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Best of the Web: Ferguson: Darren Wilson's pathetic testimony sounded like the spewings of a paranoid white supremacist

Chauncey DeVega
AlterNet
Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00 UTC
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© Reuters/LandovThis photo, provided by the St. Louis County Prosecutor's Office, shows Ferguson, Mo., police Officer Darren Wilson shortly after his encounter with Michael Brown. A grand jury declined Monday to charge Wilson with killing 18-year-old Brown.

If you have not yet read Darren Wilson's testimony to the Ferguson grand jury which decided that he would suffer no ill consequences for his decision to kill Michael Brown, please do so.

Wilson's description of the events on the day that he decided to shoot and kill an unarmed person cannot be adequately relayed to you by a second party.

The absurd, unfathomable, and fantastical story which Wilson spun out of the whole cloth in order to justify killing an unarmed black teenager combines the deepest and ugliest white supremacist stereotypes and fantasies about black folks' humanity such as the negro fiend", "black beast", and "giant negro",with white racist paranoiac thinking, and dialogue from blaxploitation movies.

Darren Wilson's grand jury testimony purports to be an accurate description of his encounter with Michael Brown. In reality, it is closer to an amateurish summer stock theater production of the movie Birth of the Nation as performed by the KKK and/or Neo-Nazis.

After submitting a blank police report that provided no substantive information, Darren Wilson was trained by attorneys from the police union (a common procedure when police kill civilians), and had many weeks to prepare his grand jury testimony.

During that time, Wilson was privy to the narrative and witness testimony that he would be confronted by in court.

Wilson was also aided by a prosecutor who was not at all interested in finding sufficient probable cause to proceed with a proper trial for the latter's decision to kill Michael Brown.

Comment: Institutionalized racism can now be seen for what it is, yet again:

Nationwide protests against police brutality in AmeriKKKa: Wilson gets away with murder, Anonymous: #HoodsOff "The war is on!"

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Megaphone

Best of the Web: Pepe Escobar: Washington plays Russian roulette

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online
Fri, 21 Nov 2014 10:05 UTC
Mutually assured destruction
© Unknown
These are bleak times. I've been in serious conversation with some deep sources and interlocutors - those who know but don't need to show off, privileging discretion. They are all deeply worried. This is what one of them, a New York strategic planner, sent me:
The propaganda attack against Putin equating him with Hitler is so extreme that you have to think that the Russians cannot believe their ears and cannot trust the United States anymore under any circumstances.

I cannot believe how we could have gotten ourselves into this situation to protect the looters in the Ukraine that Putin would have rid the Ukraine of, and even had the gall to place in a leadership role one of the worst of the thieves. But that is history. What is certain is that MAD [mutually assured destruction] is not a deterrent today when both sides believe the other will use nuclear weapons once they have the advantage and that the side that gains a decisive advantage will use them. MAD is now over.
That may sound somewhat extreme - but it's a perfectly logical extension, further on down the road, of what the Russian president intimated in his already legendary interview with Germany's ARD in Vladivostok last week: the West is provoking Russia into a new Cold War. [1]

Comment: To have a look at NATO's global military bases, watch this video from 2011:



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Briefcase

Best of the Web: SOTT EXCLUSIVE: Must-read statement by Russian FM Sergey Lavrov

Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Sat, 22 Nov 2014 20:50 UTC
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Behind this friendly exterior lies a Fawkesian force to be reckoned with!
On the heels of the publication of President Putin's lengthy interview with ITAR-TASS (which rivals the 14-year-old First Person interviews in terms of their scope and candidness), the Russian Foreign Ministry has published an important speech given by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the XXII Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, given last week.(Don't miss his TASS interview, either, given back in September.)

For those who have actually read his words or seen him speak, you'll know Lavrov is an intelligent man. He's also an expert diplomat -- always polite, always professional, always keeps his cool. So you can be sure there is a lot going on behind and between the words he says, both for him personally and those around him. Even then, based on what he does say, you can bet he leaves his Western 'colleagues' steaming.

And what does he say? Read on and see for yourself.
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Quenelle - Golden

Best of the Web: TASS interviews Putin: 'We are strong because we are right'

Vladimir Putin
ITAR-TASS
Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:04 UTC
putin
© Mikhail Metzel/TASS
In the TASS special project Top Officials, Vladimir Putin talks about healthy lifestyle, the "fifth column" and oil prices "plot" and argues with Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev.

On health, wrong statement and the other side of the coin

- What's your health status now, Vladimir Vladimirovich?

- All worries are in foes' dreams!

- The foes are making hints...

- Really? It's the first time I hear about it. What are they saying? Just fantasying?

- I won't retell it to you. As a matter of fact, I've come to the firsthand source.

- Let them think this way. It'll make them relaxed and will bring us benefits, too.

Comment: As usual, Vladimir Putin shows himself to be an intelligent, humble, diplomatic, no-nonsense human being, and a force to be reckoned with. There have been very few incorruptible politicians and statesmen in the last century - Hammarskjold was one, Kennedy became another. At the very least, Putin is the best this planet has at the moment. And ordinary people realize it. See:

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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Your friendly neighborhood Nazis in Ukraine

Riley Waggaman
Russia Insider
Sat, 22 Nov 2014 19:10 UTC

nazi ukraine
A thousand words...
Comment: Well, it's official. The leaders of the Western world have decided to forgo all pretense and just come out with what they've been hiding for the last 2 or 3 generations. For all that time, you see, the leaders of the West (led by the Late, Great United States) have been closet fascists. First they brought over the cream of the Nazi crop during Project Paperclip, and it's been all downhill since then. But at least they had the decency to keep their anti-human, pathocratic proclivities at at least partially concealed. Not anymore. Now even that pretense has been dropped, revealing what a few of us knew all along.

Russia recently proposed a resolution at the UN condemning attempts to glorify Nazi ideology and deny that the Germans did anything wrong before and during WWII. Pretty basic stuff, right? Who could disagree?! Well, now we know: the U.S., Canada and Ukraine were the only countries to vote against the bill. Facile excuses aside, it's pretty telling. But not that surprising. After all, as Riley Waggaman writes for Russia Insider below, these very countries have been actively supporting neo-Nazis in east Ukraine this whole year. What has the world come to?


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© AP Photo/Efrem LukaskyA Ukrainian volunteer soldier with emblems of WWII SS Galician division that had fought against the Soviet Army.
The conflict in East Ukraine is "a choice between civilization and barbarism," warns Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, obviously alluding to the Associated Press photograph of "a Ukrainian volunteer soldier, with emblems of WWII SS Galician division."

What was once described as a poor choice of Halloween costume by Prince Harry is now in vogue with celebrated government forces participating in Ukraine's Anti-Terror Operation. Incredible, that only a few years ago, Nazi emblems and the people who wore them were under the cloud of critical disapproval - what is posterity? Or "civilization," for that matter?

Nazi symbols representing European integration have become so trendy in West Ukraine that The Daily Beast feels the need to ask, "Why are swastikas hot in West Ukraine?" Is it because handsomepants Russell Brand has reclaimed the swastika as the ancient mascot of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Of course.
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Newspaper

Best of the Web: A dark alliance and a lasting shame: Remembering investigative reporter Gary Webb

Shaun Mullen
The Moderate Voice
Sat, 22 Nov 2014 04:06 UTC
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Kill the Messenger is currently playing at mostly empty theaters, which is a pity, because it's an important movie about a real-life story: A reporter who becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign that drives him to suicide after he exposes the CIA's role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and importing cocaine into Southern California. That reporter is Gary Webb, played on the big screen by Jeremy Renner of The Bourne Legacy fame. This is what I wrote in December 2007 about Webb's expose and investigative journalism in general, with a few embellishments and a new footnote added:

I worked with a goodly number of great investigative journalists over the years, men and women who risk career, life and limb to get the story, and I can say with some satisfaction that this bunch usually did.

But beyond the glamor of the Woodward and Bernstein portrayed by Redford and Hoffman in All the President's Men is a dark side: Investigative reporters and their editors can be an intensely jealous lot, and except for the biggest stories (like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the My Lai Massacre) rival papers are more apt to ignore an investigative story than mention it in their own pages, and sometimes even dump on it.
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Folder

Best of the Web: Russia at a glance: Sitrep on latest developments

Patrick Armstrong
Russia Insider
Thu, 20 Nov 2014 01:58 UTC
RUSSIA ISOLATED?

sad obama
Not at APEC - here's the thousand word photo. And not at G20 either - BRICS had a happy meeting. The West and its tame media is seriously deluding itself with this Russia is isolated stuff.

NEW NWO

Russia bought 55 tonnes of gold in the last quarter. What's that mean? here's a theory. (Ukraine's gold, on the other hand, is almost all gone.) Meanwhile, an arms sale to China. Sberbank offers Yuans. Another huge gas deal. Increasing military cooperation. India-China. New financial instruments. Petrodollar. Russia-Pakistan. It marches. Who thought Ukraine would be so important?

Comment: A handy collection of links! Be sure to check out Armstrong's blog here.

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Take 2

Best of the Web: The World is run by fools, and we let them

Raúl Ilargi Meijer
The Automatic Earth
Mon, 17 Nov 2014 16:35 UTC
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© Dorothea LangeNegro woman carrying shoes home from church Mississippi Delta July 1936
Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel after 20 years, was released recently. Unfortunately for Jim and Jeff and the Farrelly brothers, unintended humor will always be funnier than the scripted kind, no matter how hard Hollywood tries. Case in point: the Dumber slapstick was easily upstaged over the past few days by the G20 summit in Brisbane.

Not only did the pedantic Anglo-Saxon power hungry freak show of Harper, Cameron and Abbott (nobody even noticed Obama) give Vladimir V. Putin a good laugh with their empty chest thumping, entirely spin doctor scripted and entirely aimed at their domestic media and audiences, these so-called leaders also came up with no less than 800(!) measures they claim will boost global economic growth by 2.1%, or $2 trillion. Over 5 years, or some useless and opaque number like that (2018?).

It would seem to be painfully obvious that what the world needs really urgently badly today is not so much economic growth, but growth in the dendrites, synapses and neurons in the heads of both our leaders and of those who put them where they are, ourselves. No use holding your breath. As things are, none of us are any smarter than either Dumb or Dumber.

Comment: For more on the psychopaths running the world and listen to this radio show: SOTT Talk Radio: Surviving the Psy-pocalypse - Interview with Stefan Verstappen

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Propaganda

Best of the Web: The "Putin is isolated" story is untrue, stupid, and just plain dangerous


Moon of Alabama
Sun, 16 Nov 2014 12:12 UTC
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© AFPHead and shoulders above the rest.
These headlines are silly: Even more silly then those headlines was the German prime news Tagesschau which used a picture of Putin seemingly sitting alone at a lunch table to prove his "isolation". But news service pictures show that he is sitting with the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff waiting for the other lunch guests to sit down next to them. These were simply not visible in the frame Tagesschau selectively used.

And do these headline writers, TV correspondents and politicians know what the 20 in G-20 means? The people who publicly miffed Putin in Brisbane were Obama, Cameron, Harper, Abbott and Abe. I count five out of twenty.

Comment: Yet another crystal clear example of how the main-stream media skews the truth in order to serve its masters. But this is also a really instructive bit of 'reality creation' that is being attempted here. As discussed in Joe Quinn's recent article: Putin at the G20: Sharing a stage with psychopathic a**holes makes you want to leave early, Canadian PM Steven Harper and British PM David Cameron both addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukraine and Russia's "aggression" there. And later, Obama made one of the most despicable speeches, however short (demonizing Russia), that any leader has probably ever made about another country. This is no exaggeration. A true hit and run.

Here's the important thing to note however: The hardcore lies that undergird the accusations and speech are for perception purposes only. They serve to buttress the Anglo-American Axis's narrative as promulgated by the media doing their bidding. Because, why would anyone, no less a world leader - and someone who is a part of the vaunted G20 say such things to another world leader unless they were true, one would reason to ask. Who has the balls and the stupidity to make such accusations to the face of another about matters of such magnitude when they have to know, on some level, that such statements as theirs are absolutely false and based on lies? The answer is horrific in its implications. Only members of the intra-species predator found among homo sapiens - commonly known as psychopaths - are capable of such a thing. And many of these types appear to have found good high-profile ego-boosting jobs as Prime Ministers and Presidents.

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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: Historical Cycles: Are we doomed to repeat the past?

Stefan Verstappen
Chinastrategies.com
Sat, 15 Nov 2014 11:37 UTC
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An extremely important and concise explanation of the cycles of history, their stages, how they proceed and end. Author of the Art of Urban Survival and Defense against the Psychopath, Stefan Verstappen makes the case that we are currently in the final stage of our cycle of history, defined, like all others, by chaos across all areas of our civilization. Historically, only small groups of people survived such periods of destruction, and they did so by forming themselves into tight-knit communities with a ethos that ran counter to the prevailing corrupt and destructive tendencies. Must watch!


For more on this topic see Laura Knight-Jadczyk's The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction and her fascinating and eminently readable book The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes
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