Best of the Web:


MIB

Best of the Web: Bombshell: Security detail was switched in advance of Bataclan theater attack, claims Eagles of Death Metals frontman

Anthony Bond
The Mirror, UK
Thu, 10 Mar 2016 10:07 UTC
eagles of death metal
© Alex Matthews Jesse Hughes of the rock band Eagles of Death Metal performs with drummer Joey Castillo (R)
Bataclan security guards were 'warned of ISIS Paris attacks' in advance claims Eagles of Death Metals frontman

The frontman of Eagles of Death Metal has claimed guards at the Bataclan theatre in Paris knew that ISIS would launch its sickening terror attack.

Jesse Hughes claimed six guards did not show up for work on the night of the gig at the Paris venue.

And he even said he asked for one guard to be removed from backstage security because he was behaving oddly.

Comment: Indeed, they were obviously in on the operation.

Who would have the access and the means to switch the security detail? A rag-tag bunch of petty criminals from the slums of Europe... or high-level state security operatives?

See also: The Paris Attacks, the War on Syria, and the West's Collaboration with Terrorism

Read More...
Beaker

Best of the Web: Moderate rebels using moderate chemical weapons in Syria - BBC fails to notice

Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
Thu, 10 Mar 2016 19:35 UTC
kurds ypg
© AFP 2016/ DELIL SOULEIMAN

Comment: Kurdish YPG sources say the weapons are coming from Turkey: "Our sources inside the rebel groups have confirmed that toxic substances were used. We also have verified information that sarin gas was delivered to them from Turkey. All signs point to the fact that these factions were using banned weapons, but we cannot access the launching area, as it is located on the front between the Turkish and rebel forces."


Cameron's "moderate rebels" - Saudi supplied Wahhabi jihadists - have this past 48 hours been bombing civilian areas of Aleppo with yellow phosphorus. The BBC, which went to such extraordinary lengths to fake reports of chemical attacks by Assad, has not reported these genuine chemical attacks at all. Probably because it is too difficult to explain not just why Cameron's allies are using chemical weapons - and who gave them the chemical weapons - but also why these "friendly" jihadists are attacking Cameron's other allies, the Kurds, all during a ceasefire.

This video of Robert Stuart is a must see. Let me pin my colours to the mast and say that I am absolutely convinced that the BBC did deliberately and knowingly fake evidence of chemical attacks.

Read More...
TV

Best of the Web: Hungry for truth: Study finds RT watched by over 70 million people weekly, half of them watching daily


RT
Thu, 10 Mar 2016 13:34 UTC

Comment: In just 10 years, RT has done something astonishing: held up a mirror to the Western pathocracy for a global audience, and in the process done pretty serious damage to Pentagon's quest for 'full-spectrum dominance' - this is, after all, a war for people's minds above all else.

RT doesn't always get it right, of course, but we'd rate their truth frequency hit rate somewhere in the high 80s, whereas the vast majority of Western mainstream media languishes in the low teens.

So if you are gonna watch news on TV, ditch CNN, NBC, CBS, Fox, Sky, ABC, BBC, France24, ZDF et al, and tune into RT!


RT newsdesk
© Evgeny Biyatov / Reuters
RT ranks among the top five most-viewed international news channels in Europe and the US, the biggest study yet of the Russian network's viewership by Ipsos reveals. Seventy million individuals switch to RT TV channels weekly, with 35 million watching daily.

The study was conducted by the world's third largest market research company, based in France, in 38 countries out of the 100+ where RT programming is available. The survey was taken between August-November 2015, just as RT was preparing to mark its 10th anniversary.

"Ipsos has decades of experience in international audience measurement, and we've worked with dozens of premier broadcasters from around the world. We are happy that RT chose Ipsos to conduct their biggest audience survey yet,"said Ipsos Connect MENAP CEO, Elie Aoun.

Europe is the region where RT has the largest audience, with 36 million people watching the channel weekly. Eleven million get their news from RT at least once a week in the Middle East and Africa. In India, Ipsos included only English-language viewers, who constitute about 10 percent of the country's population, and among them 7 million viewers watch RT weekly.

In the US, RT's weekly audience is above 8 million viewers, the study showed, which places the broadcaster among the top-5 international TV news channels.
Read More...
Hearts

Best of the Web: Magellanic penguin swims 5,000 miles every year for reunion with the man who saved his life

Alison Lynch
Metro UK
Wed, 09 Mar 2016 08:21 UTC
Dimdim
© TV GloboBest buds.
Today's most heartwarming story is brought to you from a beach in Brazil.

It's the story of a South American Magellanic penguin who swims 5,000 miles each year to be reunited with the man who saved his life.

Retired bricklayer and part time fisherman Joao Pereira de Souza, 71, who lives in an island village just outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, found the tiny penguin, covered in oil and close to death, lying on rocks on his local beach in 2011.

Joao cleaned the oil off the penguin's feathers and fed him a daily diet of fish to build his strength. He named him Dindim.

After a week, he tried to release the penguin back into the sea. But, the bird wouldn't leave. 'He stayed with me for 11 months and then, just after he changed his coat with new feathers, he disappeared,' Joao recalls.

And, just a few months later, Dindim was back. He spotted the fisherman on the beach one day and followed him home.

For the past five years, Dindim has spent eight months of the year with Joao and is believed to spend the rest of the time breeding off the coast of Argentina and Chile.
Read More...
Tornado1

Best of the Web: Signs of Change: Earth changes, extreme weather, and meteor fireballs in January and February 2016

HawkkeyDavis
YouTube
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 13:29 UTC
Hawkkey Davis
© Hawkkey Davis, YouTube
Warning: This video contains graphic content - Viewer discretion advised.

Hawkkey Davis is back with another documentary of extreme weather, earth changes, and meteor fireball events from around the world in the first two months of 2016. This series does not mean to suggest that the world is ending, but that what is happening across the world is leading to bigger 'earth changes'.

If you're following the series, then you're seeing the signs. It's much more than one video; check out previous installments here.

Read More...
Books

Best of the Web: The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America

Ray Williams
psychologytoday.com
Sat, 07 Jun 2014 14:57 UTC
dumb down
© reddit.com
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

Comment: Professor Patrick Deneen explains how kids have become a generation of know-nothings
We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like "critical thinking," "diversity," "ways of knowing," "social justice," and "cultural competence."

Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.


Read More...
Extinguisher

Best of the Web: It's official U.S. policy to protect al-Qaeda in Syria: Will the ceasefire expose it?

SteveMC
Reports from the Underground
Sat, 27 Feb 2016 22:23 UTC
LavrovKerry
© www.govexec.comMr. Lavrov and Mr. Kerry: A planned "Cessation of Hostilities" Syria
In the weeks leading up to the agreed upon cessation-of-hostilities (CoH) agreement between the US and Russia, it was John Kerry's diplomacy that was instrumental in "downgrading" the truce from a more forceful and legally binding 'ceasefire' agreement to the less intensive 'cessation-of-hostilities' now taking effect.

As described by Kerry: "So, a ceasefire has a great many legal prerogatives and requirements. A cessation of hostilities does not." He goes on to note that "a ceasefire in the minds of many of the participants in this particular moment connotes something far more permanent and far more reflective of sort of an end of conflict, if you will. And it is distinctly not that. This is a pause dependent on the process going forward."

So why the insistence on non-permanence? Especially if, as Kerry says, the ultimate objective is to "obtain a durable, long-term ceasefire" at some point in time?

According to the 29-year career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, India's former ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey M. K. Bhadrakumar, it is plainly because "the Russian military operations have met with devastating success lately in strengthening the Syrian regime and scattering the Syrian rebel groups," leading "the US and its regional allies" to "stare at defeat." Therefore, they "forthwith need an end to the Russian operations so that they can think up a Plan B. The Geneva talks will not have the desired outcome of President Bashar Al-Assad's ouster unless the tide of war is reversed." Therefore, "a cessation of hostilities in Syria is urgently needed."1

Comment: While the cessation of hostilities in Syria will no doubt be used as the pretext for all kinds of provocations and lies from the U.S. and their allies, it also has the potential to expose their support for terrorists. By the letter of the agreement, they must provide information about participating groups to Russia. Either their moderate rebels will sign on to the ceasefire (in which case, Russia will know when and if they break it), or they will not (in which case, they'll become justified targets in the Syrian Army's advances). If few of the so-called moderates sign on, they'll be exposed as the al-Qaeda stooges they are.

Read More...
Arrow Down

Best of the Web: Yugoslavia, interrupted: A European success story ruined by NATO invasion


Sputnik News
Sat, 27 Feb 2016 12:12 UTC
Yugoslavs protest aginst NATO
© unknown Yugoslavs protest as their country is
civil war-ized by the US and EU
If NATO hadn't ruined Yugoslavia, the country would be on par with major European powers, US political analyst Phil Butler notes, adding that the dismantling of Yugoslavia was part of the West's bigger plan to convert potential rivals into Third World regions.

Post-World War II socialist Yugoslavia was something of a European success story and it was that prosperity that prompted the Western political establishment to seek the country's dismantling, US political analyst Phil Butler emphasizes.

"Can you imagine Europe today with Yugoslavia as a key player among nations? I can. Yugoslavia was in fact, one of the greatest cultural and human experiments in history. Formed in the crucible that was the conflict in between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Yugoslavia melded together people of both cultures, and in ways not seen since the time of Alexander the Great's assimilation of peoples after immense conquest," Butler writes in his article for New Eastern Outlook.

The political analyst underscores that the state was built on an idea that Southern Slavs should not remain a weak and divided people.
Read More...
Attention

Best of the Web: Over 120 dead in Homs/Damascus terror attacks - Western media not interested

Eva Bartlett
In Gaza
Sun, 21 Feb 2016 15:50 UTC
damascus homs attack
The terror-ravaged neighbourhood of al-Zahra'a, in Homs, has again mercilessly been hit by Western&Saudi-backed terrorists' bombings. Local journalists put the number of murdered at 57 now, some hours after the double-vehicle bombing earlier today.

Khashoof
© Homs News NetworkSaed Mutanus al-Khashoof, from the Christian village of Sadad but living in al-Zahra’a, killed in today’s terrorist explosions.
Russia Today reports:
The explosions at a traffic light at al-Siteen Street in the al-Zahra neighborhood happened within minutes of each other, witnesses said. ...Witnesses said at least one of the two blasts was triggered by a suicide bomber driving a car.

A follow-up bombing after an initial blast is a common terrorist tactic, which allows them to hit first responders, who rush to help victims....
Al-Zahra'a has been repeatedly targeted by western-backed terrorists, with almost no condemnation from the same leaders who cried for Paris.

Comment: 130 people died on a single day in Paris, prompting worldwide outrage, sympathy, military action, new laws, arrests, raids, and more. In coordinated terror attacks in Syria, this happened yesterday. But where is the outrage? Where is the support for official Damascus, for the Syrian people? Nowhere to be found - it's just another day in Syria... And who's to blame? The U.S., Western nations in general. Maybe that's why there is so little response. They don't want to look the devil in the eye, because they fear what they'll really see: themselves.

Read More...
Gold Seal

Best of the Web: Europe's refugee crisis is a means to furthering the elite's fascist agenda

Catherine Shakdam
American Herald Tribune
Sun, 21 Feb 2016 15:53 UTC
refugees
It's the 1930s all over again ... whether we look right or left, whether we point east or west, hate, ethno-centrism and sectarianism seem to be the order of the day - this new rationale we ought to abide to if not to stand being called an apologist and a hypocrite.

Earlier this week I was asked as a guest on Cross Talk, one of RT TV flagship programs with the very wonderful, Peter Lavelle, to comment on the ongoing refugee crisis Europe has had to grapple with. The show intended to delve into those questions most media have dodged for fear of being politically incorrect.

I'd like to personally hand my hat to RT TV for flying journalism's colours high - few outlets these days have dared open themselves up the way Russia has done, offering both a space, and a platform for ideas to be debated, and pluralism to be respected.

Europe's refugee crisis is set to be the challenge of the decade! I would personally argue that our ability to face up to this new crisis will very much determine our global socio-political future in that it will define communities, nations, and continents' abilities to relate to one another, and more importantly view each other.

Allow me to elaborate.

Read More...