Best of the Web:


Telephone

Best of the Web: Brits preventing Yulia Skripal from calling relatives, flout international law by preventing Russian embassy from seeing her

John Helmer
Dance with Bears
Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
Public Telephones
The British public telephone is two years short of a century old. The Salisbury Hospital has dismantled the outdoor models because it is now possible for patients to receive and make telephone calls from their bedside. The hospital has contracted with a company called Hospedia to provide patients with personal access to telephones (television, internet, games too). The patients must pay.

The business of overcharging them for incoming and outgoing calls was such a corrupt scandal, Hospedia's predecessor company went bankrupt. The Royal Bank of Scotland took over the assets, and then went even more corruptly bankrupt itself. So the bank sold the hospital telephone business to Marlin Equity Partners. That company presently controls most British hospital patient telephones; it is an American group specializing in investment in signal and cyber operations of every sort. It is based in Los Angeles and London.

Comment: For the British authorities, it seems to be a full-time job knitting together 'official' narratives in the Skripals' case. Simple phone calls would only complicate matters.

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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: Russia 'novichok' hysteria shows politicians and media haven't learned the lessons of Iraq

Patrick Henningsen
Consortium news
Sat, 31 Mar 2018 19:36 UTC
Theresa May charicature
The current state of anti-Russia hysteria is reminiscent of earlier dark chapters of American history, including the rush to war in Iraq of the early 2000s and McCarthyism of the 1950s.

If there's one thing to be gleaned from the current atmosphere of anti-Russian hysteria in the West, it's that the US-led sustained propaganda campaign is starting to pay dividends. It's not only the hopeless political classes and media miscreants who believe that Russia is hacking, meddling and poisoning our progressive democratic utopia - with many pinning their political careers to this by now that's it's too late for them to turn back.

As it was with Iraq in 2003, these dubious public figures require a degree of public support for their policies, and unfortunately many people do believe in the grand Russian conspiracy, having been sufficiently brow-beaten into submission by around-the-clock fear mongering and official fake news disseminated by government and the mainstream media.
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No Entry

Best of the Web: Cold War continuum: The long history of US-Russian expulsion of diplomats

Robert Burns
thestar.com
Fri, 30 Dec 2016 11:36 UTC
russian diplomats expelled
© Joel Landau/Associated PressA bus carrying Soviet diplomats, who were ordered out of the US in 1986, being unloaded at Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The diplomatic history between the United States and Russia has been eventful in the last three decades.

U.S. relations with Moscow during and after the Cold War have been marred by diplomatic dust-ups ranging from espionage scandals to an Olympics boycott.

Current tensions, highlighted by President Barack Obama's decision to impose sanctions and expel 35 Russia diplomats, are exceptional because they stem from U.S. allegations of Russian cyber meddling in the presidential election and because they are playing out during a White House transition. They also coincide with a collapse of military-to-military relations and nervousness in Europe over Russia's annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine.


Comment: That would be Western nervousness over the democratic expression of the will of the Crimean people.


Some of the more significant episodes of the past three decades:

Comment: But they did leave, right?

How many years now has the US been in Afghanistan?...

And of course we see that boycotting or otherwise sabotaging Russian involvement in international sports and cultural events are also "from the Cold war manual of how to deal with Russian influence."

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Attention

Best of the Web: The not so new neocons

Tulsi Gabbard
Medium
Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC
TulsiGabbard
© Zero HedgeUS Representative, Hawaii's 2nd District, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard
In the last two weeks, two neocon warhawks have been chosen by President Trump to fill key cabinet positions. First, it was CIA Director Mike Pompeo selected to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Now, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is out, and former UN Ambassador and unapologetic Iraq War champion John Bolton is in.

Like so many of my fellow veterans who served in Iraq, I witnessed the cost of war firsthand during my 12-month tour in 2005. This was a major motivation for me to offer to serve in Congress - so that I could do everything possible to prevent our country from making such disastrous and costly foreign policy decisions again. The cost of such wars are borne by US troops who are put into harm's way, who make the ultimate sacrifice, and those who come home with both visible and invisible wounds. It is borne by the American people, whose taxpayer dollars are spent by the trillions on these counterproductive regime change wars, and the inevitable nation-building that follows, while our communities languish with failing infrastructure, resource-strapped schools, and too many who still lack access to quality healthcare. Yet, the Washington interventionist foreign policy establishment, which has persisted through both Democrat and Republican administrations, remains unmoved by the costly and counterproductive failures of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and they continue increasing the drumbeat of war.
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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: "Whom the gods wish to destroy": The Telford child sex scandal and the end of England

John Derbyshire
VDARE.com
Fri, 16 Mar 2018 19:28 UTC
telford scandal
I've got to assume that very few Americans ever heard of Telford, a district in the English West Midlands. Steve Sailer admits to never having heard of it; and if Steve hasn't heard of it, nobody has.

This is excusable. There was no such place as Telford until 1968. That was when bureaucratic managerialism in Britain was in the ascendant. Ancient towns and villages were being grouped together in strange new entities under stone-faced administrators filled with a conviction of their own managerial competence. Britain's old counties were reorganized to suit the inclinations and convenience of these mandarins, and people were shoveled around like so many truckloads of concrete.

Shortly afterwards Britain entered the European Union, and those British mandarins, to their delight, became globalist apparatchiks, with way bigger expense accounts. They must have had many a laugh with each other, over the champagne and truffles, at how easy it had been.

It was the end of old England. Mass Third World immigration was a key component of the new order. British people who dared to raise their voices against what was happening - people like Enoch Powell - were insulted, abused, and hounded out of public life.

Comment: More on the Telford scandal:

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Binoculars

Best of the Web: Don't believe the MSM about N. Korea's nukes - even US intel admits they're not offensive

Steve Chovanec
Reports from Underground
Mon, 26 Mar 2018 17:42 UTC
North Korea military parade
© Damir Sagolj / ReutersNorth Korea on parade
The recent diplomatic breakthrough between the Trump administration and North Korea provides a hopeful opportunity for peaceful resolution to the crisis on the Korean peninsula. Immediately after the announcement, the media went into overdrive to try and undermine the development, worrying more about photographs of Kim Jung-Un than of preventing nuclear war.

This, however, is only the latest iteration in a long history of media reporting which has enabled an aggressive US foreign policy.

While the momentum during the Olympic Games was pushing towards détente, the Trump administration ramped up its "maximum pressure" campaign. Meanwhile, the media constantly reminded its audiences of the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons. A threat not only to the people of the region - but likely even the United States itself.

When faced with such a threat the bellicose posturing of the Trump administration seems perhaps to have been warranted. After all, if the US does not coerce North Korea into denuclearization, what else will protect us?

There is a problem though. This threat is not real. North Korea's nuclear program - according to official US intelligence assessments - is defensive. Its overall military posture is designed to deter an attack - exactly the kind that Trump has threatened them with.

By falsely portraying North Korea as the aggressor, the press have functioned much in the same way that state-sponsored propaganda would, bolstering an aggressive foreign policy despite the chance that it will descend the world into a possible nuclear war.
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Magic Hat

Best of the Web: SCL, Parent Company of Cambridge Analytica, is Military-Intelligence Front For British Establishment

Liam O'Hare
Bella Caledonia
Tue, 20 Mar 2018 06:36 UTC
city of london
The scandal around mass data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica took a new twist on Monday.

A Channel 4 news undercover investigation revealed that the company's Eton-educated CEO Alexander Nix offered to use dirty tricks - including the use of bribery and sex workers - to entrap politicians and subvert elections.

Much of the media spotlight is now on Cambridge Analytica and their shadowy antics in elections worldwide, including that of Donald Trump.

However, Cambridge Analytica is a mere offshoot of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL Group) - an organisation with its roots deeply embedded within the British political, military and royal establishment.

Indeed, as the Observer article which broke the scandal said "For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same."

Like Cambridge Analytica, SCL group is a behavioral research and strategic communication company.

In 2005, SCL went public with a glitzy exhibit at the DSEI conference, the UK's largest showcase for military technology.
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Bullseye

Best of the Web: Russian Foreign Ministry summons all ambassadors for public meeting on Skripal poisoning case - Lays out the facts


Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Wed, 21 Mar 2018 19:29 UTC
Russian foreign ministry
Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, friends,

Good afternoon.

We are glad to see you at the Foreign Ministry on this cold wintry day that nevertheless carries a promise of spring.

We are grateful to you for responding so quickly to our invitation, which we issued only yesterday.

The situation is indeed unusual. There is an urgent need for a non-politicised and highly professional discussion of the Skripals' poisoning case. We have distributed a position paper. We ask you to bring it to the notice of your governments.

The language of this position paper, just as any other such paper, is dry legalese with technical details.

It would be wrong to invite you here just to say this. I propose that we hold an open discussion in this closed diplomatic group.

Let us look at hard facts, beginning with the humanitarian aspects of the case at hand.

On March 4, 2018, two people, one of them Russian citizen Yulia Skripal, were attacked in Salisbury, a flourishing city in the south of England.

Various versions of the circumstances of this tragedy have been voiced in the UK. They highlight the use of chemical agents, which the British call Novichok, for some reason. All of these versions do not stand up to any criticism.


Comment: Clear and to the point. Yermakov pulls no punches when addressing their belligerence. Nothing gets by those Ruskies!

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Magnify

Best of the Web: The Only Reason We're Examining Facebook's Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Thu, 22 Mar 2018 13:13 UTC
Mark Zuckerberg
Trust me, there's nobody more thrilled to see Facebook's unethical and abusive practices finally getting the attention they deserve from mass media and members of the public who simply didn't want to hear about it previously. I've written multiple articles over the years warning people about the platform (links at the end), but these mostly fell on deaf ears.

That's just the way things go. All sorts of horrible behaviors can continue for a very long time before the corporate media and general public come around to caring. You typically need some sort of external event to change mass psychology. In this case, that event was Trump winning the election.

The more I read about the recent Facebook scandal, it's clear this sort of thing's been going on for a very long time. The major difference is this time the data mining was used by campaign consultants of the person who wasn't supposed to win. Donald Trump.
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Magic Hat

Best of the Web: Blimey! ANOTHER Russian Exile Turns up Dead in UK - Suspicious Pattern Emerging - UPDATE

Robert Mendick, Hayley Dixon, Roland Oliphant, Tom Ball, Helena Horton, Patrick Sawer & Gordon Rayner
The Telegraph
Tue, 13 Mar 2018 23:02 UTC

Comment: Before you begin reading about what may turn out to be yet another murder of a Russian exile in the UK in order to blame Putin, check out how many Telegraph presstitutes got together to pen this one!

It's all-hands-on-deck aboard HMS Indomitable! The British media-intelligence factory is working overtime on Operation 'Get the World to Hate Putin, NOW'...


Nikolai Glushkov
Nikolai Glushkov: Yet another 'Kremlin critic' turns up dead in the UK. Is a pattern starting to emerge?
Counter-terrorism police have opened an investigation into the "unexplained" death on British soil of an arch enemy of Vladimir Putin, just eight days after the nerve gas assassination attempt on a Russian double agent.

Nikolai Glushkov, 68, the right-hand man of the deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Mr Putin's one-time fiercest rival, was found dead at his London home on Monday.


Comment: Berezovsky was certainly a cretin and a traitor - which explains at least in part why he found safe harbour in London - but his death was almost certainly the work of British, not Russian, intelligence.


A Russian media source said Glushkov, the former boss of the state airline Aeroflot, who said he feared he was on a Kremlin hit-list, was found with "strangulation marks" on his neck.

The inquiry into Glushkov's death was announced hours before a midnight deadline for the Kremlin to explain how Russian-made nerve agent came to be deployed in the assassination attempt on the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.

Comment: On Litvinenko:

Litvinenko's father: 'The British duped me - Putin did NOT kill my son'

What an incredible spasm of anti-Putin propaganda we are witnessing coming from London these days.

WMDs, chemical weapons, the War on Terror, directed mass immigration, proxy wars in the Middle East, economic sanctions... it's all connected.

And underlying it appears to be a Global Cultural War in which Russia has found itself the prime obstacle in the way of locking down a totalitarian Western-controlled world order ruled by fear and terror.

See also: Skripal Likely Poisoned by British Intelligence in Effort to Smear and Silence Russian World View

UPDATE: 20/03/18

According to Fort Russ:
Berezovsky's friend killed during gay sex game in London

68-year-old friend of the late Boris Berezovsky, Nikolai Glushkov, was found dead on March 13 in London. It is said that the night before his death, was spent with his young lover.

A Russian man around the age of thirty, Denis, was in Glushkov's house at the time when he died.

"I think the police are determining whether he could have died during a sex game that went monstrously wrong," said a friend of the family.

Glushkov was found dead in his rented house in the New Malden area in south London. According to medical experts, death happened as a result of "squeezing of the neck." The police are investigating the case as a murder. According to the main version of events, someone strangled Glushkov with a dog lead to stage suicide.

As explained in Scotland Yard, the investigators did not find any signs of penetration into the home by force, having come to the conclusion that Glushkov could have known his killer. The police stressed that they do not associate this case with the case of the poisoned Sergei Skripal.


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