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House

Best of the Web: The USA's doll house: A vast tapestry of lies and illusions

Edward Curtin
OffGuardian
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 11:16 UTC
This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003. Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it. You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.

doll house
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?

This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll's house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people's lives.
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Stock Down

Best of the Web: Almost a THIRD of US workers can't live on their paychecks, spelling doom for a service economy based on discretionary spending

Helen Buyniski
RT
Thu, 13 Feb 2020 16:19 UTC
walmart
© REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
Almost one in three American workers can't quite make ends meet in between paydays, a new survey has revealed. This doesn't bode well for the US' service economy, where discretionary spending is the major driver of growth.

Some 32 percent of US workers are unable to stretch their salaries to cover their needs, according to a survey published on Tuesday by Salary Finance. Nor is this inability to make one's paycheck last limited to poor and working-class individuals - the poll queried over 2,700 adults working for medium- to large-sized companies about their finances and found that even among those making over $200,000 annually, 32 percent "always" or "most of the time" ran out of cash before payday.

Certainly, the insufficient-funds problem is more severe for those making under $15,000 per year - fully 40 percent, or two in five, are unable to make ends meet on that salary. But no matter how high up the pay scale one goes, the problem stubbornly refuses to vanish.

Comment: See also: Trump's greatest vulnerability is the economy - just ask poor Americans

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Stock Down

Best of the Web: Engdahl: Will coronavirus in China trigger worldwide depression? US economy already fragile

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:00 UTC

Comment: At this point, we don't think there's much to the 'coronavirus' outbreak. BUT China is sure behaving as if there is, tempting other countries to isolate themselves from her and bringing about the scenario outlined here...


china stock
Historically the greatest economic depressions have started with unexpected events on the periphery of major financial markets. That was the case in May 1931 with the surprise collapse of the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank in Vienna which brought the entire fragile banking system of postwar Germany down with it, triggering the Great Depression in the United States as major US banks were rocked to their foundations. Will it be again an unanticipated event outside the financial markets, namely the China 2029 Novel Coronavirus and its effects on world trade and especially on US-China trade that triggers a new economic depression?

Until around January 20 when the news broke about the coronavirus exploding in China's Wuhan and surrounding cities, global financial markets and especially in the US were optimistic that the combined actions of the Federal Reserve to pump in more liquidity and of the Trump Administration to do all possible in an election year would keep the economy positive. Stocks continued their artificial climb as Fed liquidity fueled the fires of the most overvalued stock market in US history for January.

Comment: See also:

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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'


RT
Wed, 12 Feb 2020 18:10 UTC
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.

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Bulb

Best of the Web: What Trump is really about

Sylvain Laforest
Oriental Review
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
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

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Health

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

Rosie McCall
Newsweek
Tue, 11 Feb 2020 21:18 UTC

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?

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Better Earth

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

Trinity College Dublin
Phys.org
Mon, 10 Feb 2020 12:00 UTC
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:

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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


Reuters
Mon, 10 Feb 2020 22:10 UTC
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!

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Red Pill

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

Doug "Uncola" Lynn
The Burning Platform
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
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.
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Oscar

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

Vanessa Beeley
RT
Sat, 08 Feb 2020 12:33 UTC
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:

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