PROLOGUE

Tibet before 1959 was a feudal serf society. The serfs had no freedom, no land, and were often hungry. The democratic reform abolished serfdom and enabled millions of serfs to master their own life.

The impoverished population in the region dropped from 590,000 in 2015 to 150,000 in 2018. The net annual income of rural residents has reached 10,330 yuan (US$1,540) per person by 2017, a 13.6-percent increase year-on-year. The region's GDP more than doubled in six years to 131 billion yuan (US$19.5 billion) in 2017, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics. The Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) eradicated absolute poverty in 2019. China has lifted all of its citizens out of poverty by 2020.

What does the intelligence agency have to do with the suicide terrorist attack?

An explosive court filing from the Guantanamo Military Commission - a court considering the cases of defendants accused of carrying out the "9/11" terrorist attacks on New York - has seemingly confirmed the unthinkable.

The document was originally published via a Guantanamo Bay court docket, but while public, it was completely redacted. Independent researchers obtained an unexpurgated copy. It is an account by the Commission's lead investigator, DEA veteran Don Canestraro, of his personal probe of potential Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, conducted at the request of the defendants' lawyers.

Two of the hijackers were being closely monitored by the CIA and may, wittingly or not, have been recruited by Langley long before they flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings.

It is an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle in New Testament history and one of the oldest textual witnesses of the Gospels: a small manuscript fragment of the Syriac translation, produced in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century. A researcher from the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered the fragment with the help of ultraviolet photography.
About 1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it. Parchment was scarce in the desert in the Middle Ages, so manuscripts were often erased and reused. A medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) has now been able to make the lost words on this layered manuscript, a so-called palimpsest, legible again: Grigory Kessel discovered one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, made in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century, on individual surviving pages of this manuscript.

This is an excerpt from Alexander Dugin's Last War of the World-Island (Arktos, 2015)

In the same period, opposite geopolitical tendencies, "color revolutions," began to unfold intensely. Their meaning consisted in bringing to power openly anti-Russian, pro-Western, and often nationalistic political forces in the countries of the CIS, and thereby finally tearing these countries away from Russia, to frustrate integration, and in the long term to include them in NATO as occurred in the Baltic countries. The peculiarity of these revolutions was that they were all aimed at bringing about closer relations of the countries in which they occurred with the USA and the West, and they followed the method of "non-violent resistance,"¹ which American strategists had elaborated in the framework of the "Freedom House" project.² This was carried out through subversive measures and the organization of revolutions that had been executed in the Third World under the direction of the CIA.

In November 2003, the "Rose Revolution" happened in Georgia, where the evasive Eduard Shevardnadze, who had been wavering between the West and Moscow, was replaced by the strictly pro-Western, radically Atlanticist, and pro-American politician Mikhail Saakashvili. An active role in the events of the "Rose Revolution" was played by the youth organization Kmara (literally "Enough!"), which acted in accordance with the ideas of the primary theoretician of analogous networks of protest organizations, Gene Sharp, and with the methods of "Freedom House." These techniques had already been tested in other places; in particular in Yugoslavia during the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević, using the pro-Western Serbian youth organization Otpor.

During a talk at an archaeological society meeting I heard mention of St Bartholomew and a 'flaying knife' - or had my imagination run wild and it was a flying knife used by the saint. When I got home I looked up the Wiki where we have quite a bit of info on the subject, much better than at other sites that came up on my search engine. Flaying is another word for skinning.

A dead animal can be flayed when preparing the meat as food - or to obtain its hide, or fur. This is more commonly known as skinning rather than flaying. At this point we may note that flaying of humans became a form of torture and torment - which is why it was applied to St Bartholomew. Flaying alive was an especially horrible form of punishment. It seems this is a practice going back a long way - deep into the depths of time. For example, we know from Iron Age Assyrian records that prisoners were on occasion flayed alive - usually resulting in their death via hypothermia, as an example. It is commemorated in royal edicts, and engraved inscriptions.

How long the practice had taken place before the Iron Age is an unknown factor. Asurnasirapli II brags of flaying rebellious kings and officials. In Chinese history flaying was also common - of servants, officials, and rebels. The Ming dynasty was associated with flaying, at its inception and its passing. It therefore led to the ascendancy of the Ming - and also contributed to their downfall, via the mandate of heaven. One wonders what kind of flaying is implied in this tradition - perpetrated by humans, or by the gods. Or even with an origin in the heavens. Flaying was an occasional punishment in Europe, among the Vikings - and therefore inherited by the Normans. Hence, Edward I had three rebels flayed, and their skins were attached to three doors of Westminster Abbey, as a warning. They had been accused of robbing the treasury.

[Source: mronline.org]

First, Obama falsely portrayed Gaddafi as a monster; then, he lied about the need for harsh sanctions to punish him for crimes he never committed and, finally, he launched an illegal war under a pretext as phony as Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf Resolution and George W. Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land that was very rich because of its oil wells, a bad king kept his people in poverty and subjected women to sexual and domestic abuse. But after many years of oppression, a charismatic young officer overthrew the bad king in a bloodless revolution that lasted less than two hours and in which nobody died.

Even the bad king was allowed to live out his life in a luxurious villa, surrounded by family and servants, until he died peacefully of old age many years later, at age 93.

The dashing young officer quickly abolished the monarchy and established a People's Congress. He threw open the royal treasury and distributed its riches to the people, so that they prospered. A free home was guaranteed to every citizen, and college education was also free. So was medical care — and if the country's own doctors couldn't cure your illness, the government paid the cost of sending you to a country where they could.

Happy were the people, but happiest of all were the women. The new government not only liberated them from sexual and domestic abuse; it also granted them full and equal rights with men, and they won more than half the seats in the People's Congress.

The above may sound like a fairy tale, but it actually happened.

When medieval monks were looking up at the night sky, writing down their observations of celestial objects, they had no idea that their words would be invaluable centuries later to a group of scientists in a completely different field: volcanology.

A new study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature explains how descriptions of lunar eclipses by monks and scribes were key in studying some of the largest volcanic eruptions on Earth.

Using a combination of these medieval writings and climate data stretching back centuries, researchers were able to clarify the date of around 10 volcanic eruptions that took place between the year 1100 and 1300.

"I was listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album when I realized that the darkest lunar eclipses all occurred within a year or so of major volcanic eruptions," lead author Sébastien Guillet, senior research associate at the Institute for environmental sciences at the UNIGE, said in a press release. "Since we know the exact days of the eclipses, it opened the possibility of using the sightings to narrow down when the eruptions must have happened."

Researchers say that getting a more accurate date for these Earth-shattering events could help paint a clearer picture of how volcanos contribute to extreme climate variability.

Vikings brought horses and dogs to the British Isles from Scandinavia, a new study suggests.

A chemical analysis of bone fragments from a cemetery in England provides the first solid scientific evidence of animals traveling with Vikings across the North Sea, scientists report February 1 in PLOS ONE.

In the 1990s, researchers unearthed the cremated remains of a human adult and child as well as of a dog, horse and probable pig from a burial mound in a Viking cemetery in Derbyshire, England. In previous work, radiocarbon dating of femur, skull and rib fragments revealed that the inhabitants all died sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. That date was narrowed down to the year 873, thanks to the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records that a Viking army wintered near the site that year.

Edward M. Kennedy Address at the Public Memorial Service for Robert F. Kennedy delivered 8 June 1968 at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York


Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, Mr. President:

On behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, her children, the parents and sisters of Robert Kennedy, I want to express what we feel to those who mourn with us today in this Cathedral and around the world.

We loved him as a brother, and as a father, and as a son. From his parents, and from his older brothers and sisters -- Joe and Kathleen and Jack -- he received an inspiration which he passed on to all of us. He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side.

This is a list of all the "democracies" the US has installed in other countries over the years:

1. 1. ____________________
   2. ____________________
   3. ____________________

That's the entire list. You can see that it's blank. But how can that be? We all know that the US has freed dozens of nations from their evil and repressive governments, and installed loving democracies where people lived happily ever after, swamped with freedoms and overwhelmed with human rights. We know this because we've read and heard it hundreds, or maybe thousands, of times. It's in all the US history books. We've seen it in so many movies and even read it in comic books when we were kids. It must be true. So why is the list empty? How can that be? Sadly, the list is empty because everything we were told was a lie. It is often said that if you tell a lie five times, most people will believe it; the US as a "defender of democracy" is one of those lies.

In the West, we have for many decades been subject to an incessant barrage of high-sounding pronouncements about the US 'saving the world from communism' and promoting democracy and freedom throughout the world. But that has been little more than an effective propaganda campaign levied at the uninformed and simple-minded, since even a casual glance at the facts on the ground reveal something quite different. In fact, rather than promoting democracy and freedom, the opposite is true. The US has instead been promoting dictatorships and serfdom, and with great success over 60 or 70 years. We have a list below of 42 countries where the US not only installed and financed a brutal dictator, but often and repeatedly sent in arms and troops to put down local rebellions and revolutions against those installed friendly dictators.

For all the talk about promoting democracy and freedom, there is no instance - NO instance - where the US has ever removed a dictatorship and replaced it with any kind of benevolent government, electoral democracy or otherwise. You may be aware of the statements by Major-General Smedley Butler who claimed that during his 33 years as a US Marine, he functioned simply as "a gangster for capitalism" and that all wars were bankers' wars. On the topic of the US government installing democracies in the world, Butler himself denied such a thing had ever occurred, and said further, "The U.S. has routinely destroyed democracy throughout the globe while its leaders claimed to be spreading democracy."

But if the US didn't install "democracy" in all those places, what did they do? Well, while preaching democracy, freedom and human rights at home, the US government was actually running around the world installing dictatorships - about 50, at last count. Not only that, while boasting at home about defending democracy, the CIA and military were actually undermining and destroying functioning democracies and replacing them with dictatorships. There are many countries where the US military and/or CIA financed and led revolutions to depose electoral democracies and install a dictator, often by assassinating the incumbent president: Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Spain, Philippines, Zaire, Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Chile, Fiji, Nicaragua, Indonesia, The Congo.