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Best of the Web: Top Bolivian coup plotters trained by US military's School of the Americas and FBI programs

Bolivian commanders
The United States played a key role in the military coup in Bolivia, and in a direct way that has scarcely been acknowledged in accounts of the events that forced the country's elected president, Evo Morales, to resign on November 10.

Just prior to Morales' resignation, the commander of Bolivia's armed forces Williams Kaliman "suggested" that the president step down. A day earlier, sectors of the country's police force had rebelled.

Though Kaliman appears to have feigned loyalty to Morales over the years, his true colors showed as soon as the moment of opportunity arrived. He was not only an actor in the coup, he had his own history in Washington, where he had briefly served as the military attaché of Bolivia's embassy in the US capital.

Bullseye

Best of the Web: 'A classic coup': Bolivia's new government is a 'military regime with no constitutional authority' - Max Blumenthal

bolivian soldiers
© REUTERS/Henry Romero
The political upheaval in Bolivia is a textbook coup that was carried out through violence and intimidation, Max Blumenthal told RT. The journalist marveled that some still deny the unconstitutional nature of the power grab.

Opposition politician Jeanine Añez declared herself interim leader of Bolivia on Wednesday, after President Evo Morales was urged by his country's military chief to step down. But her legitimacy has already come into question. As the editor of the Grayzone Project pointed out, Añez is a fringe figure who garnered only 1.7 percent of the votes cast in Bolivia's last elections.

Realizing that there was no popular support, threats of violence were used to ensure that senators who opposed Añez would not be able to vote on a motion declaring her Bolivia's acting president. According to Blumenthal, politicians belonging to Evo Morales' Movement for Socialism Party, which has a majority in both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, "had guns to their heads, their families were threatened, and if they showed up they could have been arrested and killed."
There's absolutely no way that Áñez would have obtained power without the help of the Bolivian military and the police... You essentially have a right-wing dictatorship, a military regime in power now in Bolivia, with no constitutional authority.

Propaganda

Best of the Web: The latest false news on the Trump impeachment circus

fake false news
© WSJ
As the media are all out to get Trump, there is no way to get any valid information about the so-called impeachment. But you don't have to pay too much attention to notice that the Democrats and the presstitutes are constantly changing the focus. The alleged whistleblower, who only had hearsay information, if that, has dropped out of the picture, being too compromised by his afflilations and prior meetings with Adam Schiff during which the "whistleblowing" was planned as an attack on Trump.

The Democrats and presstitutes then shifted focus to state department types who also heard second hand from "staff" about the alleged conversation containing a quid pro quo, a claim unsupported by the transcript of the telephone call or by the President of Ukraine. So now a new alleged phone call has emerged, or been invented. The acting ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, a sleazy State Department type, today (Nov. 13) testified that a member of his staff heard Trump in another telephone call asking Sondland about the Ukraine investigation of the Bidens. This second-hand information is described by the presstitute media as a "bombshell." God help us. It is nothing of the sort. But the presstitutes will repeat it until it is.

A person has to wonder how many members of staffs are permitted to listen to telephone conversations between heads of state. In my day it was zero.

Comment: We are witnessing political warfare and a battle of narratives of the first order - where the fate of many lie in the balance. When a fact-based history of this time in the US is finally put together, do not expect it to look kindly on the efforts of Schiff and the pathological political class who have done so much to divide the country in a sick effort to accrue money and power.


Battery

Best of the Web: Bolivia: What happens to the lithium industry without Morales?

EvoMoralesQuote
Bolivia's President Evo Morales was overthrown in a military coup on November 10. He is now in Mexico. Before he left office, Morales had been involved in a long project to bring economic and social democracy to his long-exploited country. It is important to recall that Bolivia has suffered a series of coups, often conducted by the military and the oligarchy on behalf of transnational mining companies. Initially, these were tin firms, but tin is no longer the main target in Bolivia. The main target is its massive deposits of lithium, crucial for the electric car.

Over the past 13 years, Morales has tried to build a different relationship between his country and its resources. He has not wanted the resources to benefit the transnational mining firms, but rather to benefit his own population. Part of that promise was met as Bolivia's poverty rate has declined, and as Bolivia's population was able to improve its social indicators. Nationalization of resources combined with the use of its income to fund social development has played a role. The attitude of the Morales government toward the transnational firms produced a harsh response from them, many of them taking Bolivia to court.

Over the course of the past few years, Bolivia has struggled to raise investment to develop the lithium reserves in a way that brings the wealth back into the country for its people. Morales' Vice President Álvaro García Linera had said that lithium is the "fuel that will feed the world." Bolivia was unable to make deals with Western transnational firms; it decided to partner with Chinese firms. This made the Morales government vulnerable. It had walked into the new Cold War between the West and China. The coup against Morales cannot be understood without a glance at this clash.

Comment: See also:


Bulb

Best of the Web: Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoysky blasts US in NYT interview, calls for 'new Warsaw Pact' with Russia - "They're stronger anyway"


Comment: Some variant of this was always going to come about. That it took them over 5 years of dancing with the devil, and over 10,000 lives, sums up the utter fecklessness and lack of foresight of the Ukrainian political elite.

Putin has been proven correct in his strategy since the Americans' coup in 2014 to just keep Ukraine on a leash but otherwise stay out of it; Kiev would eventually see the light and come crawling back.


A tycoon who spent millions of dollars arming anti-Russian fighters in Ukraine has emerged from the shadows to blast the Europe he once idolized. The oligarch now sees alliance with Russia as the only option for his country.
Igor Kolomoysky
© Reuters / Valentyn OgirenkoIgor Kolomoysky is one of Ukraine's most powerful tycoons.
Igor Kolomoysky, the oligarch seen by many as the shadow power behind Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, has changed his tune sharply from the days of the 2014 Maidan rebellion.

Back then he was an ally of pro-European President Petro Poroshenko, who even appointed him governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region. Once installed there, Kolomoysky placed a bounty on captured fighters from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics, who fought against the new authorities in Kiev, and spent a reported $10 million per month fielding his own private militia, also funding ultranationalist volunteer units, like the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

"We'll just have to kill them," he said of the rebels at the time.

Comment: This "chancer" who "only wants money" couldn't "see objectively" in 2014 that Ukrainians want "people want peace, a good life, and not to be at war."

But now he does?

We shall see.

In the meantime, what can the Americans do about this? Sanction Kolomoysky? Sanction Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt itself?!


Fire

Best of the Web: Democrazis run rampage in Hong Kong - Police chief warns 'society on brink of total breakdown'


Comment: The situation's reaching boiling point in Hong Kong. Stand by for mystery snipers shooting protesters and/or police...


hong kong map riots
Just some of the flash-points across Hong Kong today, 12 Nov 2019
Protests in Hong Kong have reached new heights of violence, with bomb-throwing rioters seizing control of university campuses and pushing out police while authorities admit that the riot-ravaged city hangs by a thread.

Demonstrators armed to the teeth with molotov cocktails, javelins, and (in one case, at least) a chainsaw have seized control of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), pushing riot police off the campus on Tuesday night and leaving a shocking amount of destruction in their wake.

Videos and photos posted to social media show the rioters fortifying their position with barricades and setting "huge" fires on the campus. Classes were unsurprisingly canceled at CUHK and other universities around the city, some of which also played host to clashes between the demonstrators - still dubbed 'pro-democracy activists' in the media despite the increasing levels of violence on display - and police. On at least one campus, rioters stole sporting equipment including javelins and shot puts and weaponized them.


NPC

Best of the Web: I was a liberal NY prof, but when I said the Left was going too far, colleagues called me a NAZI & treated me like a RUSSIAN SPY

nyu graduates
© (L) AFP / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Drew Angerer; (R) Wikimedia / Jonathan71
What's wrong with the American left? Suffering from Trump anxiety disorder, acting like cult members, and engaging in a new McCarthyism, the left has lost its collective mind. I saw it coming and left the left in the nick of time.

My break with the left began in the fall of 2016. I was a professor at New York University, a left-liberal, and an active social media participant. My skepticism and resentment at my political tribe's insistence that I affirm its increasingly crazy claims had been growing steadily to this point.

Much like Jordan Peterson, my tipping point involved the pronoun wars, although, as you'll see, I enjoyed a more satirical approach. When the University of Michigan instituted a policy that offered students a carte blanche pronoun preference opportunity, a clever student offered "His Majesty" as his chosen pronoun, and his blasphemous pronoun choice made the news. The satirical trope hilariously underscored the absurdity of gender and pronoun proliferation, and the institutional lunacy that has attempted to keep pace with it. I posted a link to an article about the spoof on Facebook, without comment. I then proceeded to teach for the rest of the afternoon.

Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Why Extinction Rebellion seems so nuts

extinction rebellion
© Getty
This is an edited version of a short speech Brendan O'Neill gave at the Battle of Ideas festival in London on 3 November 2019.

One of my favourite political events this year was the Battle of Canning Town. This was the moment when Extinction Rebellion decided to send its painfully middle-class agitators to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turned out. There were many wonderful moments. The two posh greens who climbed on top of a Tube train at Canning Town were mocked and eventually dragged down. A commuter can be heard branding one of the protesters a 'ponytail weirdo'. Elsewhere on the Tube system that day, commuters pointed out that the London Underground is run on electricity and is therefore pretty eco-friendly. 'Are you that fucking stupid?', one asked a smug-looking couple of XR agitators. 'No wonder you can't get jobs...'

Comment: See also:


Chess

Best of the Web: MSM Adamantly Avoids the Word 'Coup' in Bolivia Reporting

morales resign
There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing rioters and the US government, but you'd hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines.
"Bolivian President Evo Morales steps down following accusations of election fraud" proclaims CNN.

"Bolivia's Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests" reports The Washington Post.

"Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down" says The New York Times.

"Bolivian President Evo Morales resigns amid fraud poll protests" declares the BBC.

"President of Bolivia steps down amid allegations of election rigging" we are informed by Telegraph.

"Bolivia's President Morales resigns after backlash to disputed election" says the Sydney Morning Herald.
So there you have it. The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world's largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a "disputed election". Nothing to do with the fact that right-wing mobs had been terrorizing this leader's family, or the fact that the nation's military literally commanded him to step down and are now currently searching for him to arrest him, leading to ousted government officials being rounded up and held captive by soldiers wearing masks.

All perfectly normal and not suspicious at all.

Family

Flashback Best of the Web: Bone-chilling national scandal: Thousands of babies are stolen from innocent parents by the UK state

Nicky and Mark Webster, forced adoptions UK, UK state kidnapping
Nicky and Mark Webster with son Brandon. After doctors became suspicious of the parents, believing they were abusing their kids three of their children were forcibly removed and taken in social services
The woman's face was pale and tear-stained; her eyes raw from crying. 'Please may I speak to Denise?' she begged my husband. Fired by desperation, she'd found my home and rung my doorbell one evening six years ago. I was her last hope, she said.

As a magazine and TV agony aunt with a regular slot on ITV's This Morning, my job is to give constructive and compassionate advice to those who seek it. I take my role — and the responsibility it involves — very seriously.

So although I usually make it a rule not to see people in my home, this time the woman's distress was so acute that I invited her in.

Her story spilled out. She was a grandmother in her late 40s, whose daughter, single and unable to cope with the responsibilities of parenthood, had nonetheless given birth to four children.

Each had been raised with love, kindness and singular devotion by the woman standing in front of me: their grandmother. They were all under nine and the youngest was 18 months old. The woman was distraught because she had been told that her youngest grandchild, a cherubic, blue-eyed blonde, was to be taken from her.

Comment: Related articles: For more information on this horrendous practice, see Ian Josephs' website, forced-adoption.com, where he lays out what has been happening in the UK for years, and what parents can do about it.