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Attention

Beware the hijacking of US protests into a 'Color Revolution'

Max Parry
OffGuardian
Mon, 15 Jun 2020 09:06 UTC
george floyd protests
The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic.

In the Twin Cities, what began as spontaneous, peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism, arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters, while the initial incitement for the riots was likely the work of apparent agent provocateurs among the marchers.

Within days, the unrest had spread to cities across the country including the nation's capital, with US President Donald Trump threatening to invoke the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and National Guard on American soil, federal powers not used since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King case.

The debate over the catalyst for the uprising into its period of lawlessness has drawn a range of theories. The suspicious placement of pallets of bricks in the proximity of numerous protest sites have spurred rumors of sabotage by everything from white supremacist groups to "Antifa" to law enforcement itself.

Comment: See also:

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Propaganda

No memes, no chill? Twitter flags Trump's fake 'CNN clip' intended as satire as 'manipulated media'


RT
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 04:20 UTC
meme video trump banned twitter
© Twitter / President Donald Trump / screenshot
Twitter's latest "manipulated media" tag on a tweet from the president.
Twitter has again slapped a "manipulated media" tag on a tweet from US President Donald Trump - a meme video mocking CNN - prompting cheers from the #Resistance, which apparently missed what many saw as an "obvious joke."

Shared to Twitter by the president on Thursday evening, the post played off an old viral video showing two toddlers, one black and one white, as they run to embrace one another. Parodying the adorable clip, Trump's tweet features a mock CNN chyron captioned "Terrified toddler runs from racist baby."

Twitter, however, apparently decided that netizens would have a hard time telling actual CNN news coverage from the satirical clip, warning users that the video may have been "manipulated." Indeed.

Comment: It's blatant hypocrisy for anyone with eyes to see it. Either the TDS mob is disingenuously pretending the video is meant to be serious, and not a parody, or they literally have no sense of humor. It's unlikely the video received the same treatment when it was posted by anyone other than Trump.

See also:

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Bad Guys

Rumors of wars: China, India, North Korea, South Korea, Israel and Turkey all move toward war

Michael Snyder
The Most Important News
Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00 UTC
missile launch
As if we didn't have enough already going on in 2020, now we are facing the possibility that several regional wars may erupt. China and India had both been pouring troops into a disputed border region, and now there has been an incident where they were actually killing each other. On the Korean peninsula, North Korea just blew up "a joint liaison office" that it had used for talks with the South Korean government. And in the Middle East, Turkey is warning of grave consequences if Israel goes ahead with a plan to annex portions of Judea and Samaria. If a major regional war erupts at even one of these flashpoints, it will be another devastating blow for a global economy that is already imploding, and there is a very strong probability that the U.S. and other major western powers could be drawn into the conflict.
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No Entry

No breakthroughs from US/China meeting to ease tensions

Stephen Lendman
stephenlendman.org
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 00:00 UTC
Pompeo met with China's Yang Jiechi.
On Wednesday, Pompeo met with China's Yang Jiechi.

He holds several high-level positions in Beijing, including CPC Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission director.

Both officials met in Hawaii, the meeting requested by Pompeo at at a time of dismal bilateral relations that risk rupture or possible confrontation.

Still, bilateral communications are better than cutting them off altogether despite no chance of resolving major bilateral differences.

For the US, they're all about China's unstoppable development, heading toward becoming the world's leading economy, already a prominent nation on the world stage.''

It's why the vast majority of nations want normalized ties, including most European ones.

The problem of dealing with the US diplomatically is that it doesn't negotiate. It demands, wanting other countries to bend to its will, even when harming their own interests.
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USA

Warmonger Bolton paints Trump a peacenik

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Sat, 20 Jun 2020 02:03 UTC
Wrestler Donald Trump
© Facebook
Embellished image of Donald Trump during his days as a World Wrestling Entertainment participant.
A career warmonger becomes the darling of limousine liberals just because he's ridiculing the president of the United States.

The current, convoluted spectacle in the hallowed halls of Empire is worthy of the most demented WWE scripts - as everything about Donald Trump has to be understood as a pile-up of professional wrestling plots. Here we have former national security advisor John Bolton playing The Undertaker with Trump trying to cast himself as The Rock.

Still, when we see the full 4K picture of the supposed leadership of the United States government, plus the Beltway extensions, mired in a swampland crammed with double-dealing vipers, it looks more like a catfight.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro - a rabid China demonizer - actually came up with the best description of what John Bolton is up to with his supposedly tell-all $2 million book deal: this is the DC swamp's "revenge porn."

Bolton's 592-page memoir, to be published next Tuesday, was conveniently leaked in advance by Simon & Schuster to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and an extract has been published by the Wall Street Journal.

Bolton wrote, "A president may not misuse the national government's legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest."

A New York Times hack wrote, "Mr. Bolton sought to use his 17 months in the White House to accomplish policy goals that were important to him [italics mine], like withdrawing the United States from a host of international agreements he considers flawed, like the Iran nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others."

So a certified warmonger - his track record fully documented - is entitled to get away with accomplishing "policy goals important to him" even as he accuses the President of equalizing his "own personal interest" with the "national interest."

What really matters here, for the self-described paper of record seems to be the unique chance to quote at will an insider source that simply cannot be checked for accuracy. The fact that Bolton is no more reliable as a source than any DC swamp peddler? That is conveniently shoved under the carpet.

The Washington Post, for its part, gloated that this is "the most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far," as it portrays Trump as an "erratic" and "stunningly uninformed" commander in chief.

The Post also takes Bolton at his word, as he describes Trump relying on "personal instinct" and playing for "reality TV showmanship." At least Bolton seems to have a vague clue about the WWE's preeminence - much as he got a clue about the obvious: The one thing that really matters above all for Trump is re-election.
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Attention

Fake news and fact checkers - 'Who will fact check the fact checkers?'

James Corbett
Corbett Report
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 21:26 UTC
Fake News
© Future Five
We've all come across online fact checkers that purport to warn us away from independent media sites under the guise of protecting us from fake news. But who is behind these fact check sites? How do they operate? And if these ham-fisted attempts at soft censorship aren't the solution to online misinformation, what is? Join James for this week's important edition of The Corbett Report podcast, where we explore the murky world of information gatekeeping and ask "Who will fact check the fact checkers?"

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

Watch on BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4
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Microscope 2

Study of All-cause Mortality During Covid-19: No Plague, But Likely Mass Homicide by Government Response

Dr. Denis G. Rancourt, PhD
researchgate.net
Tue, 02 Jun 2020 20:23 UTC
elderly nursing home covid-19

Lockdown prevents family visiting nursing home resident
Summary / Abstract

The latest data of all-cause mortality by week does not show a winter-burden mortality that is statistically larger than for past winters. There was no plague. However, a sharp "COVID peak" is present in the data, for several jurisdictions in Europe and the USA. This all-cause-mortality "COVID peak" has unique characteristics:
  • Its sharpness, with a full-width at half-maximum of only approximately 4 weeks;
  • Its lateness in the infectious-season cycle, surging after week-11 of 2020, which is unprecedented for any large sharp-peak feature;
  • The synchronicity of the onset of its surge, across continents, and immediately following the WHO declaration of the pandemic;
  • and its USA state-to-state absence or presence for the same viral ecology on the same territory, being correlated with nursing home events and government actions rather than any known viral strain discernment.
These "COVID peak" characteristics, and a review of the epidemiological history, and of relevant knowledge about viral respiratory diseases, lead me to postulate that the "COVID peak" results from an accelerated mass homicide of immune-vulnerable individuals, and individuals made more immune-vulnerable, by government and institutional actions, rather than being an epidemiological signature of a novel virus, irrespective of the degree to which the virus is novel from the perspective of viral speciation.

Comment: Also by Dr Rancourt:
The Science is Conclusive: Masks and Respirators do NOT Prevent Transmission of Viruses
His analysis of this past winter's all-cause mortality rates, and his conclusion, is in line with ours:
Everything You Think You Know About Coronavirus
And so, to summarize the 'Covid-19 pandemic' once more...

For two/three months the WHO, the media, and whichever 'secret cabal' controls both, shoved in everyone's faces the fact that old people die when they reach the end of their lives. In the process of 'making everyone realize the horror' of this fact, irresponsible (and frankly pathological) elites willfully enjoined the general population to accelerate the deaths of tens of thousands of elderly and immune-compromised people, who died alone when separated from loved ones and abandoned by their regular healthcare practitioners.

Govt policy decisions - specifically, ONE 'central' govt policy decision, one followed by most Western govts, along with a few others - generated a 'bottleneck of deaths' by temporarily lifting the normal healthcare options available to society's most vulnerable. These vulnerable people then died in droves, earlier than they would otherwise have done, and their deaths provided the media with images of 'overflowing morgues', crematoria, etc. from around the world.

Ironically then, the declared purpose of the lockdown - to 'save the elderly' by 'flattening the curve' - produced precisely the opposite outcome: the elderly were killed off, thereby artificially and precipitately spiking the otherwise flatter regular winter season curve.

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Target

Book excerpts leaked: Bolton's accusations against Trump feed Democrats' frenzy


RT
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 22:02 UTC
Bolton
© Reuters/Jonathan Drake
Former national security adviser
Former national security adviser John Bolton has leaked excerpts of his book to major newspapers, accusing President Donald Trump of colluding with leaders in China and Turkey, and obstruction of justice "as a way of life."

Facing a DOJ lawsuit seeking to block the publication of his memoir for containing classified information, Bolton decided to go to the press, leaking parts of the book to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Comment: Bolton's book was meant to hit the market just as the election frenzy is about to begin...as they say: 'timing is everything'. The lawsuit will muck that up, but not before Bolton gives away his treasure trove of innuendo for free in order to cement partnership with the Dems - his new best friends.

See: US files breach of contract lawsuit against John Bolton blocking release of his book

Bent on inflicting damage while defying legal court action, more Bolton leaks appear in the press:
Excerpts published from Bolton's forthcoming book on Wednesday claim that, during a sideline meeting at last year's G-20 summit in Japan, President Donald Trump asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to boost his country's purchases of US agricultural goods, believing it would aid his re-election bid. Pressed about the claim at a Senate hearing later on Wednesday, Trump's top trade envoy, Robert Lighthizer, said in no uncertain terms that the allegation is false.
"There was a meeting on the outskirts of the G-20, in Osaka between the president and President Xi, and I was in that meeting, Absolutely untrue. Never happened. I don't want you to think I'm being deceptive. I said what meeting I was at, and this never happened at it. For sure."
The previews from Bolton's memoir come just a day after the Department of Justice launched a lawsuit seeking to force the former advisor to complete a pre-print review for the book, arguing it is "rife" with classified material. The book had reportedly been shipped out to warehouses, ready to hit the shelves, but the new suit could see its publication delayed, possibly prompting the leaked excerpts in retaliation.

Though Bolton has defended lying in service of US foreign policy goals on record, even openly boasting of his own ability to "spin" the facts, a number of American journalists and pundits rushed to endorse his version of the G-20 meeting.



Bolton, a main driving force behind the coup attempts in Venezuela, offers exploitable 'bombshells' timed for the upcoming election:
US President Donald Trump thought it would be "cool" to invade Venezuela but was persuaded not to by "Soviet-style propaganda" from Moscow, claims former national security adviser John Bolton in book excerpts leaked to the press.

Trump...described the South American country as "really part of the United States," according to the Washington Post.


In January 2019, Trump recognized opposition politician Juan Guaido as Venezuela's "interim president" at Bolton's urging - only to have doubts a day later, according to the book, saying that Guaido looked "weak" and childish next to the "tough" Maduro.

Trump was "largely persuaded" against overthrowing Maduro after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin in May 2019, Bolton claims, calling Putin's comparison of Guaido with Trump's 2016 rival Hillary Clinton a "brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda," according to the Post.


Not accepting Bolton's innuendo, the Kremlin had this to say:
The Kremlin has dismissed former US National Security Advisor John Bolton's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is able to manipulate his American counterpart Donald Trump.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Friday that Putin does not believe he can exploit or control the US leader. "No, Putin cannot play Trump like a 'fiddle'. What he thinks about Trump, he himself has repeatedly said in many interviews," Peskov explained.

Bolton describes Trump as a person who trusts Putin more than his own intelligence services. Bolton also alleges that the Russian president perceives Trump as a weak opponent.

In one instance, Bolton writes that Trump asked an aide whether Finland was part of Russia. The US president has slammed the book as a mixture of lies and fictional stories.
If these snippets of the book have any validity, it shows Trump is, at times, an independent thinker with a modicum of common sense. If Moscow offered 'a come to reason' moment with the president - good on them! It is clear Bolton was a poison pill from the beginning, likely one Trump had to swallow. Bolton's current machinations further reveal the trap within the neocon mind.

See also:

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Briefcase

US files breach of contract lawsuit against John Bolton blocking release of his book

Dave Boyer
Washington Times
Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00 UTC
Bolton
© AP/Carolyn Koster
Former national security advisor John Bolton
The Trump administration sued former White House National Security Adviser John R. Bolton on Tuesday to block the release of his new book next week, saying he never completed a required government review to scrub classified information.

The breach-of-contract suit filed by the Justice Department in federal court says the action seeks to stop Mr. Bolton "from compromising national security." It says that in his former post in the White House, Mr. Bolton had "a high-level role in which he regularly came into possession of some of the most sensitive classified information that exists in the U.S. government."

Although Mr. Bolton did remove some classified information from the manuscript, the National Security Council has determined that some secrets remain in his book, up to several paragraphs in length.

The lawsuit states:
"In fact, the NSC has determined that information in the manuscript is classified at the Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret levels.

"Accordingly, the publication and release of The Room Where it Happened would cause irreparable harm, because the disclosure of instances of classified information in the manuscript reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States."

Comment: Stay tuned. This fight is just beginning!

Bolton is apparently on shaky legal ground and according to Trump he will run afoul the law if the book is published as is:
Trump indicated that his administration will do everything to prevent it from seeing the light of the day. Speaking alongside Attorney General Bill Bar on Monday, Trump took a dig at Bolton, saying that his former national security advisor "should not call himself an 'ambassador' since he was never confirmed by the Senate," and that he "gave him a break" by cherry-picking him for a position that did not require Senate confirmation.
"I can't imagine that he can [write a book], because that's highly classified information. Even conversations with me - they are highly classified. I told that to the Attorney General before. I would consider any conversation with me as president highly classified.

"So that would mean if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he's broken the law and I would think he would have criminal problems...has been known not to tell the truth a lot."
With the Trump administration preparing for a legal war with Bolton, his lawyer Chuck Cooper has accused the White House of trying to silence his client using the pretext of US national security. Cooper claimed that the National Security Council employees had reviewed the book for months before indicating that it was good to go in late April, but then the White House intervened, and Trump's deputy counsel for national security John A. Eisenberg told them on June 8 that the book contained classified information.

See also:

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Recycle

Pelosi orders removal of Confederate portraits in Capitol

Cristina Marcos
The Hill
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 16:49 UTC
Nancy Pelosi
© AP Photo/Susan Walsh
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks during her weekly news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 18, 2020.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday ordered the removal of four portraits in the Capitol of previous House Speakers who served in the Confederacy.

The move marks Pelosi's latest effort to take down Confederate imagery in the Capitol, following her push last week calling for the removal of 11 Confederate statues displayed in the Capitol complex.

"We didn't know about this until we were taking inventory of the statues and the curator told us that there were four paintings of Speakers in the Capitol of the United States, four Speakers who had served in the Confederacy," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.
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