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Chess

Best of the Web: Iran is winning strategic struggle for influence, even as US cripples its economy

Darius Shahtahmasebi
RT
Fri, 08 Nov 2019 16:49 UTC
Azadi Tower
© Getty Images / Sir Francis Canker PhotographyAzadi Tower illuminated at late dusk in Tehran, Iran
A new report has confirmed what some analysts have been saying for some time: that Iran is winning the regional struggle for strategic influence.

The 217-page report, published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is entitled "Iran's Networks of Influence in the Middle East" and details Tehran's use of proxy forces and networks throughout the region and the effects and benefits of its "minimum output" foreign policy strategy.

It is probably worth mentioning at this point that H.R. McMaster, Trump's former national security adviser, was once an employee of the IISS. As was James Steinberg, a former US deputy secretary of state. Furthermore, at the end of 2016, the Guardian revealed that the organization had received £25 million ($32 million) from the Bahraini royal family (apparently almost half of its total income has come from Bahrain). Iran and Bahrain aren't exactly close friends.

Notwithstanding the potential motives and bias of the IISS, the report definitely arrives at some interesting conclusions.
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Magnify

Best of the Web: Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions

Lucy Komisar
OffGuardian
Thu, 07 Nov 2019 21:52 UTC
bill browder julian assange


The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder, Assange and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense.

A US government lawyer in the Assange extradition case just wrote a London Times oped promoting the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Ben Brandon is one of five lawyers in a London network whose spokes link to convicted tax fraudster William Browder, the U.S. government, and to both sides of the extradition case against whistleblower publisher Julian Assange.

Here is how the British legal system works. Lawyers are either solicitors who work with clients or barristers who go to court in cases assigned by the solicitors. To share costs, barristers operate in chambers, which provide office space, including conference rooms and dining halls, clerks who receive and assign cases from solicitors, and other support staff. London has 210 chambers. There are not "partners" sharing profits, but members operate fraternally with each other.

Comment: See also:

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Light Saber

Best of the Web: REBUTTAL: Bill Maher's Transgender Period Lies! | Louder with Crowder


StevenCrowder
Thu, 07 Nov 2019 21:03 UTC
bill maher dennis prager
Steven Crowder responds to Bill Maher, who recently dismissed Dennis Prager's legitimate concern about the transgender agenda and its cultural damage...

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Dollars

Best of the Web: The run on the dollar: Is it due to panic or greed?

Ellen Brown
truthdig
Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
fisheye/wallstreet
© Martin St-Amant/Wikimedia Commmons/CC BY-SA 3.0/KJN
What's going on in the repo market? Rates on repurchase ("repo") agreements should be about 2%, in line with the Federal Reserve funds rate. But they shot up to over 5% on Sept. 16 and got as high as 10% on Sept. 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big profits to hold onto their cash — just as they did in the housing market crash and Great Recession of 2008-09.

Because banks weren't lending, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York jumped in, increasing its overnight repo operations to $75 billion, and on Oct. 23, it upped the ante to $120 billion in overnight operations and $45 billion in longer-term operations.

Why are banks no longer lending to each other? Are they afraid that collapse is imminent somewhere in the system, as with the Lehman collapse in 2008?

Perhaps, and if so, the likely suspect is Deutsche Bank. But it looks to be just another case of Wall Street fattening itself at the public trough, using the funds of mom-and-pop depositors to maximize bank profits and line the pockets of bank executives while depriving small businesses of affordable loans.
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Magnify

Best of the Web: Transcript of US ambassador to Ukraine reveals leaked 'smoking gun' testimony based on hearsay & 'fake news' media


RT
Thu, 07 Nov 2019 19:04 UTC
Former US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor
© Reuters / Carlos JassoFormer US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor
Impeachment testimony from former US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor reveals the fatal 'quid pro quo' at the center of the probe rests on mere hearsay, even as Taylor's words are held up as a smoking gun by Trump's enemies.

In the course of his October 22 deposition, made public on Wednesday, Taylor explains it was his "clear understanding" that "security assistance money would not come" until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky "committed to pursue the investigation" of natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden's son was a director.

That understanding, however, came from being told by Trump adviser Tim Morrison that another ambassador - US envoy to the EU Gordon Sondland - had informed a Zelensky aide of the condition.
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Snakes in Suits

Best of the Web: You've been lied to: Walrus suicide NOT caused by climate change as Attenborough story quietly revised. What else is a lie?

Helen Buyniski
RT
Wed, 06 Nov 2019 18:47 UTC
walrus
© Reuters / Fabian Bimmer
Footage of walruses driven to suicide by climate change broke the world's heart last year, only for the story to be quietly revised. But if media lied about walrus suicides, what else are they lying about?

Renowned nature documentarian David Attenborough probably converted a few climate skeptics with his heartrending footage of walruses, their habitat decimated by climate change, throwing themselves off cliffs in despair in the 2018 Netflix documentary Our Planet.

Unfortunately, the story was untrue. Walruses regularly take to the water as part of their seasonal migration, and some plummet to their doom in their hurry to escape predators like polar bears, which sometimes hunt their prey by triggering a stampede off a precipice.
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Eye 2

Best of the Web: Killing the messenger by proxy: Heads roll over ABC News' Epstein coverup — at CBS, for exposing it

Joshua Caplan
Breitbart
Thu, 07 Nov 2019 17:40 UTC
amy robach espstein project veritas
© D Dipasupil/Getty Images for AWXII, Project Veritas
A CBS News staffer believed to have leaked unaired footage of ABC News anchor Amy Robach saying the network quashed a bombshell report on Jeffrey Epstein has been fired, according to a report.

The Huffington Post's Yashar Ali, citing two sources familiar with the situation, said Thursday morning that CBS News has "fired the staffer in question."

"This comes after ABC informed CBS that they had determined who accessed the footage of Amy Robach expressing her frustrations about the Epstein story," noted Ali.

Comment: National Review comments that Robach's backpeddling excuses make no sense:
Sorry, but Robach's response to the firestorm doesn't square with her initial comments, in which she states that "Roberts had pictures, she had everything . . . it was unbelievable what we had. [Bill] Clinton, we had everything."

"Everything" sure sounds like sufficient corroborating evidence. Even if employing the most scrupulous journalistic standards, a giant news organization wouldn't need three years to substantiate — or dismiss — a story with pictures, dates, and a credible witness.

We certainly know that ABC didn't need "everything" — or much of anything, for that matter - when it was running scores of pieces online and on television, highlighting every risible accusation against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

I'm not even talking about the prime accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, whose allegations still haven't been corroborated, but rather about someone such as Julie Swetnick, who was all over the ABC News at the height of the confirmation battle. Swetnick accused Kavanaugh not only of sexual assault but also of being present at parties where women were being drugged and "gang raped." She wasn't even remotely credible.

Yet here is Robach's colleague, former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos, meeting ABC's editorial standards by allowing Swetnick's shyster lawyer Michael Avenatti to smear Kavanaugh without offering a shred of substantiating evidence for her claims.
[...]
By the way, has Robach wrapped up that reporting on Clinton, yet?

The notion that she believes she was venting during "private moment" isn't plausible, either. Any regular guest — and Robach is on TV every day — knows that a gaggle of producers are listening to everything that's being said, and that everything that's being said is going to be on tape.

Paired with NBC News' burying of the Harvey Weinstein story, we now have evidence of two major media institutions protecting serial abusers. One wonders how many young women might have been saved if they hadn't.
ABC News' Stephanopoulos is drawn into the Epstein maelstrom:
Word that ABC News spiked a story on Jeffrey Epstein, left, shined a spotlight on chief anchor George Stephanopoulos' ties to former President Clinton.

However, what's really raising eyebrows is a 2010 report of a party Stephanopoulos attended that Epstein had hosted.

Page Six reported that the convicted pedophile held an event in honor of Prince Andrew, who was one of the high-profile figures implicated in the scandal, in his New York City townhouse, and on the guestlist were several members of the media, including Stephanopoulos.

[..]

Stephanopoulos is known to be highly influential inside ABC News, but a spokesperson told Fox News he had "no involvement" in Robach's interview.
Who else will be implicated as the Project Veritas exposes continue?

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Colosseum

Best of the Web: The case of the Occident is lost

Paul Schmutz Schaller
The Saker
Tue, 05 Nov 2019 12:00 UTC
Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia
© APPresidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia working towards a multipolar world
I claim that 2019 will be the year when it has become obvious that the case of the Western hegemony is lost. In my text "Iran or the fight for the strategic initiative" (August 7, 2019), I wrote that the Western hegemonic forces and the worldwide anti-hegemonic forces fight for the strategic initiative and that Iran is actually the center of this combat. Since then, the situation has evolved. The hegemonic side has clearly lost the initiative, much quicker than I expected.

No aggressive objective has been achieved by the Trump government

Under President Trump, the USA had three main targets: China and North Korea, Iran and the Middle East, Venezuela and Cuba. All the corresponding attacks have been successfully repelled.

After the protests in Ecuador and in Chile and the elections in Bolivia and Argentina, the political position of Venezuela has been much strengthened. Now, the isolated countries in South America are rather Brazil and Colombia, not Venezuela.

Comment: See also:

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Cult

Best of the Web: British state sentences victim who named his elite pedophile rapists to 18 years in prison for 'false accusations' and... pedophilia


Reuters
Mon, 22 Jul 2019 12:16 UTC

Comment: This report is actually from mid-summer this year. We're running it today because we missed it at the time. Carl Beech was not the first to go down on the basis of being sentenced for the very thing he was exposing his accusers of doing, and he probably won't be the last. The pedocracy always protects its own...


The sweeping investigation following Carl Beech's allegations came after revelations that late BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile was a long-time child sex abuser
carl beech
Elite pedophile victim Carl Beech goes to prison for daring to speak out
When Carl Beech made stunning allegations that senior British politicians and military figures were engaged in a murderous pedophile ring, the country was already reeling from a failure to identify a high-profile prolific child sex abuser.

Jimmy Savile, one of the highest paid BBC entertainers of his day and a flamboyant personality who was friends with royalty, died in 2011. A year later a documentary revealed he was a prolific pedophile who for six decades used his status to abuse what was thought to be more than 1,000 children.

It was in the light of that shocking case that Beech made explosive claims that would lead police to raid the homes of politicians and military officers in the search for the evidence that would expose the pedophile ring.


Comment: The poor sod probably assumed it would be safe to do so because it had by then - thanks to the Savile scandal and other revelations about a political-military child rape ring involving Britain's 'best and brightest' - become a national scandal and 'justice will surely follow'. Think again. The pedocracy will sooner plunge its own country into civil war than give up its 'liberty' to consume children.


Comment: They even nicked his paltry compensation from him.

Meanwhile, when MI6 officers are caught with child rape images on their computers, they get away with it:

MI6 pedophile
© The GuardianGuardian report from 26 March 2019
The UK establishment was on the rocks up until about 2015 as scandal after scandal forced then Home Secretary Theresa May to announce an 'independent inquiry' into the plethora of claims about British political and military figures going back decades. While there have been occasional updates about its progress, the above appears to be the British establishment's predominant answer to the people:

"SHUT UP AND GO AWAY."

Thankfully for them, the 'Brexit' fiasco has dominated the airwaves since 2016...

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TV

Best of the Web: MSM execs part of 'network of people' that covered for Epstein - Project Veritas founder to RT


RT
Wed, 06 Nov 2019 17:08 UTC
Project Veritas James O'Keefe
© RT
ABC and other mainstream media outlets refused to cover accusations against sex predator Jeffrey Epstein because "a network of people" that includes their executives were implicated, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas told RT.

The Disney-owned network has doubled down on its insistence that anchor Amy Robach's story on Epstein three years ago lacked "enough corroboration" and thus wasn't aired. This was after Project Veritas released a "hot mic" video of Robach slamming the decision to quash the story.

The conservative filmmaker told RT on Tuesday that he believes ABC's refusal to budge from that explanation backs up Robach's claim that "a network of people" - including the executives running her channel - are "covering up for this" because they are somehow "implicated."


Comment: Here's that bombshell Project Veritas report again:



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