truth?

Tim Hayward
Mronline.org
Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00 UTC
Douma balcony canister in Forensic Architecture’s “augmented reality.”
Isn't the answer obvious? Universities are about attaining, preserving and disseminating knowledge — which only is knowledge insofar as it is true. Caring about the truth is what universities — through their members — do.

The question as intended, however, concerns claims of fact that are appealed to as grounds for governments to go to war or to engage in other kinds of hostilities such as sanctions, blockades, coups and military interventions.

Such claims are not typically the fruits of academic research. They are made by politicians or pundits, and amplified by the media, on the basis of such intelligence reports as are made available. But sometimes they are wrong: babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait; Saddam Hussein did not have WMD; Gaddafi did not give Viagra to his soldiers; it is far from certain that Assad used chemical weapons as alleged by the West.

So the question is whether universities have any particular business truth-checking such claims. The answer is not obvious.
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USA

The Military Coup Against Morales Won't End The Hybrid War On Bolivia

Andrew Korybko
One World Global Think Tank
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 21:06 UTC
Evo Morales resigned
President Morales resigned under duress following the military's "request" that he do so after the US-backed OAS alleged that it uncovered evidence supposedly proving that his recent re-election was rigged, but the military coup won't end the Hybrid War on Bolivia even in the unlikely "best-case" scenario that it ends the cycle of violence in the country because the structural-institutional consequences of this ongoing campaign will inevitably lead to a reversal of the socio-economic rights that were bestowed upon the majority-indigenous population and therefore risks returning millions of people to their prior position as slaves to the neoliberal-globalist system.
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Attention

UK election shocker: Farage makes u-turn, now he DOES support BoJo's 'Brexit Deal', dump hundreds of Brexit Party candidates

Sam Bright
Scram:
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:45 UTC

Comment: Farage appears to have bottled it. We can't blame him though. The British establishment is ruthless, and they've apparently tried to 'take him out' at least once before. Today he reversed last week's grand announcement that 600 Brexit Party candidates would challenge all seats in the UK - thus including incumbent Conservative seats - on the basis that all the traditional parties are colluding to keep the UK in the EU.

Farage now says that the Brexit Party won't contest half of those seats - those won by the Conservative Party in the last election in 2017. This means that, with those two parties now effectively in an alliance, they'll win enough seats in December to prevent Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party from becoming PM.

Farage isn't himself running for a seat, so - barring a miracle to the effect that most English voters now want to remain in the EU and would therefore vote Labour - Johnson will be PM for the next 5 years. And the UK will remain in the EU because 'Brexit negotiations' will be dragged out indefinitely and/or mere cosmetic changes will be applied to the UK's status within the EU.

That's the last nail in Brexit (actually happening), and it 'defends the realm from national security threat Corbyn'. But it leaves anyone who wants actual Brexit with no real choice in the upcoming election...


farage brexit party
'Sorry old chaps'
Several of the Brexit Party's (now former) general election candidates are in a state of open revolt against Nigel Farage, after he stood down candidates in 317 constituencies.

Brexit pied piper Farage led his troops to the top of the hill, before unceremoniously dumping them earlier today. The Brexit Party leader announced that he would be standing down his candidates in every constituency won by the Conservatives in 2017, in an effort to prevent splitting the Leave vote.

However, perhaps unsurprisingly, Farage's scorned candidates have been reacting with a decent level of fury to his decision.

A couple of candidates have suggested that Farage has abandoned Brexit voters, and that even they will not vote at the upcoming general election.

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Quenelle - Golden

Libyan Tribal Union declares ICC charges against Saif Ghadafi illegitimate

JoannaM
Libyan War The Truth
Sun, 10 Nov 2019 19:03 UTC
Dr. Saif al Islam Muammar Gaddafi Libyan tribes
Dr. Saif al Islam Muammar Gaddafi
The Libyan Tribal Union has issued a statement of rebuke to the ICC for its phony charges against Dr. Saif al Islam Ghadafi. The charges have no foundation in truth and were basically taken from unsubstantiated and highly biased media articles. The Libyan tribes point out the great HYPOCRISY of the ICC that turns and continues to turn a blind eye to the crimes against humanity that were committed in Libya by NATO, Obama, Clinton, Bernard Levy (and their terrorist mercenaries) and other western nations in their illegal invasion and attacks in 2011. The crimes against the Libyan people continue to this day by the terrorists militas supported by the Serraj illegitimate - UN installed regime in Tripoli.

Not one charge has been made against the aforementioned criminals, and against the illegal invasion by NATO, illegal bombing of homes, rape of women, assassination of families, destruction of homes, water supplies, power supplies, hospitals, roads, food supplies, medicine supplies etc. etc.

Comment:

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Bad Guys

Immigration backlash: Eurosceptics rejoice as right-wing Vox becomes 3rd most powerful party in Spanish election


RT
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:34 UTC
Spain elections Vox Abascal
© Reuters/Susana VeraSpain's far-right party VOX candidate Santiago Abascal reacts during Spain's general election
Right-wingers across Europe have celebrated the success of Spain's anti-immigration Vox party which came third in the nationwide election race, doubling its previous number of seats.

A surprise surge in seats for Vox has become one of the biggest talking points of the day after the Spanish right-wing party came in third with 52 seats in the 350-seat parliament, up from 24 in April.

The ruling Socialists gained 120 seats while the conservative People's Party came in second with 88 seats. Shortly after the results were made public, leaders of like-minded parties from Europe rushed to congratulate Vox and its head, Santiago Abascal, on the huge election results.
spain election results november 2019

Comment: Gains for the Spanish nationalist party, but it's yet ANOTHER hung parliament in western Europe, where politics has become utterly sclerotic because the central banking cartel won't yield to popular will. As much as Vox is the more 'genuine' alternative in Spain, like its counterparts in Europe, it has dodgy ties to deep state/zionist interests:

Spain: Far-right Vox a recipient of nearly €1M from 'Marxist-Islamist' Iranian exiles

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Attention

Rafael Correa: Morales forced out by 'coup'; OAS an instrument for 'US domination'


RT
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 15:22 UTC
Correa
© Reuters/Francois LenoirFormer president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa
Former leader of Ecuador Rafael Correa said the resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales was the result of a coup d'etat and that events could have ended in worse violence, if the socialist leader had not resigned.

"Of course there was a coup d'etat," Correa told RT Spanish in an exclusive interview on Monday, explaining that such an insubordination of the country's armed forces "cannot exist in a constitutional state of law" or democracy. "If Evo Morales did not resign, there would have been a bloodbath because there was no public order," he said.

There can be no true democracy until the arbitrators are the citizens and "not the uniformed," Correa said, adding that he would not be surprised if there were foreign forces behind the efforts to oust Morales. Correa said that the Organization of American States (OAS), which encouraged Morales to call for new elections, did not condemn events in socialist Bolivia because democracy is only valid when it serves the interests of the right.

"You can see the double standards that exist in all this. For the right, democracy is valid as long as it meets its interests," Correa said. When those interests stop being fulfilled, suddenly democracy is not enough and "the situation must be changed to blood and fire, as we are seeing in Bolivia."

Comment: RT, 11/11/2019: Jeremy Corbyn: 'Coup against Bolivian people' forced Morales out of office
Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced out of office by a coup, Jeremy Corbyn has claimed. The Labour leader condemned the country's military and expressed solidarity with the Bolivian people.
See also: US 'coup d'état': Bolivian President Evo Morales announces his resignation, UPDATES

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Briefcase

FBI edits, DOJ paper mess, new discoveries prompt Flynn legal team to get to bottom of Russiagate plot

Ekaterina Blinova
Sputnik
Sun, 10 Nov 2019 18:00 UTC
Michael Flynn
© AP/Susan WalshFormer National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn
As Michael Flynn's sentencing date nears, the retired lieutenant general's legal team have come up with new discoveries suggesting that the former national security adviser was trapped by the FBI amid the Russiagate inquiry. According to Flynn's defence, there's already enough evidence to overturn Flynn's plea deal.

Michael Flynn's defence team signaled Monday that it has enough evidence to file a motion "at the appropriate time" to dismiss the prosecution for "egregious government misconduct and in the interest of justice" amid growing controversy over the FBI and DOJ's handling of the retired lieutenant general's false statement case.

FBI Agents Manipulated Flynn 302

On 24 October, Powell, raised a red flag over the apparent manipulation of the general's FD-302 - a form used by FBI personnel to report or summarise the interviews that they conduct. According to the attorney, FBI agents made "substantial changes" to the Flynn 302.

She argues that, first, they added an unequivocal statement "Flynn stated he did not" - in response to the question whether he had asked Russian Ambassador Kislyak to vote in a certain manner in the UN. However, the agents' handwritten notes indicate that the general had not even recalled speaking to Kislyak on the issue.

Second, the agents added a phrase: "or if Kislyak described any Russian response to a request by Flynn" to which Flynn answered "no". However, neither the question nor the answer appeared in the FBI raw notes.
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Oil Well

Pentagon: Access denied! Shoot any Syrian official who tries to retake Syrian oil

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 16:30 UTC
SyrianOil
© Xinhua/Getty ImagesSyrian soldiers deploy in Qamishli, northeastern Hasakah province in early November, 2019.
Pentagon officials, Thursday, asserted U.S. military authority over Syrian oil fields because U.S. forces are acting under the goal of "protecting Americans from terrorist activity" and would be within their rights to shoot a representative of the Syrian government who attempted to retake control over that country's national resource.

The comments came from Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman and Navy Rear Admiral William D. Byrne Jr. during a press briefing in which the two men were asked repeatedly about the legal basis the U.S. is claiming to control Syrian oil fields.

The briefing came less than two weeks after Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, "That's our mission, to secure the oil fields" in the Deir ez-Zor area of eastern Syria. President Donald Trump's comments before and after that remark — "We're going to be protecting [the oil], and we'll be deciding what we're going to do with it in the future," and "The oil... can help us, because we should be able to take some" — were seized on by critics who claimed Trump was suggesting violating international law by plundering another country's resources and openly saying the U.S. was pursuing war for oil.

Hoffman, in his comments Thursday, gave a different message — that "the revenue from this is not going to the U.S. This is going to the SDF," referring to the Kurdish-led and U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, who are battling ISIS. Byrne claimed that the U.S. has been waging the oil field control mission alongside SDF and that the goal was to prevent ISIS from obtaining the oil revenue.

Comment: There are plenty of examples of ISIS stealing oil for revenue in cooperation with Turkey and the US, but this edict falls short - somewhere between a threat and a convenient excuse. There is no US entitlement to take control, determine where the oil is going or to whom it benefits.

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V

The US doesn't need Euro-style hate speech laws

Jonathan Turley
jonathanturley.org
Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
freeSpeech wall
© Harry Blain/opendemocracy.net
Below is my column in USA Today on the latest calls for limiting free speech and imposing censorship on political speech. Last week, we discussed the refusal of students to allow former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to speak at Northwestern University and a New Yorker writer calling for the curtailment of free speech. These attacks are coming largely from the left where speech criminalization and censorship has become an article of faith for activists and some Democratic members.

Roughly 70 years ago, Justice William O. Douglas accepted a prestigious award with a speech entitled "The One Un-American Act," about the greatest threat to a free nation. He warned that the restriction of free speech "is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." For decades since Douglas' famous speech, the Democratic Party has been a champion of free speech in fighting that subversion. Yet recently, the Democratic Party seems to have abandoned its historic fealty to free speech. Democratic writers and leaders are publicly calling for everything from censorship to the criminalization of free speech. The latest such clarion call appeared in The Washington Post by a column from MSNBC analyst and former Obama official Richard Stengel.
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No Entry

Mick Mulvaney to defy impeachment subpoena

Joshua Caplan
Breitbart
Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
Mick Mulvaney
© AP/Evan VucciActing WH Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney will defy a subpoena seeking his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the House Democrats' impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump, according to Fox News.

Mulvaney was scheduled to testify Friday in the impeachment inquiry — but like several other administration officials, he was not expected to appear.

The White House said Mulvaney won't participate in what it called a "ridiculous, partisan, illegitimate proceeding." The House issued a subpoena for Mulvaney on Thursday, but he's still unlikely to appear, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway said.

State Department official Catherine Croft testified last week that Mulvaney had put a hold on nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine four months ago — before President Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that spawned a whistle-blower report, and the impeachment investigation.
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