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Eye 1

Best of the Web: CIA used Swiss encryption firm to spy on DOZENS of nations for DECADES - Codenamed 'Rubicon', racket was 'intel coup of the century'

cia emblem
© AFP / Saul Loeb; AFP / John MacDougall
The CIA and German intelligence spied on the secret communications of governments around the world for decades in a covert partnership, controlling a top encryption company and installing backdoor vulnerabilities in its products.


Comment: Ah, so that's why they don't want anyone using Huawei: the US will no longer control the world.


Founded during the Second World War, the Swiss cryptography firm, Crypto AG, has provided top-of-the-line devices for encoding communications to some 120 countries. Starting in 1970, however, the CIA and then-West Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, secretly bought and controlled the company, using its devices to eavesdrop on enemies and allies alike, according to a joint investigation by the Washington Post and German public broadcaster ZDF, based on a classified internal CIA history.


Comment: Founded during WW2... Does this mean the CIA is literally a continuation of the Nazi party?


Comment: The Swiss have a lot to answer for too.


Bulb

Best of the Web: What Trump is really about

Trump
The timing is right for everyone to understand what Donald Trump is doing, and try to decrypt the ambiguity of how he is doing it. The controversial President has a much clearer agenda than anyone can imagine on both foreign policy and internal affairs, but since he has to stay in power or even stay alive to achieve his objectives, his strategy is so refined and subtle that next to no one can see it. His overall objective is so ambitious that he has to follow random elliptic courses to get from point A to point B, using patterns that throw people off on their comprehension of the man. That includes most independent journalists and so-called alternative analysts, as much as Western mainstream fake-news publishers and a large majority of the population.

About his strategy, I could make a quick and accurate analogy with medication: most pills are designed to cure a problem, but come with an array of secondary after-effects. Well, Trump is using medication solely for their after-effects, while the first intent of the pill is what's keeping him in power and alive. By the end of this article, you'll see that this metaphor applies for just about every decision, move or declaration he's made. Once you understand what Trump is about, you'll be able to appreciate the extraordinary presidency he's conducting, like no predecessor ever came close to match.

Comment: In case you missed it: Revelations in the bubble: Trump's presidency brings to light 7 undeniable facts about the swamp


Health

Best of the Web: Strung-out population: 70% of Americans' donated blood found to contain Xanax


Comment: And what is Xanax? A mind-altering, highly addictive, yet commonly prescribed drug to 'induce feelings of calmness that counter feelings of anxiety and panic'.


blood donations
© DESIREE MARTIN / AFP/GettyScientists found concentrations of Xanax in seven out of ten blood batches tested.
Scientists testing a small but random sample of donated blood ready for transfusion have discovered that 70 percent contained traces of Xanax.

Writing in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical earlier this month, researchers were surprised by the level of pharmaceuticals detected in supposedly clean blood batches — in particular, the concentrations of cough medicine and anti-anxiety medication.

The testing also revealed that all 18 batches of blood contained caffeine, suggesting America's love of coffee, tea and other caffeinated beverages runs deep.

The purpose of the exercise was to find out the purity of the blood samples before they were used to test a method for examining the effect of botanicals on drug metabolization. Botanicals are plants or plant extracts taken for medical or therapeutic reasons, such as echinacea, CBD oil and ginko.

"From a 'contamination' standpoint, caffeine is not a big worry for patients, though it may be a commentary on current society," co-author Luying Chen, a PhD student at Oregon State University (OSU), said in a statement.

Comment: Americans talk about freedom a lot, especially individual freedom.

But how free can they really be when so many of them are effectively dependent on external aids - and the pharmacological industry that produces them - to regulate, process and deal with their own emotions?


Better Earth

Best of the Web: Solar system processes control Earth's carbon cycle, geologists show Earth has entered an era of cooling

rock striation
FILE PHOTO
The world is waking up to the fact that human-driven carbon emissions are responsible for warming our climate, driving unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and placing us on course for the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history.


Comment: This opening comment reflects just how science is at the mercy of the global warming agenda, because it is not only irrelevant to the article but is also refuted by the actual findings.


However, new research publishing this week in leading international journal PNAS, sheds fresh light on the complicated interplay of factors affecting global climate and the carbon cycle — and on what transpired millions of years ago to spark two of the most devastating extinction events in Earth's history.

Using chemical data from ancient mudstone deposits in Wales, an international team involving scientists from Trinity College Dublin discovered that periodic changes in the shape of Earth's orbit around the Sun were partly responsible for changes in the carbon-cycle and global climate during and in between the Triassic-Jurassic Mass Extinction (around 201 million years ago, when around 80% of the species on Earth disappeared forever) and the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (around 183 million years ago).

Comment: As you'll see in the links below even mainstream science is no longer able to deny that the global warming agenda is unsupported by both past and present data: And there's more to the story: Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle

Also check out SOTT radio's:


Rocket

Best of the Web: For the SIXTH time, Pentagon increases number of injured US troops from Iranian airstrikes on Iraq base, this time to 109

al-asad airbase iraq iran airstrikes
© AP
The U.S. military is preparing to report a more than 50% jump in cases of traumatic brain injury stemming from Iran's missile attack on a base in Iraq last month, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement, said there were over 100 cases of TBI, up from the 64 previously reported last month.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but in the past had said to expect an increase in numbers in the weeks after the attack because symptoms can take time to manifest and troops can sometimes take longer to report them.


Comment: Right.


No U.S. troops were killed or faced immediate bodily injury when Iran fired missiles at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq in retaliation for the U.S. killing of Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport on Jan. 3.


Comment: "Immediate bodily injury." You can smell the desperation to avoid admitting military weakness (in terms of defensive capabilities anyway) all the way from the Pentagon.


Comment: This is one heckuva brazen PR stunt they're pulling here. 6 weeks old and still ongoing...

See also: Pentagon AGAIN increases casualty numbers from Iranian airstrikes against US base in Iraq, this time to "50, as of today" - UPDATE: Now it's 64!


Red Pill

Best of the Web: Revelations in the bubble: Trump's presidency brings to light 7 undeniable facts about the swamp

SOTU TrumpPencePelosi
© UnknownSOTU Address: President Donald Trump • VP Mike Pence • Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Barely into the New Year, 2020 vision has brought many revelations into better focus, making several ongoing observations perfectly clear. Although there are those who've been watching the dots of The Matrix assemble into the big picture for decades now, the election of Donald Trump has increasingly exposed what was hidden in plain sight for so long.

The awakening for many Americans could be compared to that of actor Jim Carrey's character in the 1998 film The Truman Show. In that narrative, the unsuspecting star of a global reality television program came to the realization his entire worldview was formed within a bubble; a literal bubble that generated bubblevision in Carrey's character as all of those around (and above) him performed right on cue.

Truly, it feels like that now in America. The times have become surreal.

Oscar

Best of the Web: 'For Sama' nominated for an Oscar - yet another propagandumentary that pushes Al Qaeda's narrative in Aleppo

For Sama 1
Screenshot from the trailer for For Sama (2019) PBS distribution.
Oscar-nominated 'For Sama' is a gritty, well produced "documentary" claiming to present the reality of the five-year siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo. Just how deceptive is this portrayal?

The 90-minute video directed by UK Channel 4's Waad Al-Kateab and English filmmaker Edward Watts has been unanimously praised in the mainstream media and it might win this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. But does the film present a truly unbiased picture of the Syrian conflict or, rather, just the side of the story that fits the Western narrative about the war?

Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts
© REUTERS/Mario AnzuoniWaad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, February 4, 2020

Comment: See also:


Better Earth

Best of the Web: Mexico shows the world how to defeat neoliberalism: With publicly-owned banks outside bankster control

Obrador
© Eneas De Troya/CC BY 2.0Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico's president
While U.S. advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico's new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks were not serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the United Kingdom's left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-​wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico's 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century. Called Mexico's "first full-fledged left-wing experiment," AMLO's election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book A New Hope for Mexico, "In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers.... Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites."

Family

Best of the Web: Populist wave reaches Ireland: Sinn Fein stuns establishment, becoming first left-wing party to win Irish general election


Comment: Sinn Fein is definitely 'left', but there's more to it than that. It's also nationalist, and wants a referendum on Irish reunification ASAP. But the primary source of its support is likely drawn from a decade of austerity measures and the failure of neo-liberalism.

Needless to say, the entire media-political establishment spent the entire election campaign warning the Irish people that voting for Sinn Fein would mean certain DOOM!...


irish elections 2020 Fine gael
© Reuters / Phil Noble
Polls have closed in Ireland's general election and, with no party securing a strong lead, confusion abounds as voters wait to see which parties will agree to do business with each other to form a coalition.

An Ipsos MRBI exit poll published by Ireland's state broadcaster RTE at 10pm shows FG [Fine Gael], SF [Sinn Fein] and FF [Fianna Fail] tied with a statistically insignificant (given a margin of error of 1.3 percent) difference of 22.4, 22.3 and 22.2 percent of the vote respectively.

A Sinn Fein surge in the run up to election day looks to have translated into votes at the ballot box, allowing party leader Mary Lou McDonald to head into post-election discussions with some serious clout - and possibly even form a coalition either with another major party, or with the Green Party, the Social Democrats and independents - though the 'grand left coalition' still looks like one of the least-likely outcomes.

Comment: It'll be a few days before results are counted, but so far Sinn Fein actually appear to be doing better than even the exit poll suggested, approaching 25% of the popular vote as of 22:00 CET this Sunday February 9th.

Ironically, Sinn Fein themselves apparently didn't believe they were going to do this well, as they didn't field enough candidates to translate their large vote share into a corresponding number of seats!

This means that the two establishment parties, if they hinder Sinn Fein efforts to form a coalition government this time around, will almost certainly lose more seats to them if another election were held later this year.

Ireland still has some way to go before its fractured polity of multiple small parties and independent candidates reunite under strong leadership, as in the 1918 election when (old) Sinn Fein won the vast majority of seats, but something historic may indeed be in motion here.

One thing is certain: Ireland's current leader, Leo Varadkar, is out.


Star of David

Flashback Best of the Web: Israel admits arming anti-Assad Syrian 'rebels'. That was a big mistake

Free Syrian army damascus suburb
© ReutersA fighter from the Free Syrian Army's Al Rahman legion carries a weapon as he walks towards his position on the front line against the forces of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in a Damascus suburb
For the first time on the record, a senior official confirmed Israel's secret unconventional war in Syria, aimed at preventing Iranian encroachment. But what did Israel gain from exposing its 'anti-intervention' lie after so many years of denial?

In his final days as the Israel Defense Forces' Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot confirmed, on the record, that Israel had directly supported anti-Assad Syrian rebel factions in the Golan Heights by arming them.

This revelation marks a direct break from Israel's previous media policy on such matters. Until now, Israel has insisted it has only provided humanitarian aid to civilians (through field hospitals on the Golan Heights and in permanent healthcare facilities in northern Israel), and has consistently denied or refused to comment on any other assistance.

In short, none other than Israel's most (until recently) senior serving soldier has admitted that up until his statement, his country's officially stated position on the Syrian civil war was built on the lie of non-intervention.

Comment: This article was published almost exactly one year ago. What a change since then. Syria has regained two-thirds of its territory, and with Russian support, is well on the way to pushing Turkey's terrorist proxies out of Idlib. Unfortunately, the US is still squatting in the resource-rich north-east of the country and at the Al-Tanf border crossing with Iraq, but (probably on Russia's advice) Idlib must be dealt with first. Regaining the illegally-occupied Golan Heights is a distant goal still, but it's unlikely Syria will give up on it. All in all, not the picture Israel was hoping for a year ago.
syria territory military situation
© SouthFront