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Megaphone

Best of the Web: Democrats' 'bribery' charge against Trump is a complete bust

Betsy McCaughey
NY Post
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 18:36 UTC
trump
© Tia Dufour
After nearly three years searching for grounds to ­impeach President Trump, House Democrats have landed on "bribery." Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) cited bribery ­repeatedly as he grilled impeachment witnesses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, raising her finger in triumph, declared the witnesses have provided "devastating testimony" and "evidence of bribery."

Not so fast: What the Democrats are labeling "bribery" isn't illegal, according to the Supreme Court. And the public won't support impeaching a president who hasn't broken any law.

Truth is, Democrats are trying to impeach Trump for the same kind of give-and-take horse-trading that politicians do every day. They should look in the mirror.

The pretext for the bribery charge is a July 25 call between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asked for a "favor" — to investigate Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 US election and Joe Biden's son's dealings with a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. Trump didn't say military aid ­depended on it. But aid was ­delayed, and Democrats insist a quid pro quo was implicit. Therefore, bribery.
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Vader

Best of the Web: Cultural warfare against Russia: USADA chief declares only 'full ban' on Russian athletes will do

Danielle Ryan
RT
Fri, 29 Nov 2019 18:23 UTC
russia olympics
© Reuters / Ruben Sprich
As the sporting world awaits WADA's decision on the fate of Russian athletes, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) chief decided to pour fuel on the fire, calling for a total ban on Russian participation in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Travis Tygart even called for Russians to be banned from competing as neutrals, and not under their national flag. Such extreme measures, he said, would "protect clean athletes" and force Russia to "clean up its act."

Yet, with the situation increasingly tense and uncertain for Russian athletes in the run up to another Olympic games, is now really the appropriate time for Tygart to be inflaming the situation? What is to gain from such provocative statements?

The USADA chief's comments come just a couple of weeks before WADA will make its final determination in Paris on December 9. The doping saga re-erupted after a WADA compliance committee claimed that data handed over by Moscow in January — in an attempt to draw a line under the whole scandal — was manipulated to delete hundreds of positive drug tests.

Comment: There are plenty who are fed up with politics invading the Olympics and the hypocrisy of the West towards Russia. Greek pole vault champion Katerina Stefanidi blasted Tygart on Twitter:

Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was even more poignant:
"This is about the politicization of this issue in order to squeeze Russia out. There is a term for such a thing: unfair competition. This is a battle without rules, maybe even already a war.

"The issue of doping...focuses exclusively on Russia. The problems of other countries are not discussed at all.


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Cow

Best of the Web: People power! #Yestomeat hashtag overcomes Planetary Health Diet on social media outreach

Stockholm Resilience Centre
Medical Xpress
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC
yestomeat info graphic
© The LancetFollower networks coloured by community and word clouds of the profiles of users in each community. Words have a size proportional to their frequency in profile text. The largest community (blue) is generally positive, with the second largest (red) very negative, and the third one (yellow) displaying a mix of sentiments. The fourth community (green) is composed of vegan diet supporters that opposed #yes2meat independently of the EAT-Lancet Commission.
In January 2019, The Lancet's report "Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems" received significant positive international media coverage. The report concluded that greatly reduced meat and dairy consumption would improve health and environmental outcomes and proposed the "Planetary Health" diet.

However, an analysis of social media campaigns linked to the launch of the EAT-Lancet commission shows that days before the report's launch, online pro-meat advocacy began to consolidate around the hashtag #yes2meat. In the months following the report's launch, tweets attacking its findings surpassed balanced communications. The critics of the planetary health diet reached 26 million people on Twitter — compared with 25 million from academics and others promoting the research — despite having fewer followers (1.3 million compared with 3.45).

Comment: To see the propagandists in such a tizzy over this is gratifying beyond words! They can't understand why people didn't simply soak up their lies and regurgitate them like good little citizens. Pushing people to make major lifestyle changes based on misinformation is clearly harder than the elite thought.

And make no mistake - the EAT-Lancet report is not science. It's propaganda dressed up as science. The fact that so many debunkers were able to pick it apart and spread the word goes to show how effective the truth is when confronting the lies. Bravo people - the truth wins!

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Butterfly

Best of the Web: Design from the beginning: It didn't take long for animals to master physics and engineering


Evolution News
Wed, 27 Nov 2019 06:44 UTC
Ctenophores
© Marsh Youngbluth [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsBathocyroe fosteri, a ctenophore: The first animal body plans were performing feats that fascinate — and baffle — research scientists.
Ctenophores: Flashing Paddles

Also called sea gooseberries and comb jellies, ctenophores (pronounced TEN-o-fours) are small centimeter-sized marine organisms with rows of cilia, called comb rows or ctenes, which function as paddles for swimming. Though gelatinous and transparent, comb jellies are unrelated to jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria); they have been classified into their own phylum, Ctenophora, characterized by eight of these comb rows. Scientists debate whether ctenophores are the earliest animals that appeared in the Cambrian explosion, as opposed to sponges (phylum Porifera). If so, they arrived with multiple tissues, a nervous system, and a digestive system. That's a lot to account for without any known transitional forms.

Up close, comb jellies look like alien spaceships with flashing lights. Rainbow colors race down the comb rows as the cilia beat in series. There's a puzzle: how do the cilia coordinate their movements? A recent paper in Current Biology by Jokura et al. shows it's not simple.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Western media excited about 'new Iran revolution', but polls tell a different story about protests

Sharmine Narwani
RT
Wed, 27 Nov 2019 18:59 UTC
iran protests
© Reuters/WANA/Nazanin Tabatabaee
Data from two foreign polls tell a very different story about protests in Iran. The economy is tough, but a majority of Iranians back their government's security initiatives and reject domestic upheaval.

On November 15, angry Iranians began pouring onto the streets to protest sudden news of a 50% fuel price hike. A day later, peaceful demonstrations had largely dissipated, replaced instead by much smaller crowds of rioters who burned banks, gas stations, buses and other public and private property. Within no time, security forces hit the streets to snuff out the violence and arrest rioters, during which an unconfirmed number of people on both sides died.

Western commentators tried in vain to squeeze some juice out of the short-lived protests. "Iranian protesters strike at the heart of the regime's legitimacy," declared Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution. France 24 asked the question, is this "a new Iranian revolution?" And the LA Times slammed Iran's "brutal crackdown" against its people.

They grasped for a geopolitical angle too: protests in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq that were based almost entirely on popular domestic discontent against corrupt and negligent governments, began to be cast as a regional insurrection against Iranian influence.
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Newspaper

Best of the Web: Der Spiegel's Exposé of Con-Man Bill Browder: Questions Cloud Story Behind US Sanctions

Benjamin Bidder
Spiegel Online
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 20:17 UTC
bill broder
© Chris Gloag/ WirtschaftsWocheBill Browder at his office in London.
There's a tombstone in northeastern Moscow that bears the portrait of a man with a friendly yet somewhat uneasy smile. His name is Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. He was born in April 1972 in Odessa, Ukraine, and died in November 2009 in Moscow. To this day, 10 years after the fact, the circumstances of his death in a Russian pretrial detention facility remain unclear.

There are two versions of what happened to Magnitsky. The more well-known version has all the makings of a conspiracy thriller. It's been repeated in thousands of articles, TV interviews and in parliamentary hearings. In this version of the story, the man from the Moscow cemetery fought nobly against a corrupt system and was murdered for it.

The other version is more complicated. In it, nobody is a hero.

The first version has had geopolitical implications. In 2012, the United States passed the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions against Russian officials who were believed to have played a role in his death. The measure was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama after receiving a broad bipartisan majority. Back then, if there was one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle could agree on, it was their opposition to a nefarious Russian state. In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.

The facilitator behind these pieces of legislation is Bill Browder, Magnitsky's former boss in Moscow. "When he was put to the ultimate test, he became the ultimate hero," Browder says of Magnitsky. Browder was born in the U.S. For years, his company, Hermitage Capital Management, was one of the largest foreign investors in Russia. At the time, Browder was an advocate for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the West. That is, until he was prohibited from entering Russia in 2005.
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V

Best of the Web: Tucker Carlson questions Douma 'chemical attack proof' and roots for Russia on air. Off with his head, cry MSM


RT
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 20:25 UTC
tucker carlson
© Reuters / Brendan McDermid
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has crossed an MSM Rubicon and questioned the Douma "gas attack" fraud on air, bringing up the OPCW whistleblower. Then he "rooted for Russia" over Ukraine. Was it a "betrayal," or epic truth-trolling?

Carlson boldly went where no mainstream TV host had gone before, unpacking the explosive story of April 2018's Douma "chemical weapons attack." While the "attack" was attributed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by an altered report from the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, two whistleblowers within the group accused it of omitting evidence to craft a misleading narrative - a fact that has never crossed the lips of US media until Monday night.

The polarizing Fox host dismantled the official Western media narrative in a seven-minute segment that included an interview with the Guardian correspondent who personally witnessed the second whistleblower present evidence to the agency.
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Gold Seal

Best of the Web: The lies about Assange must stop now

John Pilger
RT
Mon, 25 Nov 2019 17:30 UTC
assange
© Getty Images / Leon Neal
Newspapers and other media in the United States, Britain and Australia have recently declared a passion for freedom of speech, especially their right to publish freely. They are worried by the "Assange effect".

It is as if the struggle of truth-tellers like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning is now a warning to them: that the thugs who dragged Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy in April may one day come for them.

A common refrain was echoed by the Guardian last week. The extradition of Assange, said the paper, "is not a question of how wise Mr. Assange is, still less how likable. It's not about his character, nor his judgement. It's a matter of press freedom and the public's right to know."

What the Guardian is trying to do is separate Assange from his landmark achievements, which have both profited the Guardian and exposed its own vulnerability, along with its propensity to suck up to rapacious power and smear those who reveal its double standards.
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Hourglass

Best of the Web: 100 years ago, a gigantic meteor shook Michigan on Thanksgiving eve

Eric Mack
CNET
Mon, 25 Nov 2019 19:42 UTC
Chelyabinsk Meteor
© Associated PressIn this frame grab made from a dashboard video camera, a meteor streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013.
A century ago, on Thanksgiving eve, people across Michigan saw something that would mark Nov. 26 in their memories for years to come. Fog and rain rolled across the Great Lakes region, when just before 8 p.m. something unusual cut through the dark.

"The road, trees, houses and even ourselves were bathed in a blinding phosphorescent-like glow which had its center in a bright streak in the sky above us," highway construction superintendent Leroy Milhan of Centerville, Michigan, would recall in a paper published the following year. "It passed over us toward the west. Immediately came a muffled report or jar that shook houses and the very earth like an earthquake."

The following day, the Washington Times reported that "telegraph and telephone communications and electric lighting plants in several cities in southern Michigan and northern Indiana are out of commission" as a result of "a remarkable phenomenon believed by several scientists to have been a gigantic meteor."

Comment: You can read more about the hazards to humanity from cometary bombardment in SOTT's Comets and Catastrophe Series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.

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Cow

Best of the Web: India is NOT a 'Vegetarian Country' like the EAT-Lancet report would have us believe

Sylvia Karpagam, Frédéric Leroy and Martin Cohen
The Wire
Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC
indian children plates
© Reuters/Babu/FilesChildren holding plates wait in a queue to receive food at an orphanage run by a non-governmental organisation on World Hunger Day, in Chennai May 28, 2014.
Currently, food politics in India spearheads an aggressive new Hindu nationalism that has led to many of India's meat eating minority communities being treated as inferior.

Vegetarians, far less vegans, let us be frank, would not like to be compelled to eat meat. Yet the reverse compulsion is what lurks in the current proposals for a new 'planetary diet'. Nowhere is this more visible than in India.

The subcontinent is often stereotyped by the West as a vegetarian utopia, where transcendental wisdom, longevity, and asceticism go hand in hand.

Earlier this year, the EAT-Lancet Commission released its global report on nutrition and called for a global shift to a more plant based diet: "The scientific targets set by this Commission provide guidance for the necessary shift, which consists of increasing consumption of plant-based foods and substantially reducing consumption of animal source foods".

Comment: Like much of the EAT-Lancet report, the idea that India is a vegetarian country is nothing but propaganda, propped up to fulfill an agenda. That agenda, the 'vegan pusch', is a house of cards, upheld by these blatant lies in an attempt to sway the global population into strict dietary austerity.

See also:

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