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Best of the Web: Trump betrays MAGA over Venezuela

Tom Luongo
TomLuongo.me
Fri, 25 Jan 2019 12:00 UTC
Donald Trump and Juan Guaido
© Reuters: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Aaron JosefczykThe US has announced its support for Juan Guaido, the Venezuelan Opposition Leader.
The U.S. backed a coup in Venezuela that has failed. And President Trump was the architect of it. This is a farce surrounding an intrigue contained within a tragedy.

What has happened in Venezuela is tragic. Nicolas Maduro is a comical figure straight out of central casting for a South American leader of a junta. But it has been the U.S.'s designs on Venezuela's oil and gas reserves (the largest proven in the world as of 2017) that is the real story behind this week's events.

For anyone still harboring doubts as to who Trump truly is Venezuela should end them. Trump's Energy Dominance policy is at the core of his foreign policy. And he will do whatever it takes to secure that policy and deliver a long-standing order to the U.S. and European oligarchy to gain control over Venezuela.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Will Globalists' War on Nationalism Lead to Bloody Revolution?

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Vader

Best of the Web: Trump goes full Neocon: Tweets US recognition of opposition leader as 'legitimate' president of Venezuela - UPDATES


RT
Wed, 23 Jan 2019 19:23 UTC
Trump US presidents
One voice, one mission!
US President Donald Trump has recognized Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president in a provocative move against the elected government of Nicolas Maduro.

"Today, I am officially recognizing the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the Interim President of Venezuela," Trump said in statement.

He called the Maduro government "illegitimate" and "directly responsible for any threats" posed to the Venezuelan people.

He added he would use "the full weight of United States economic and diplomatic power to press for the restoration of Venezuelan democracy" and encouraged other governments in the Western Hemisphere to also recognize Guaido.


Comment: In situations like this, there's no distinction to be made between 'the Trump government' and 'the deep state'. They're all acting as one to one agenda: the US imperial agenda. Even Twitter - bashed for being 'communist' in other contexts - is on Trump's side here, banning Maduro's presidential comms from the platform.

Besides these messages of pro-coup support from Washington, in just the last week Venezuelan military units have been apprehended for attempting to get an insurrection going, while this pretender to the throne - Guaido - has apparently staged a fake arrest to further whip up popular support.

It doesn't matter whether non-Venezuelans believe Maduro is evil incarnate - he's NOT YOUR PRESIDENT.

Americans, TRUMP is your president. Is more illegal breaches of other countries' constitutional orders what you voted him into office for??

UPDATES - 23:00 CET

Venezuela has broken off formal diplomatic relations with the US.

The Venezuelan military - its defence minister anyway - has disavowed Guaido's power-grab, saying they "will not accept a president imposed by dark interests."

American film-maker Mike Prysner - who has reported from Venezuela on multiple occasions - reminds his followers that the opposition's supporters includes violent terrorists:


Brazil's new leader Bolsonaro, clearly working in coordination with the US and allied regional governments, has joined Trump in 'recognizing' the opposition leader as Venezuela's 'legitimate' president.

Wikileaks meanwhile points out that this political maneuver from abroad risks plunging Venezuela into civil war. Which means massive dislocation of people, which means more mass migration...

UPDATE - 24 Jan 08:00 CET

Following in lock-step, the unelected bureaucrats of the EU have thrown their support behind pretender Juan Guaido.
European Union has sided with "democratic forces" in Venezuela, backing the self-proclaimed president Juan Guaido over the elected government of Nicolas Maduro.


Meanwhile, the unelected EU High Representative for foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, likewise declared her support for Guaido's self-proclaimed government, in language strangely reminiscent of EU support extended to Ukraine's coup in 2014.


"Violence and the excessive use of force by security forces are completely unacceptable, and will for sure not resolve the crisis. The Venezuelan people have the right to peacefully demonstrate, to freely chose [sic] its leaders and decide its future," Mogherini said in a statement.

While Venezuelans appear at best divided between Guaido and Maduro, Washington has taken upon itself to declare which government in Caracas is legitimate, throwing its support behind leader of the National Assembly, which was last elected in 2015 and - according to Maduro - replaced by the 2017 Constitutional Assembly.

US allies have followed suit, with most OAS members, Canada, France and now the EU backing Guaido.

Maduro has given US diplomats 72 hours to leave the country, but Guaido has called on them to stay, setting the stage for a possible diplomatic confrontation. Venezuela's military has sided with Maduro.




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Attention

Best of the Web: Modern Phoenix Program: Inside the CIA's Afghan terror unit

Mujib Mashal
New York Times
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 20:21 UTC
Khost
© Jim Huylebroek for The New York TimesThe outskirts of Khost city.
Razo Khan woke up suddenly to the sight of assault rifles pointed at his face, and demands that he get out of bed and onto the floor.

Within minutes, the armed raiders had separated the men from the women and children. Then the shooting started.

As Mr. Khan was driven away for questioning, he watched his home go up in flames. Within were the bodies of two of his brothers and of his sister-in-law Khanzari, who was shot three times in the head. Villagers who rushed to the home found the burned body of her 3-year-old daughter, Marina, in a corner of a torched bedroom.

The men who raided the family's home that March night, in the district of Nader Shah Kot, were members of an Afghan strike force trained and overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency in a parallel mission to the United States military's, but with looser rules of engagement.

Ostensibly, the force was searching for militants. But Mr. Khan and his family had done nothing to put themselves in the cross hairs of the C.I.A.-sponsored strike force, according to investigators.

It was clear that the raiding force had "committed an atrocity," said Jan-mir Zazai, a member of the Khost provincial council who was part of the government investigating team. "Everyone we spoke to said they would swear on the innocence of the victims."

Comment: The CIA has been running a modern-day Phoenix Program in Afghanistan for going on 2 decades. It's no wonder the Taliban is winning. See Doug Valentine's The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World for the details.

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Fireball 5

Best of the Web: Astronomical odds? Meteor strikes moon during 'Super Wolf Blood Moon' eclipse

Chris Baraniuk
New Scientist
Tue, 22 Jan 2019 19:50 UTC
Lunar Meteorite Impact
© Jose M. MadiedoThe meteorite impact caused a bright flash, indicated by the arrow.
Observers of yesterday's lunar eclipse were blessed with the first known sighting of a meteorite impact during such an event.

The so-called "super wolf blood moon" was eagerly watched by millions of people around the world, mostly via live streaming video. During the eclipse, some people noticed a tiny flash, a brief yellow-white speck, popping up on the lunar surface during the online broadcasts.

One Reddit user raised the possibility that this was a meteorite impact and others scoured eclipse footage for evidence of the event. A flash is visible in at least three different videos.

Jose Maria Madiedo at the University of Huelva in Spain has confirmed that the impact is genuine. For years, he and his colleagues have been hoping to observe a meteorite impact on the moon during a lunar eclipse, but the brightness of these events can make that very difficult - lunar meteorite impacts have been filmed before, but not during an eclipse.

Comment: Well we're "really really" glad that this chappy is "really really happy", but someone has to point out that this clearly points to the inner solar system these days having a LOT more debris in it than usual...

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Attention

Best of the Web: Sochi Gold Stands: IOC knew Russian athletes were clean, but concealed evidence of their innocence


RT
Sun, 20 Jan 2019 22:30 UTC
Olympic emblem
© Reuters/Denis BaibouseStaff of the IOC dismantle backdrop to news conference after the Olympic Summit on doping in Lausanne, Switzerland, June 21, 2016.
Russian athletes, falsely accused of a doping scheme at Sochi 2014, could've avoided career-ruining bans if the International Olympic Committee (IOC) didn't conceal facts of their innocence, an athlete's lawyer told RT.

Russian sport has won a crucial legal battle on Saturday. Swiss Supreme Court has turned down the IOC's appeal against the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling from February 1, 2017 to acquit 28 Team Russia members of doping use accusations during the 2014 Winter Games in Russia. The Olympic officials accepted the decision with "disappointment," but announced that they'll stop further persecution of the athletes.

The athletes' good names might be restored now, but they had all been handed lengthy disqualifications and missed out on the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang last year.

The harsh measures were introduced after an Olympic disciplinary panel accused the Russians of being part of a state-run doping program, based on claims by former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov, who fled to the US in 2015 and is wanted at home on several charges.

German legal firm Wieschemann Lawyers said in a statement on Saturday that "there is no factual evidence for the allegations made by Dr. Rodchenkov regarding the events in Sochi." It also insisted that the International Olympic committee "seriously violated the procedural rights of the athletes and even withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and the court."


Comment: Justice done? Admitting the wrong doesn't begin to make up for destroying athlete reputations, tarnishing their sports programs, maligning the country they represent or eroding trust for international sports. Dr. Rodchenkov, WADA and the IOC were all party to this despicable episode in the history of the Olympics - an arrow to the heart of sportsmanship and athletic honor.
See also:

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Eye 1

Best of the Web: The convenient timing of US troops killed in Syria

Finian Cunningham
Strategic Culture Foundation
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 14:15 UTC
us troops syria
With unseemly haste, US news media leapt on the killing of four American military personnel in Syria as a way to undermine President Donald Trump's plan to withdraw troops from that country.

The deadly attack in the northern city of Manbij, on the west bank of the Euphrates River, was reported to have been carried out by a suicide bomber. The Islamic State (ISIS) terror group reportedly claimed responsibility, but the group routinely makes such claims which often turn out to be false.

The American military personnel were said to be on a routine patrol of Manbij where US forces have been backing Kurdish militants in a purported campaign against ISIS and other terror groups.

An explosion at a restaurant resulted in two US troops and two Pentagon civilian officials being killed, along with more than a dozen other victims. Three other US military persons were among those injured.

US media highlighted the bombing as the biggest single death toll of American forces in Syria since they began operations in the country nearly four years ago.

Comment: See also:

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Beer

Best of the Web: Gillette: Shaviours of the world feminist revolution?

Rob Slane
The Blogmire
Sat, 19 Jan 2019 20:06 UTC
gillette ad toxic masculinity
© Procter & Gamble Co.Gillette’s ill-judged ‘toxic masculinity’ ad.
I'm always greatly amused when I hear people saying things like, "I can't stand being preached at". What amuses me is that the same people who say this with a straight face tend to be completely oblivious to the fact that they are being preached at day in day out. If they are aware of it, somehow it never seems to bother them.

As a culture we are being preached to constantly. No, I don't mean that we sit in a room whilst someone delivers a three-point sermon at the front. I'm talking about the fact that the vast majority of us sit for hours on end in front of a little box, and we let people whose ideas and beliefs would be strange to us if we weren't in the habit of cultivating this practice on a regular basis, preach at us, teach us, and shape our thinking beyond all recognition. It is not a question of whether we'll be preached to; it's simply a question of which preaching we sit under.

This is usually done in very subtle ways. An ideology is presented to us, but it is not done so in the "in-your-face" kind of way that a three-point sermon might be done. No, it is cloaked in the garb of emotive and powerful language and buzz-phrases, deliberately designed not to make us think, but rather to make us "non-think". The aim is to have us look at one side of a particular social issue - transgenderism being the latest fad - to empathise and sympathise with that side, so that in the end we come to look at the issue not from the perspective of an overarching objective reality - XX = XX and XY = XY and never the twain shall meet -, but rather from the subjective viewpoint of the person or people being shown to us and their feelings.

Comment: See also:

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Question

Best of the Web: What is Liminality? Understanding social hysteria in the West

Jasun Horsley
kunstler.com
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 21:20 UTC
liminality
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
-Marshall McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science
Probably most people reading this-especially if they spend a lot of time on the Internet-are aware of the growing phenomenon of "social justice warriors" with hair-trigger mouths and clicking mice, fiercely practicing intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Earlier this year, in the small (pop: 6000) Canadian town where I live, a group called Culture Guard were scheduled to speak at the local Royal Canadian Legion. The subject was a nationwide, multi-leveled educational program called SOGI (Sexual Orientation Gender Identification), ostensibly directed towards encouraging "tolerance." Culture Guard is a conservative organization whose mission is to uphold citizen-driven democracy and community values and expose what they call the "tyranny of politically correct idiotology."

The event was cancelled after the Legion received 900+ email complaints, including threats. Much to my surprise, the reaction on Facebook to this was mostly gushing gratitude that this diabolical hate group had been righteously silenced. Two fairly typical comments: "Hope we've run these poisonous haters out of town" and "No bible thumping flatlander would dare show their face because hate has a weak foundation."

Apparently, nothing is more immoral to the new moralists than old-style moralism, and if you aren't in a state of fear or loathing these days-possibly both-you probably aren't participating in "the debate." We have entered a liminal zone in which up can become down, right turn left, and virtue trades places with vice in the time it takes to say "What's your pronoun?"
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Gold Bar

Best of the Web: Pure GOLD: Trump cancels Pelosi's use of US Air Force military plane for world trip... as she prepares to board!


RT
Thu, 17 Jan 2019 22:32 UTC
pelosi air force plane
President Trump on Thursday abruptly denied military aircraft to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a foreign trip just minutes before the congressional delegation was set to depart, in a stunning decision that followed her call to delay the State of the Union address amid the government shutdown.

In a curt letter, Trump said her trip has been "postponed."

"Due to the Shutdown, I am sorry to inform you that your trip to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan has been postponed. We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the Shutdown is over. In light of the 800,000 great American workers not receiving pay, I am sure you would agree that postponing this public relations event is totally appropriate," Trump wrote.


Comment: This alone is reason enough to re-elect The Donald in 2020.

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Camcorder

Best of the Web: Jim and Joanne Moriarty begin release of exclusive footage of NATO's war on Libya

Joanne Moriarty
Libyan War The Truth
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:09 UTC
jim joanne moriarty
We have started to release the unseen videos we took on the ground in Libya during the 2011 NATO destruction of Libya. These are raw videos, taken by us with a small Sony Camera. They are not edited, these are the real Libyan people sharing their sorrow, their thoughts and their desires for their future. They speak in Libyan Arabic but we are there with a translator. Our series will be every Monday night at 6pm central, you find the links below.

Jason Goodman is the one we have ever entrusted these videos with and he is doing a great job. He is clear and honest and works to share the importance of the information.

These are the videos that the CIA, DIA and FBI were after when they came into our home.

These videos will prove the false flag, the war crimes, the lies and the atrocities committed by the UN/US/NATO/France/UK and the criminal lying media.

Please watch the introduction to this series free on YouTube:


Comment: See also:

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