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racefortheironthrone · 5 years

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Thoughts on House of X #6

The penultimate issue!

While You Slept, the World Changed:

Before I get into the content, let me say that I think Hickman et al. really brought it with their two final issues, which are some of the best of the miniseries.

Showing Hickman’s love of circular storytelling, we flash back to the speech from the very first page of House of X #1, where Xavier announced the formation of Krakoa. The always-frustrating timeline is cleared up a little: Xavier’s speech happened a month ago, although we know from that same issue that work had been going on on Krakoa for “months” before the announcement - more evidence that the schedule was important.

Despite this all of this preparation, Xavier takes a moment before the speech to ask Moira and Magneto to join him for this “leap of faith,” which requires “total commitment.” (Which is interesting, given Namor’s questioning of same.) Moira agrees quickly, but then hangs back and watches, as is her wont (as we’ll see in Powers of X #6).

By contrast, Magneto makes a significant shift from his earlier pledge of unrelenting accountability to burying the hatchet completely (I love how “all the anger at the other’s relentless ideology and unyielding persistence” so perfectly describes both men) and promises his complete support (and possibly more, depending on how you interpret the hand-on-hand-on-shoulder panel) going forward. That’s a big moment for the two of them.

And then we get Xavier’s speech in full, which I’m going to do my best to annotate.

“Humans of the planet Earth...I am the mutant Charles Xavier and I bring you a message of hope. ”

The first thing I’ll note is that we’re already seeing a rather significant change in Xavier’s behavior: for decades, Charles Xavier refused to come out of the closet as a mutant even when asked directly, and only did so in New X-Men when possessed by Cassandra Nova. Here, he’s straightforwardly describing himself as “the mutant Charles Xavier,” putting his group identity before even his name.

Secondly, there’s an interesting tinge of classic sci-fi in the way that Xavier addresses “humans of the planet Earth” - it’s very reminiscent of The Day The Earth Stood Still - and I wonder whether part of this has to do with the so far largely unspoken Krakoan ambition of beating humanity to the Moon, to Mars, and the stars themselves.

“In the coming days, you will learn of several far-reaching pharmaceutical breakthroughs that have been discovered by mutant scientists. These drugs extend human life, heal disease of the mind, and will prevent - or cure - most common maladies. Influenza, Alzheimer’s, ALS, many cancers...gone. Overnight. These drugs will make life on this planet...better. Remarkably so.”

First, this is very much of a part of Hickman’s technocratic futurism from his F.F run, which I have to imagine often leads to a bit of frustration with the editorial mandate not to use super-science to make the world unrecognizable.

At the same time, I’m all the more convinced that the point of this proffer (in addition to buying U.N votes and diplomatic recognition) isn’t to mess with human biology - I think the drugs actually do what’s advertized, rather than mind-controlling people or activating the X-gene - but rather (according to what we learn in Powers of X #6) to dull the drive to achieve post-humanity, solving humanity’s problems but leaving the source out of their hands. This is a theme that featured quite heavily in the finale to Hickman’s Transhuman.

“All this...we have made for you. In the past they would have been a gift. Something freely given by me -- to you -- because I believed it would create harmony between our two peoples. That was my dream -- harmony -- but you have taught me a harsh lesson: that dream was a lie. You see, all I ever wanted was peace between humans and mutants. All I ever wanted was to love you and for you to love us.”

Here’s a great example of how comics can use text and imagery in different ways. Visually, what this page shows us is different levels of humanity: ordinary people in a hospital room, who see Xavier’s speech as a message of hope, the promise of deliverance from disease; a board room full of businessmen who probably see either opportunity or competition, depending on their market position; and a situation room of national security types who represent human power structures that have always viewed mutants as a threat.

At the same time, I think the text is an answer, if not a rebuke, to those fans who’ve been decrying Charles Xavier as acting “out of character” or spinning conspiracy theories about how it’s actually the Maker or the like. This is clearly the same Charles Xavier, who has come to change his mind about his vision of society, because he’s seen how humans have responded over again. (I think it also gets at one of the problems of grounding the X-Men in a “dream” of harmonious co-existence when genre conventions prevent that dream from ever coming to fruition. Especially given how the serial nature of comics leads to repetitions of “anti-mutant hysteria,” it’s not surprising how much of the fandom have shifted to a “Magneto Was Right” perspective.)

“We wanted to save you -- and we did, many times -- but in return, all you did was stand by while evil men killed our children. Over 16 million of them. So there will be no gift...for you have not earned it. We will -- however -- let you pay for it. In return for two things, we will provide you with the means to have a better life. One without pain or suffering and full of hope -- and it will cost you so little.”

Here, instead of constrasts, the text and images are working in concert, with the art giving pointed examples of whom Xavier is referring to - pointing to the Avengers as “stand[ing] by while evil men killed our children” (given that the Avengers tend to specialize in threats to the planet, but have had a decidely mixed record when it comes to threats to mutants specifically, to say nothing of the fallout from the Scarlet Witch’s actions), or the Fantastic Four as having “not earned” his “gifts,” given that the FF haven’t exactly been at the forefront of applying scientific advancement to specifically mutant concerns. Similarly, Doctor Strange was willing to brave the dangers of hell to bring the city of Las Vegas back from the dead, but didn’t do the same for the victims of Genosha.

At the same time, it becomes clear that what Xavier is getting at isn’t just direct complicity in anti-mutant violence, but the broader systemic problems of human apathy towards anti-mutant violence. (Although, to be fair, he’s bringing this up as, essentially, emotional blackmail to justify his economic policies and his political demands.)

On a different topic, it’s interesting that Xavier is offering something of a utopia for humanity - “a better life...without pain or suffering and full of hope” - but may instead be planning to put humanity inside a walled garden where they will be cared for but kept out of mutant-kind’s way.

“First, you must accept the island of Krakoa as the nation-state of all mutants on this planet. We will happily go through the same process as any newly formed nation with the U.N, but there is an expectation that our sovereignty will be recognized. Second, all mutants -- by birth -- can claim Krakoan citizenship. And with that citizenship, we expect a period of amnesty. So that those who have been singled out as criminals -- or punished and imprisoned by humans -- can overcome man’s bias against mutants.”

So here we get Xavier’s main political ask: international recognition of Krakoan sovereignty, mutant citizenship, and amnesty for mutants in prison.

It’s clear from his tone, however, that Krakoa is going through the “same process as any newly formed nation” mostly as a formality, with “an expectation that our sovereignty will be recognized” - both because humanity needs what Xavier is offering and the unspoken fact of mutant power.

One thing that caught my eye is that the citizenship/amnesty isn’t just a one-for-one copy of Israel’s law of return; given the heavy focus on human judicial system’s “bias against mutants,” it also borrows heavily from the 1966 platform of the Black Panther Party, which called for “freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails,” because they had been denied a trial by jury of their peers.

“From this day forward, mutants will be judged by mutant law, not man’s. These are our simple demands, and they are not negotiable. In return for making our lives better, we will do the same for you. And if you find yourselves asking, who are these mutants to think they can dictate terms to us? We are the future. An evolutionary inevitability. The Earth’s true inheritors. You closed your eyes last night believing this world would be yours forever. That was your dream. And like mine...it was a lie. Here is a new truth: while you slept, the world changed.”

Here’s where we get a firm statement of mutant-kind’s manifest destiny, although how accurate a description of “evolutionary inevitability” it might be is up for debate, given what we learn about Moira’s Sixth Life in the next issue. No wonder that Magneto is eating it up, but Moira seems more ambivalent.

One important thing to note: as the art demonstrates, ORCHIS is very much in operation when Xavier makes his announcement. Rather than being a response to a more militant and separatist Krakoa, their motivations are much more driven by eugenic fears of demographic replacement, which is way less defensible.

Quiet Council of Krakoa Infographic:

In the wake of Powers of X #6, we now have to ask ourselves whether the (un-elected, possibly temporary) Quiet Council is, if not a Potemkin government (this would be a bit much, given what they get up to in this issue), but perhaps not the only locus of authority on Krakoa.

In addition to continuing the naturalistic themes of Krakoa, I wonder whether the Autumn/Winter/Spring/Summer designations suggest a kind of rotating chair system for a council in which all are supposedly equal...but who is primus inter pares? Xavier is acting as speaker, setting out the agenda and moving the action along, but he’s not the only voice in the room - a sign that he is sharing power to a significant extent.

So let’s talk about the membership of the Quiet Council:

Autumn: here we have the three ideological leaders whose ideas have led to the formation of Krakoa (although Apocalypse’s contributions are less public), and potentially Moira’s exes (although we never learn whether Moira was romantically involved with Magneto in her Eighth Life).

Winter: is “where we parked all of the problem mutants” other than Magneto. Mostly, this seems to be on the basis of both necessity and “better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” One question I have is whether Exodus, as someone who used to basically worship Magneto, is a vote that Magneto can count on, since clearly he and Sinister aren’t on the same page, and Mystique is very much on her own.

Spring: here is Emma’s quid-pro-quo, and a recognition that the economic and foreign policy might of the Hellfire Corporation has to be represented within the governing structure of Krakoa. Given the structure (down to the very seating), I have to think that Xavier and Magneto had always planned for the third vote that Emma demanded. It’s also quite notable in later deliberations how limited Sebastian Shaw’s influence is on the Council.

Summer: as we might expect, given who’s extending the invitations, Xavier gives three seats to “my children,” which gives Xavier at least four votes that he can count on - although Ororo, Jean, and Kurt clearly have their own minds and priorities. As the Krakoan national project continues, counting votes will only become more important.

Speaking of which, we can’t forget about Krakoa and Cypher. While not formally one of the twelve, they are nonetheless a powerful influence who have a voice if not a vote on the Council. And ultimately Krakoa’s voice is quite loud, because the whole enterprise cannot happen without its consent.

The Great Captains:

So here we see the division of civilian and military government, with the “great captains..assum[ing] the responsibility of defending the state” during “times of conflict or war.”

The more curious question to me is what counts as a “state-related excursion” - it would seem to cover X-Men missions like the one at Sol’s Forge and at the ORCHIS facility in X-Men #1, but does it mean that Kate Pryde wouldn’t be in charge of her own vessel if Bishop steps on board? Does it cover X-Force clandestine operations, or would plausible deniability be important? Who does X-Force report to?

Cyclops as first among equals makes sense, although it does raise a question of what happens when you have two other captains in the field.

So Bishop makes sense as a head of whatever the name of the agency in charge of resurrection-related investigations is (possibly X-Factor), but I was surprised to see him show up in Marauders #1.

I wonder what Magik’s role as a Captain is supposed to be, especially since it seems she’ll be heading off to space in New Mutants. Down the line, I’m going to guess she’ll be involved in Krakoa’s version of Inferno, but what’s her intended role supposed to be?

Finally, what’s Gorgon’s role as Captain supposed to be.

The First Laws of Our Nation

Before I get into the content of this section, I want to talk about the beautiful panelling here that starts wide, shrinks down to the nine panel grid as the political debate intensifies, and then opens up again once the decision is made.

Similarly, I like the use of the two key symbols: the X of the chairs and the sigil on the ground (secular authority), Krakoa’s face looming over them all like a heart tree (spiritual authority)

Given what we learn in Powers of X #6 about why various council members was chosen, describing three of the four seasons as “family, friends, and allies” is highly ironic.

Sabertooth is removed from watery confinement - which, if Krkaoa can just hold people in water bubbles for an extended period, why isn’t that the punishment used late? - and Kurt sets an appropriately Biblical tone by noting that “our first bit of business is the oldest kind on this planet...judgement.” (Appropriately for Kurt’s themes, the judgement in question also centers on how to punish the first murder in this new land, and ends with exile.) Also, for those of you keeping track of how much Krakoan justice accords with human conceptions of justice, I will point out that Sabertooth comes out of the bubble threatening his judges/jury, which is never a good look for a defendant.

So let’s talk about the trial:

One of the things that jump out to me immediately is that it’s interesting seeing Magneto in the role of an idealist - “this is the establishment of a nation...and I would have it be one of laws.” - whereas Xavier’s acting as the pragmatist, acknowledging that “I cannot say everyone here best represents the ideals of what any society should be based on,” but that they have to do the best with what they’ve got. Ultimately, I think this is a tension at the heart of all national projects.

Meanwhile, we get precisely three speakers in before conflict erupts: Sinister is a camp shit-stirrer who (publicly, anyway) really only partakes in the meeting to poke at Xavier and Exodus. Meanwhile, showing how little bloc voting there will be in the “problem mutant” camp, Exodus goes right for direct threats, prompting Sinister to propose criminalizing “mutant-on-mutant violence” (again, the political resonances here are obvious), not because he believes murder is wrong but because he’s enjoying trolling Exodus.

Showing how much Krakoan technology and the...unique worldviews of the Council members are going to produce new forms of political philosophy, Aopcalypse opposes Sinister’s motion, because he doesn’t think it should be “a crime to kill someone who cannot be killed,” since killing mutants is now a non-lethal way of testing them for social Darwinian worthiness.

This clearly does not track with Storm’s morality, and in a rare moment in HOXPOX where we get to see Jean Grey operating as a forceful political presence, she uses Storm’s interjection to pivot to an appeal to “the highest of ideals” (perhaps aiming her words at Magneto as well as her fellow X-Men) that it should be the “highest crime...killing someone who cannot come back.” (This is more in line with her more recent appearances in X-Men: Red.) Thus, the Second Law of Krakoa is established...without actually taking a vote. It seems that the Council operates on the basis that any proposal not actively objected to becomes law, which I imagine the political scientists out there have some thoughts on.

Before the law passes, Mystique raises the question of self-defense against human aggression (which fits her first X-appearance nicely). Showing how much his earlier views have shifted now that he’s operating in the context of a mutant nation-state, Magneto distinguishes between “murder” and killing “done in defense of a nation,” and while that question is formally tabled, it does suggest an exception for formal armed conflict at least in the founder’s intent.

Supporting my theory that he’s going to be the de-facto Chairman or Speaker, Xavier not only drives the agenda (although he’s not alone in this, Magneto is definitely acting in this capacity), but also makes sure to “call the question,” deciding when proposals become law as long as no one objects.

Another point wrt to the justness of this process: well before he’s found guilty, let alone sentence is passed, Sabertooth threatens murder and cannibalism against his judges...which isn’t a persuasive defense against murder charges (even if he’s just threatening the murder of mutants...which isn’t legal AFAWK, just not as illegal as the murder of humans.)

A nice bit of character work, and another rare rmoment where we see Jean’s power in action, Emma and Jean collaborate to silence Sabertooth’s ranting.

With the Second Law established, and Sabertooth’s trial technically in abeyance, the Council moves on to “any new business.”

As we might expect from a neoliberal robber baron, Sebastian Shaw calls for “property rights, wealth, currency,” to be legislated for next.

In an interesting turn of events, Doug Ramsey interjects that “Krakoa is alive. Not a place, or a biome -- a person.” Krakoan (real) property rights will have to have a decidedly non-capitalist orientation, because as we see further in Marauders #1, in addition to not having rights in the land, you have to ask for Krakoa’s consent in order to build grow a house.

In a development I didn’t see coming, Storm takes the position that that mutants can still own property, but “it has to be...out there...in the world. No one has said we have to run from it.” This is somewhat more capitalist than I might expect from Storm, but it does make sense that someone with her particular entanglements in the wider world would take a less isolationist position. This raises an interesting question: if mutants own property in a sovereign nation, and they decide to plant Habitat flowers on their property, does that make that property now part of Krakoa?

Doug’s position gets supported by Exodus (in a characteristically religious tone), and Xavier once again calls the question, creating the Third Law of Krakoa. For those of us keeping track of the colonial theme, it is interesting that this largely European-led nation state has taken a legal position on land ownership that’s much more associated with indigenous peoples.

Befitting her role as the true power in the Hellfire Trading Company, Emma Frost tables the discussion of economic legislation, due in no small part to it impinging on Krakoan diplomacy and international economic policy.

With a decidely mocking air aimed at her son, Mystique shifts the agenda from the secular to the sacred. After a moment’s thought, Kurt who fires back with the original “manifest destiny” out of Genesis (the first creation), and we get the First Law: “make more mutants.” In addition to continuing the very horny feel of the issue, this law raises a set of interesting questions about Krakoan attitudes with regard to the right to choose, access to family planning services, and sexuality - although as Hickman has pointed out, the implications of an egg-based system for (re)growing people point in completely different directions. Why assume Krakoa will follow human social mores in any area?

With the fundamental laws established, the Quiet Council can now decide how to apply them to Sabertooth:

In an example of how subtly powerful agenda-setting can be, Xavier makes the question of voting guilty or not guilty a question of “making an example...that no one is above mutant law” or “giving you one last chance.” Fitting his somewhat collectivist bent in Powers of X #1, he frames this question not in terms of the civil rights of “Mr. Creed,” but in terms of how the decision “benefits our new society.”

While it doesn’t quite settle the post facto question, Magneto argues that Sabertooth’s killing of the Damage Control guards violatted the “strict instructions” he was given when Magneto dispatched him on the mission, making it not merely a question of the First Law but also of obedience to the chain of command. Apocalypse, who knows something about managing an aggressive workforce, agrees.

Sinister and Exodus, for once, are on the same page, and while Mystique ultimately goes along with the emerging majority, her body posture and dialogue suggests a degree of internal conflict - after all, she was the one leading the mission, so some responsibility falls on her shoulders.

Turning to the X-Men side of the room: as befits his spiritual role, Kurt feels shame for not turning the other cheek, Jean takes a moment but is more assured, and of course Storm has no problem with a bit of divine judgement.

Continuing the trend of divisions among the Hellfire Club, Emma is all about getting rid of Sabertooth, while Sebastian goes along with the emerging consensus because he doesn’t care.

And once again proving that a defendant representing themselves is always a bad idea, before all the votes are in (and we don’t know whether Krakoan juries require a unanimous verdict) or the sentence is given out, Sabertooth threatens familicide of the Quiet Council. Not exactly a strong argument for leniency, since Sabertooth hasn’t exactly been pleading innocence at any point.

Finally, Doug asks Krakoa to bring the hammer down, and Sabertooth is dragged down to hell put into an oubliette. As Xavier explains, “we cannot send you back into the world” (because Sabertooth is a serial killer who can’t restrain himself, and Krakoa just promised the world it would hold mutants accountable for their actions), they won’t jail him because “we tolerate no prisons here” (this seems a technicality), they won’t kill him, because seemingly the “resurection protocols” are non-optional (which is interesting, given what we learn about Destiny in the next issue), and so they “exile him.”

One interesting question: given the resources available to them, why is it necessary to leave him “aware but unable to act on it” rather than have him be unconscious during stasis? My guess is that Xavier wants to motivate Sabertooth to “redeem” himself down the line.

And then finally, we get Xavier’s concluding statement, where I think Hickman’s views on nation-states (“it’s distasteful, I know, this business of running a nation”), the proper attitudes one should have about holding and exercising political power (”I pray we never get used to it...never grow cold from it...never learn to love it”), and even parenthood come through.

Just Look At What We’ve Made:

But in the meantime, the council emerges to what almost everyone has analogized to the Return of the Jedi celebration: not only do we see bonfires and fireworks and a riot of color everywhere, but we see mutants flying around, using their powers, for the first time really feeling that they can live as mutants without fear for their lives.

As the Quiet Council walk down the steps, we see some of the reasons why and the consequences: the Five party as one, but near them we see the formerly dead raising a glass with the living. And echoing Magneto’s earlier statements about how Krakoa will change the way mutants see their own powers, we see Siryn and Dazzler combining their powers for the purposes of culture rather than warfare or high tech.

Xavier’s final message is that the Quiet Council will work like hell to ensure that the next generation of mutants “sleep in soft fields of lush green, staring at the stars and dreaming of a future where they hold those stars in their hands.” Once again, a sign that Krakoa’s manifest destiny lies in space, a common theme of Hickman’s from his FF run. As this happens, we see three of the O5 goofing around (I’m surprised how many people didn’t notice that Bobby had frozen Warren’s drink while he wasn’t looking), and Exodus leading storytime with the children as Sinister watches in the background.

But that’s not what people are really here for - as nice as it is to see Broo and Synch and Skin and Pixie, what people really care about is the Jean/Logan/Scott panel. As the now infamous architectural diagram in X-Men #1 makes very clear, this is not a case of a mere open marriage: the most famous romantic triangle in X-Men history is now a throuple, founded on the principle of beer and tummy rubs.

Almost as exciting for much of the fandom is the next page, where Jean goes to make peace with Emma while Scott hangs out with Alex. One of the big questions going on is what Emma’s role is in the polycule, since she doesn’t seem to be living at the Summer House. My guess is that Emma is “part of it” (to quote David S. Pumpkins), but may only be with Scott, and definitely would refuse point-blank to share communal living quarters with Logan. We will have to wait for more evidence to be sure.

And so we end with Xavier and Magneto looking out over the celebration, taking a moment to feel (rightly?) proud of “what we have made.” And yet, all is not well, because Apocalypse, the third ideological force who (through Moira) helped to create Krakoa, broods on what he lost when Krakoa was born.

Krakoa Infographic:

With Krakoa now extant as a nation-state, we get one more infographic...that shows us that there is a Krakoa Atlantic to go along with Krakoa Pacific. This points to an important truth about this new polity - it would be a mistake to see Krakoa as an island nation like Genosha or Utopia, because the nation of Krakoa exists wherever the physical entity of Krakoa exists. It’s in the Pacific and the Atlantic, it’s on the moon, it’s on Mars, it’s everywhere a Krakoan flower has been planted. Which makes it a post-geographic power.

So what’s on Krakoa Atlantic?

The Pointe is one of Xavier’s Cerebro back-up locations, so that an attack on Krakoa Pacific won’t destroy the database.

Danger Island is the X-Men’s new and expanded training facility.

Transit allows for instant transportation between Pacific and Atlantic to allow the X-Men to respond to a threat to either island or cradle, and possibly a final keep to fall back to if everything else is lost.

And finally we get one last map of Krakoa (All), and there’s a lot we don’t know about these locations:

The House of X and the House of M are Xavier and Magneto’s residences, and the location of one of the Cerebro “cradles.”

The Arbor Magna is the big tree where the Resurrection system is located in/on.

The Arena we don’t know anything about, but from the name it suggests that it’s a combat-oriented location, either for training or for entertainment purposes.

The Akademos Habitat is almost certainly Krakoa’s educational facility that Jean mentions back in House of X #1, but the fact that it’s a Habitat is interesting, because a Krakoan Habitat is a ”self-sutained environment” of its own that is “part of the interconnected consciousness of Krakoa,” and I had thought that having a Habitat on Krakoa itself, as opposed to one out on the moon or Mars would be redundant. My guess is that this is meant to provide an additional layer of safety to the next generation of mutants.

We saw Transit back in House of X #1, this Transit location is the Grand Central Station for Greater Krakoa, linking all gateway locations together. Yet another sign that, for Krakoa, their nation has a different conception of distance.

The Oracle is, I would guess, probably one of the Krakoan Systems, most likely either Sage’s or Beast’s part of the system.

I don’t know what the Grove is supposed to be, but given its proximity to the Akademos Habitat, I think it’s supposed to be a living space, possibly just for the young and possibly not.

The Cradle, it turns out, is just a cradle.

The Resevoir could be that lagoon we saw back in House of X #1, which would make sense if the Wild Hunt is a nature preserve, because animals love to congregate at watering holes.

The Carousel’s name suggests it’s an entertainment facility.

We know what Bar Sinister is from its last appearance; it turns out that Sinister recreated his little island Edwardian eugenics nightclub on Krakoa. Interesting that it’s locsated so close to Transit; maybe Sinister wants to be able to make a quick getaway.

Speaking of the fruits of faustian bargains, it turns out that the quid-pro-quo for becoming the economic engine of a nation is that the Hellfire Trading Company gets a whole Hellfire Bay to itself as its headquarters.

Red Keep is almost certainly Kate Pryde’s new pad, which is conveniently ocean-ajacent for our newest mutant pirate privateer queen.

Blackstone is Sebastian Shaw’s Gilded Age “gentleman’s” club.

The White Palace is naturally Emma’s boudoir, complete with buzzsaws and spikes.

The unnamed location 18 is clearly Moira’s No-Space.

#xmen #xmen meta #house of x #spoilers #hoxpox

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tak4hir0 · 4 years

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And back to the UK, it’s cold here! In brief, I admit I had a blast at Dreamforce this year! It was great to: 1) Showcase HIVE and the teams that I’m doing quite a bit of work with, at the developer keynote. Which had a whole chapter as part of the technology announcements for the year, which I was working with to get it ready with the product and evangelist teams before the event. One of which was Alba Rivas from the dreamOle team that has recently moved on to the Salesforce Evangelist team, it was so nice when I got a whatsapp from her early on in the prep for the keynote Although it really is great to see oneself on the big screen like this I wanted to showcase the team, so I managed to sneak in a little sign. I wonder if Wade thought for a second… oh dear another protester! 2) Laura Walker (who I also work with) opened the Admin keynote, high five-ing Parker Harris on to the stage! And Michael Kolodner, who by the way I had the pleasure to discover is such a gamer! We may be on to something about board games at Dreamforce… 3) Recording the day before Dreamforce a Pluralsight course with Don Robins, Agile for Salesforce coming up in couple months for the #SFPlayByPlay series. It’s a pre #Df19 wrap! Last batch of 2019 #SfPlayByPlay in the can: @Inescapinezka on Agile with #Salesforce and @jan_vdv demystifying #CPQ. Browse all in the PxP gallery https://t.co/xFIYkLxh5J & follow me on @Pluralsight to get notifications https://t.co/ANtDQdrMB9 pic.twitter.com/3uvYV5b5A7 — Don Robins (@donrobins) November 19, 2019 4) Having my crazy cards selling out at the DreamStore. And it’s OFFICIAL: #Dreamforce is going to be epic! My recently released #GAME https://t.co/Tpaf59M8ZY IS @ the #Dreamstore @ #DF19. For #agile teams to selfasses, improve & have fun! Thankyou to make this happen #Agile & #trailblazercommunity. #BNT adventures. I’m over the moon! pic.twitter.com/WAz6hrn1dL — Ines Garcia (@Inescapinezka) November 17, 2019 5) Also sharing some content about Release Readiness, Appexchange and digital nomads, Building applications in the Salesforce platform workshop and a Lightning roundtable. … enough bragging. But seriously it was awesome! Now, I thought to ping some product highlights and share knowledge on what’s coming: Firstly, it was a breath of fresh air during the main keynote to openly acknowledge that one uses more things than just Salesforce. (That statement includes AWS Trailhead modules available now and Amazon Connect as a strategic partnership). Salesforce Economy update is that it keeps growing and growing, so let’s bring people in! So we all can be ready to fill those opportunities with willing, capable and prepared professionals. The little device running Einstein Voice (I think this is Amazon under-the-hood and with connection to Service Cloud, you can build skills to power apps too) made it to the big stage as the announcement of the year, even managed to have a section in every single keynote. The @Salesforce and @AWScloud strategic alliance is expanding to include ways to achieve customer service, learn skills, and make Einstein Voice Builder compatible with @alexa99 and other voice assistants. See everything else announced at #DF19 https://t.co/8rixQcqbYT pic.twitter.com/JO7JQjkg3s — Dreamforce (@Dreamforce) November 25, 2019 Tableau was part of the main keynote, but in my opinion with a very poor showcase and demo. Throughout the conference I had many confused conversations on where does this sit, including from Salesforce Employees. So impatiently watching the space to find out more. More and more on Customer 360 Truth Which connects data from across sales, service, marketing, commerce etc. to create a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer. Revamp of the Salesforce mobile app, and one of which in my mind must be related to the ‘Trailhead Go‘ a separate app to do modules on the go… ahem this is for questions tick-box not actually doing hands-on exercises. But it’s a starter! There was the announcement that Marketing Cloud will run on Microsoft Azure, so hopefully this will enable other things like: as customer you could find your own logs, be less clunky and have sandboxes? Those are my hopes but not quick ones to deliver. From Marketing Cloud side of things there was another good product release in my mind: the embedded forms within emails I think is pretty cool (maybe an outcome from previous acquisition, I think). Watch the dev keynote! but few quick notes: announcement of Evergreen (serverless functions and elastic compute), Lightning Full sandboxes within minutes!, Data policies and Masking across environments, local development (beta), Open sourcing Lightning base Components… BOOM! Permission set groups another layer for separation of concerns, I think we may need to do some migration from profiles to at least permission set at some point soon. (Conspiracy theory disclaimer: that page layouts will go away) With the announcement of Dynamic Forms for record pages, you can go as granular level of 1 field, that is not only display area but dynamic visibility on user and other value within the record. But is not all ‘happy clappy’, the True to the Core session was good too. It felt to me a bit too short as a big part was to explain the announcement of the IdeaExchange, which is basically a revamp where not all points count the same, so when voting for new features you would do it as ‘a product manager’ with 100 coins to distribute on and how things are important to you. Check it out it’s live already: https://ideas.salesforce.com/s/prioritization There was a really honest session on ‘open conversation of DX’ I leave here a snapshot on what the product team is aware they need to sort out: On top of all of this, I had some incredible conversations with people, some deep and even some non-Salesforce related (!), certainly quality over quantity. Which with Dreamforce madness this can easily be a challenge. So a big thank you for being part of this Dreamforce to remember! I certainly missed my peeps Chris & Mike throughout, I kept sending them silly stuff… sigh!

#Salesforce Weekly

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backstorywithdanalewis · 4 years

Text

QAnon Conspiracy podcast link https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/4783994

jason blazakis: (00:00) It's exploded, unfortunately, via social media and it has inspired individuals to carry out acts of violence. dana lewis - host : (00:13) Hi everyone. And welcome to our 20th edition of backstory. I'm your host, Dana Lewis. This backstory is about a right w dana lewis - host : (00:13) ing conspiracy group that got started online. It's called QNR. There is nothing funny about paranoid conspiracy theories winging their way across the internet. They influence people to think things like COVID-19 is a virus created by the so-called dark state in America to remove president Trump from the white house or Democrats like Hillary Clinton or part of a child sex ring, torturing children. There may be hundreds of thousands of Q Anon followers, including the guy who recently drove his truck with weapons through the Gates of Rido hole prime minister Trudeau's residence in Ottawa, Canada, and in 2016, a man armed with a rifle, stormed comet ping pong pizza in Washington, believing the Democrats were running a child sex ring there. And then there was the case of a man who murdered a reputed mafia boss on Staten Island, who now says in court, he was a follower of Q Anon. And if you look closely, you will see Q posters and t-shirts at Trump rallies. Speaker 1: (01:25) A curious theme popped up at the president's campaign style rally last night signs t-shirts stating we are Q or Q Anon. Speaker 2: (01:34) Some even think Trump is Q and he seems to speak to his disciples. Yeah, Speaker 3: (01:40) This represents what store, what store mr. President, dana lewis - host : (02:08) Dangerous stuff. So here we are in an election year and the FBI identifies conspiracy theories as potential domestic terrorism threats, specifically citing Q Anon, a group that believes there is a deep state working against president Trump. The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories, very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve into a modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts. And that's why on this edition of backstory, we are doing a Q story because there are people running for Congress who are followers of Q Anon. I kid you not like Marjorie Taylor green, a Georgia Republican, unknown : (02:54) You know, about the Q movement. Are you familiar with what that is? I Speaker 4: (03:00) Am familiar with that. So I'm very familiar with it though. Do you think he was a bad thing or, or is it just sort of, I mean, what's your opinion, honestly, everything that I've heard of Q I hope that I hope that this is real Speaker 5: (03:13) Then Lauren bull bird who just won the GOP nomination in Colorado's third district. Speaker 4: (03:19) The other thing that Q says, and this is the stuff that we don't, we just don't want to think about. Um, and many Americans don't want to know about, but Q is saying that they participate in pedophilia and spirit cooking and spirit cooking. They had that spirit cooking dinner. That was something else that came out in those. Um, John Podesta, WikiLeaks email re release. Remember that Q is trying to tell people on these forums unfortune, and he's trying to tell people the truth. dana lewis - host : (03:50) So to understand whether Q Anon is a cult or a new religion or a widespread mental disorder, this Jason Blazakis written a piece for the Soufan intelligence group on QAnon. And he joins me now from California. How are you Jason? I'm doing well. Um, Dana, it's, it's good to be here. I'm on your show. The Q in the Anon, meaning the Anon is anonymous and who the heck is a cute, yeah, that's a, that's a, it's a great question. Even the people who call themselves a nons are essentially followers of Kew. Don't really know they have a, there's a lot of speculation ranging from president Donald J. Trump could be Q, um, John F K a, um, um, Kennedy jr. Um, didn't really die in a plane accident. He could be cute. Um, he could be a guy and, um, the government with a military intelligence background with, uh, accused security clearance, which means, you know, when you have Q clearance and the governments, you have nuclear, um, access secrets, uh, it could be any number of individuals. jason blazakis: (05:02) Um, you know, who could be que, um, you know, I have my own theory, my own theory, which hasn't really been written about. And I, I may write something on it later is that it's, it's part of a large disinformation campaign, um, organized by a state to stir up trouble. Um, and, and the way that Q communicates, um, certainly has led to a lot of individuals becoming adherence to, uh, this, this movement, a state, a state, I have some concern that it could be part of a state disinformation effort. And if you look at the timing of the creation of cue, um, it was created, um, in essentially the first queue and non post was in 2017. Um, not that long after, um, president Trump's election, less than a year after it. And, and, uh, the focus of, of Q is to ensure that, uh, president president Trump stays in power as he does battle against a deep state network of individuals who are trying to use SERP his power. dana lewis - host : (06:05) And you're going to tell me it's another Russia conspiracy? jason blazakis: (06:08) I wouldn't go there yet. Um, but I do have some concerns that at a minimum, at a minimum, um, there are States like Russia who may be amplifying the messages of the individuals who feel that they are Q Anon followers or adherence, um, making it look like it's a movement larger than it really is. Um, but one thing I hope to do, and I wear many hats. I work at the Soufan center as you introduced me, Dana as a research fellow, but I also am a professor at the Middlebury Institute of international studies in Monterey, California is we're going to start studying the syntax of the messages related to, um, Q Anon, um, when Q and nom posts a new message. Um, it's called a huge drop. Um, generally, um, in the past he has posted in, um, various, uh, uh, freedom boards, like four Chan, eight Chan, eight Kuhn, and then study sort of the, that transition in terms of language, um, how it's evolved, um, to get any kind of insights as to whether or not, um, the syntax could be traced back, um, with Stickley, um, perhaps to another country, maybe this is an individual, um, that's publishing, um, in writing that that is not really using, um, English or does not have English as a first language. Speaker 5: (07:21) So this is one hypothesis I have that I'm really interested in exploring here. Um, dana lewis - host : (07:28) Why Jason, are you taking your time because you're a serious analyst to write about this group and why am I taking my time? Cause I think I'm a serious correspondent to broadcast something about them. Speaker 5: (07:39) I mean, they have suddenly been held Speaker 6: (07:44) With serious regard by a lot of different agencies, including the FBI. Speaker 5: (07:48) Yeah, absolutely. So I guess a little background about myself. I have been in the federal government for 20 years, I guess Q a non folks will automatically say, whatever I have to say is, is null and void because of a significant trust they have with individuals who worked in the federal bureaucracy. You're another one of the deep state. Yeah. They said, yeah. And I left the DC deep state. So maybe that makes me a little bit better than those who remained in. Right. But I worked in the counterterrorism Bureau at the state department studying terrorists. Um, you know, whether it's ISIS, Al Qaeda, um, understanding who the individuals are within these networks. So the U S government could sanction them. Um, and to sanction individual or organization, you have to study them deeply. Um, so I've always been interested in extremist movements. Um, you know, 10 and a half years, I was following counter related issues, primarily focusing on, um, uh, Salafi jihadist groups. jason blazakis: (08:40) But in 2016, the British government actually made a decision to designate a white supremacist group called national action. And it was from that point forward, I started looking at the more of the radical right, mill you in which Q Anon certainly sits. Um, I've become more in Q Anon. Um, given that background, um, more recently over the last couple years, um, because it's attracted a very wide following, um, it's exploded unfortunately, um, via social media. Um, and it has inspired individuals to carry out, um, acts of violence. Um, one was the situation in New York where an individual killed a mafia boss, um, because, uh, he felt that he needed to do justice. Um, by carrying out that attack against the mafia bus, you had a situation and, um, the Hoover dam area in Arizona where a Q Anon follower, um, parked his vehicle and blocked the bridge, um, and he was armed. jason blazakis: (09:37) And then you, the more recent incident showing next to a non has gone overseas, where you had an individual who was consuming, um, to a non content, um, and people could argue, um, other experts say, well, he wasn't that actively involved in Q Anon. He only had a few posts. Um, but that individual carried out, um, a ramming, um, attack against the prime minister of Canada premise or Trudeau's house in Rideau. Um, and thankfully, um, he was stopped. He couldn't do harm. Um, he was well armed, um, but 30 minutes before he actually did that attack, um, where he worked on Instagram, he reposts that one of the conspiracy theories that, um, QNR has put forward before talking about so-called event two Oh one, talking about a pandemic, talking about COVID and how all of this is being created by essentially, um, a deep state, what bill Gates in cahoots. Speaker 5: (10:31) Right. So, um, for me, I'm running to blink my eyes fester and fester Jason, as we get lost in the mud here with this, but I mean, they're pretty incredible events. And then there was one with pizza gate, right? He's one of the highest profile one. What would you absolutely. So pizza gate, um, predated Q Anon, but a lot of people point to pizza gate as being sort of the, the father of the, the Q Anon, um, conspiracy and, and pizza. Gate's really important to understand in the context of Q Anon, because what Q Anon about is about as a conspiracy theory directly relates to the pizza gate conspiracy. So you had, um, an individual who was within the, um, um, uh, Hillary Clinton campaign who had essentially, um, his emails hacked. Um, his emails were published on WikiLeaks and 2016. Um, and in those emails, he's talking to the owner of a Washington DC pizzeria called comet ping pong. And in those, um, exchanges, um, there are discussions between the proprietor of comment thing, pop pizza, and, um, the campaign, um, individual Podesta, um, within the Clinton campaign. And they're talking about pizza, they're talking about toppings and there are conspiracy theorists looked and examined this language and felt that somehow that's code words for children, um, who are being exploited by adults essentially, um, Speaker 6: (12:06) That they believed that Hillary Clinton was deep in bold. Then Democrats were deep involved in holding children hostage and pedophiles and be assaulted. And that allegedly this, this man came to believe that that was taking place in the basement of the pizza store. Speaker 5: (12:23) Correct. So they're, they're the, the, the final thinking was essentially as in, at punk pizza, there is a basement where children are being held. There are part of a, um, you know, being captive part of a pedophilia ring run by, um, people like Hillary Clinton and Podesta, um, in this man from North Carolina was reading all this online and all of this was being discussed online and it felt he that take it upon himself morally to do something about that. So he traveled from Carolina to Washington, DC, armed [inaudible], um, started shooting, um, went downstairs to the basement, um, and didn't see any children. Um, there were no children there. Um, it was clearly, um, false information, Speaker 6: (13:04) Got his weapon, as I understand it kind of with the revelation of, Oh gosh, this actually isn't taking place. Right. But exactly the fact is that people like that on the internet come to believe some of these wild conspiracy things from Q a Speaker 5: (13:20) Oh, absolutely. People read this, not just individuals who are associated with pizza gate, which predated Q and on, but afterwards you had individuals who actually have taken action. And this is part of the reason why the FBI and the Phoenix field office, um, Q and on to be a domestic terrorism threat. Um, and I, I think for good reason, because individuals, particularly during a pandemic when people are trapped at home, um, they're reading information online about all these conspiracies. They feel helpless. And if they have some kind of secret understanding, um, which maybe these conspiracies, um, give them that they have some kind of secret understanding about this, like conspiracy has happening by the deep state, they could do something about it, um, because they now are empowered and they can take power back from these two are running the world, Speaker 6: (14:08) Be clear, Q Anon says there isn't really a pandemic. It's a concern. Well, I shouldn't say that they say it's a conspiracy created by the left, by the Democrats against president Trump. Speaker 5: (14:21) So you have individuals most certainly, um, uh, based on my research, a preponderance of individuals who are adherence or say that they believe Q Anon, um, guidance that believe that there is a plan demic. There was even a movie made by Q and non followers, um, called pandemic that said this was a stage by the new world order and people like George Soros, um, to essentially, um, you know, take power, um, and to eliminate eMoney enemies. Um, but in terms of the, the actual Q and on, um, the individual who posts, um, Q drops as they're called, um, essentially posts on the various boards, he's under like little coded messages from yeah. Coded messages that Anon, um, adherence, decode. He said that COVID-19 was real. Um, but it was a good thing be prepared for it. Um, and I think the thinking behind that as many decoders believe is that either Genesis for the beginning of what a non calls, the great awakening, many Speaker 6: (15:24) People are going to get this great awakening. And we're talking about a few dozen people on the internet, are you, Speaker 5: (15:30) And I know it's impossible to tell, but, you know, take a guess just it in the tens of thousands, or is it, I think, I think we're at least in the tens of thousands now, there's, um, you know, individuals who are essentially what they call it like red pilled, um, people who have seen the light, um, they see that there is first and foremost, a deep state that exists that is trying to, um, work as a secret cabal, um, to, uh, you serve the president, president Trump, who is essentially the white Knight of this, this movement. Um, and on the second part of this thinking is that if this great awakening occurs, once you see and become enlightened, um, there's going to be a battle for the soul of, of, of America. And you have to do something about it. And is there potentially an armed battle? Speaker 5: (16:18) Um, I look at Qanan as a cult, um, and cults, particularly Paul step leave. And apocalyptical like thinking, um, you know, things like a great awakening where there could be a battle between good and evil, um, you know, white hats versus black hats in the context of how [inaudible] describes them. Um, white hats being essentially the Q Anon followers, um, within the government who are doing battle against the black hats who are, um, sickness and part of this deep state conspiracy. Um, whenever you had to think about the world and Manichaean terms like human on puts forward, there is this definite risk of, of turning to a via apocalyptical like scenario. And if president Trump were to say lose, or it looks like he will lose, my fear is that you have to, and on adherence who may try to take, um, you know, matters in their own hands and carry out acts of violence to try to stop the, the, from the state to make sure the great awakening occurs or to stop those who are trying to stop the great awakening, Speaker 6: (17:16) Like the guy who went into the pizza store, they have been convinced, and they've been consuming this stuff Speaker 5: (17:23) They'll believe that this wasn't a fair election, but in fact it was something done by the deep state and they have, they have got to stand up maybe with weapons and fight it. Absolutely. And, and even, um, Q post on COVID-19, he said, um, this is going to be used by the Democrats to create COVID-19, to create mass hysteria. Um, and it's all of an eye towards the election. So Hugh himself is talking about COVID-19 in the, of the election, how Democrats could use it as essentially a bulwark against president Trump, um, and therefore making the election look illegal. And at the same time, you have the rhetoric of the president, of course, saying that, um, the, the president poll numbers aren't as bad as they're saying. Um, but if you have say male and voting, um, which would be a responsible thing to do during COVID-19, um, that that's somehow cast as a dispersion upon the possible results of the election. So I think the president himself unfortunately, has played in the hands of some of these two non followers by saying that the election itself is already perhaps not credible because of COVID-19. And because of the ideas behind Malin voting, which he said will lead to fraud. And if there's fraud related to the election, then president Trump loses because of fraud. That's going to be very upsetting to Q a non followers. Speaker 6: (18:37) So Jason, does the president unknowingly unwittingly plate Q a non followers, or do you think that he is aware of QA, Speaker 5: (18:48) Um, and actually dropped some Speaker 6: (18:51) Things that may benefit him in, in with certain things? Speaker 5: (18:55) Well, I'll tell you, Q Anon thinks the president is messaging secretly to them. Um, I have no evidence that the president believes that he somehow was secretly messaging to Q Anon, but if there were a couple of tweets, right, one was quarry, we had over a hundred team. The other one used something about with his friends in the UK who supported the UK and the queen, and saw that in Q Anon is a coated drunk. No, absolutely the Q and M people that see how you use quarantine and how you made us a hand gesture that looked like a queue. Um, but he has indeed retweet it. Um, Q Anon followers over a hundred plus times. I think last night I read through, um, media was maybe up to 145 times, um, Donald Trump jr. Eric Trump have tweeted and retweeted memes, um, and, um, other Q and non follower rhetoric before. So they're, they're, I think they're, they're not doing it because necessarily there are two and on followers, or believe in Q I think they're not just being careful with our social media feeds and then two and non followers, you know, being the conspiracy serious, they are read something into it. I'm like the president is signaling something special to us. Um, Speaker 6: (20:08) I understand that though, that sounds pretty sinister to me. Speaker 5: (20:12) They have retweeted tweets from Q and non followers and the president, I'm not Q and himself, but QNR followers adherence people on social media who believe in Q, um, and, and the president has retweeted them. Um, so, you know, he probably doesn't know that he's retreating Q and non followers. Um, I don't think he's being necessarily careful about what he retweets. Um, clearly he has a, uh, a capacity to, to retweet many things, um, later, which he has removed or deleted his own tweets, um, or his campaign team or the waste house have disassociated from those tweets. Or they've said that that's not really what he was meaning. Um, so I, I don't think tensional on purpose, um, by the press. I think it's unintentional, but the, the problem is because he's not careful about what he says over social media. It is really riling up these individuals who are not followers and then believe essentially in bolsters. The theory is that somehow president Trump is, um, perhaps to himself or trying to motivate, um, to a non people to support him in some fashion. And there is a political element to this too, beyond the Trump's. Um, you know, there are, um, last count, there was a journalist who said that there was more than 66 Q and non followers running for various state and federal offices. So you have this normalization that's occurring with Q Anon as well. And that makes it really dangerous. How many more than 60? Speaker 6: (21:45) I mean, I'm shocked by that. And I, I was reading in the Atlantic and they, by the way, they didn't call it a cult. They call it a new religion, Speaker 5: (21:55) The kind of religion. Yeah. There's religious overtones to it. Absolutely. They think it'll be adopted current at least Speaker 6: (22:02) 35 current or former congressional candidates have embraced Q according to an online tally, but a nonprofit media matters. Speaker 5: (22:12) Yeah. Yeah. And I think that same journalist who has continued to study this as they put it at 66 and there's another 30 plus who, um, are running for office right now, um, many, uh, lost already. Um, but people who were running to be become members of Congress. And I think there was one member, um, potentially, um, one individual that may get elected, um, out of Georgia memory serves, I forget her name off the top of my head, but you may actually end with a scenario where you have, um, a que non follower in Congress. Um, and that's the danger of, of this movement, um, that somehow it becomes more normalized. Um, a lot of people call it a fringe movement, but slowly, um, you have more and more people reading, um, consuming, watching videos like planned DEMEC who actually believe what's being written, um, and then may become followers themselves, or somehow by virtue of passing along this video to other people in their Facebook group, um, it becomes more of a normal thing. Speaker 5: (23:11) Um, and, and that's really dangerous storing a pandemic. You're taking it very seriously. Oh, absolutely. Um, you know, there are people who, who are trapped. Like I said, who are, we are living in uncertain times? Um, when you feel uncertain, you feel powerless. Um, conspiracy theories have resonance in ways in which can motivate individuals to join the movement or at worst, um, you know, become, um, an entity or individual who carries out violence on behalf of a moon because of something they saw online. Um, you know, pedophilia is a terrible thing. Um, and if people actually believe some of the things going on, like the most recent conspiracy theory put forward by Q Anon that somehow Wayfair the furniture company was selling essentially, um, material. Um, and, and, um, for really high prices, $13,000 for a stack of cabinets, um, people are saying, well, um, that's some part of a ring of, of children being sold by, by Wayfair, which was completely wrong. And, but it took off on social media and had an impact on Wayfair and they had to respond. So, um, you see this danger, if you actually think a child's in danger, um, you want to do something about it. And if you believe that conspiracy, um, you may actually do something about it and there was no, there, there, and that's the challenge with, with Q and on, and, and the threat it poses, please, Louisiana, Speaker 6: (24:34) Like wildfire through the internet, um, over, over several years now. Right. So now you, um, from, from Reddit to Facebook, to Twitter, Twitter now has taken down some 7,000 accounts, um, linked to Q Anon. Do you think that that's a good idea? Is it going to do anything or is this just sort of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted? Speaker 5: (25:00) Um, I think unfortunately it's more the latter, but I will say it was a good decision, um, to take down, um, in authentic, um, Twitter accounts and handles associated with the Q and M movement. And I think, um, in addition to taking down those 7,000 and removing them outright, um, probably I think I read 150,000 we're, we're limited in some way as well. That's a positive action Reddit, um, was the first out there in 2018 to take action against Q Anon. Um, particularly those that were, uh, putting out conspiracies on the subreddit board known as our conspiracy board. Um, and then you have YouTube actually I noticed about three or four weeks ago, and this could be happening much longer than that, but [inaudible] videos now have underneath of them a box that says like, this is a far right conspiracy, um, which it is, and it's good. Speaker 5: (25:49) They have that fact checking box. And then I think we probably both read that Facebook may be taking a decision soon, um, to remove to a non-related, um, groups as well, um, to non is all over Facebook, um, private groups and public groups in the context, from my perspective, these are good decisions because these are mainstream social media platforms that touch so many more people than say four Chan, um, eight Chan or eight Q and ever have. Um, so you're, you're I think, inherently making their reach, um, less impactful by taking those actions. My fear is though, um, it's, it's a little too late, um, and they may migrate to another service, uh, and, and the, the, the conspiracy will continue on and particularly problematic is the fact that they may have a member of Congress or people on state assemblies in the United States who are, um, politicians who could be advocating things, um, from a policy perspective that are problematic. Speaker 5: (26:44) Um, so yeah, I think again, barn door, um, was closed after a horse left. Like you said, Dana. Well, I mean, that's always been the intelligence debate with, uh, terrorism. Do you, do you allow these things to kind of bubble at the surface so that you can monitor them or do you pull them off and push these people underground? And it makes it much more difficult to get after some of the more extremists that, that may be contemplating violence. Yeah. Now that is the dilemma. You remove them from open source platforms in which you could observe them. And they go to the encrypted communications in which they're more difficult to track that is, that is the dilemma. From my perspective, I'd rather have fewer individuals as part of a movement, um, and have a more difficult time monitoring them. Um, you know, you still can go into those encrypted apps. Speaker 5: (27:40) You can break the encryption, you can insert an individual who pretends to be part of a group and it gets bad at, um, online and can still, you know, infiltrate that encrypted network. Right. Um, in, in that chat group where if it's telegram that joined that telegram group. So there are still law enforcement tools, um, time honor, that can infiltrate in groups that are more secretive in nature. Um, from my perspective, I'd rather just have them fewer have fewer recruits and members in adherence. And I think that's why I think the actions taken by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, um, Silicon Valley writ large like Reddit's action in 2018. It's very important because it can limit the, the number of individuals who are consuming this information. I just want to also add tech talk has unfortunately become another Avenue in which the pizza gate conspiracy, which a lot of people thought was dead in 2016, had a second life because it took off, um, and tick tock again. Speaker 5: (28:34) And then tick talk actually made a decision to, I think, remove the hashtag, um, pizza gate, um, remove some of the other Q Anon hashtags. And that's really important because tech talk is now sort of the viral social media platform. And it seems like they're taking early action against that, um, proliferation over their platform, which is a good thing. Jason Blazek is with the Soufan center, mind blowing stuff, and really intriguing. And thank you so much for taking the time to kind of lay this out for me. No, my pleasure Dana is a pleasure to be with you and to be with your listeners in may Speaker 2: (29:13) Follower of Q Anon was arrested in New York, attempting to assassinate democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, a woman from Illinois armed with a dozen knives. When Trump tweets about the dark state, he feeds conspiracy theories that are not harmless Spiricin theories and their close cousin, fake news are socially destructive and dangerous, especially for those with mental illnesses. You and I will no be hearing more about Q and even if we don't care to I'm Dana Lewis, thanks for listening. Please subscribe to backstory and share it. We need your support to make this grow, and we'll talk to you again soon. [inaudible].

#https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/4783994 #jasonblazakis soufancenter backstorywithdanalewis @danalewis qanon

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

https://www.newsweek.com/2019/01/18/donald-trump-mafia-connections-decades-later-linked-mob-1285771.html?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true

This is a fascinating read on Donald Trump's long held ties to the Mafia going back many years and may continue thru today.

#TrumpCrimeFamily #TrumpCrimeSyndicate #Mueller #MuellerInvestigation #TrumpRussiaConspiracy #PutinsPuppet #impeachtheMFNow

Jeff Stein's latest, promoted by Trump’s outbursts about “rats” and “flipping.”

DONALD TRUMP'S MAFIA CONNECTIONS: DECADES LATER, IS HE STILL LINKED TO THE MOB?

By Jeff Stein | Thursday, January 10, 2019 - 07:10 |

NEWSWEEK | Posted January 10, 2019 |

On a rainy day in the spring of 1976, FBI Special Agent Myron Fuller took the New York subway to Brooklyn to interview Donald Trump. The future tycoon, about 30, was just getting his real estate career off the ground, aided by secret payments from his father. Fuller found Trump working out of a temporary office in a double-wide trailer on a muddy construction site. “There were boards covering wet dirt, in lieu of cement walkways,” Fuller recalls to Newsweek. He knocked on the door and went in. “His secretary sat there by the entrance, and Trump was a door away from there.” Ushered in, he found Trump sitting behind his desk. The businessman did not get up to welcome the agent. “He never came around, and I do not recall him shaking my hand,” Fuller says.

The FBI agent was carrying out an errand for the bureau’s Miami office, to follow up on a tip that mobsters had asked Trump to front for them in a purchase of the Fontainebleau hotel. Once a beachside favorite of movie stars and the rich, the hotel was also a notorious hangout for Mafia kingpins like Sam Giancana, who famously met with CIA agents in the hotel’s Boom Boom Room to plot the assassination of Fidel Castro. But in 1976, the Fontainebleau was teetering on bankruptcy, and the mobsters needed a straw man to buy it.

Fuller asked Trump a simple question. “Why would your name come up as a possible buyer for them?” The future president of the United States responded calmly that “he did not know.” He had “heard about” some people wanting him to buy it, he told Fuller, but not much more. Fuller, with nothing else to go on, closed his notebook. Trump summoned his limo driver to take the agent back to the city.

More than 40 years later, Fuller, who gained fame for the FBI bribery sting dramatized in the movie American Hustle, chuckles ruefully about the encounter, reported here for the first time. “Seeing who he is now, learning more about him in the last two or three years, I do have some regrets that I didn’t have a bell and whistle going off there and go further,” he says.

And nothing further did connect Trump to the Fontainebleau’s eventual sale to a mob front. Nor do public records show the budding real estate operator was ever indicted, much less convicted, in any of the big cases that brought down the five Mafia families who ruled New York. But Fuller’s encounter offers a timely window into a history that explains how Trump learned to talk—and act—like a don, even in the hallowed precincts of the White House.

To be sure, Trump’s upbringing in Queens, where the Mafia was ubiquitous, helped form his wiseguy persona. So did an apparent behavioral disorder that caused him to buy switchblades and start fights in school. But it’s also evident that by the time he was 30, the future president was on the FBI’s radar as someone the Mafia might turn to in a pinch. And by the time he was 70, with a business trajectory studded with mobsters, it should’ve come as no surprise that he was paying hush money to women, allegedly offering a secret hotel deal to Vladimir Putin, calling his longtime former lawyer Michael Cohen a “rat” or denouncing prosecutors for pressuring his associates to “flip.”

This was the life he had chosen.

In December, as the president disparaged Cohen with Mafia lingo (the onetime fixer told a federal court that Trump had directed him in violating campaign finance law), a flurry of coverage noted the origins of rat and how Trump had used it before, along with flip, more wiseguy slang for cooperating with the feds. The press clutched its collective pearls. But lost in the horror over Trump’s language were the much darker inflection points of his journey through the underworld, relationships arguably more revealing about the president and his business and political operations than still-unproven theories about his collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election.

GOING TO THE DARK SIDE

Trump’s descent into the gangland may have begun with Roy Cohn, the ruthless lawyer whom Trump hired to help navigate the bare-knuckle New York real estate business. Long notorious for helping Senator Joseph McCarthy unleash the 1950s “red scare” that ruined the careers of scores of Hollywood figures, federal workers and journalists, Cohn in the 1970s represented leaders of the Vito Genovese crime family during a federal racketeering investigation. As it turns out, around the same time Fuller was interviewing Trump in 1976, Cohn was adding a former Connecticut attorney general to his law firm who, on the side, was representing a local mobster by the name of Andrew D’Amato in a bid to buy the Fontainebleau.

Looking back on the events years later, Fuller says, “I presume that Miami’s knowledge of D’Amato’s efforts to purchase the Fontainebleau hotel is what led them to Trump.” In 1977, D’Amato was convicted of conspiracy in a financial swindling scheme in Hawaii with other known mobsters. Now in his 90s, D’Amato did not respond to messages left at his home in Connecticut.

Some of Cohn’s Mafia clients controlled New York’s construction unions, whose blessings Trump needed to complete his projects. So he “hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by Mafia chieftains Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul Castellano,” Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston wrote in Politico in 2016. Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who chronicled Trump’s deals in books and articles through the years, wrote that Trump probably met Fat Tony through Cohn. “This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business,” Johnston wrote.

One benefit of such connections was that workers tearing down the Bonwit Teller building where Trump Tower was planned could take allegedly illegal shortcuts around strict city regulations for disposing of construction waste. According to a Newsweek source who asked not to be identified because his family is well-known in the construction business, the asbestos and concrete were dumped near abandoned docks in Brooklyn and other discrete places instead of prescribed sites farther away—saving time and money. The White House referred Newsweek to the Trump Organization, which did not respond to an inquiry.

“On paper,” as one of several news accounts put it, the demolition workers were members of Local 95, a Genovese-controlled union. But in reality, they were undocumented workers from Poland and South Korea. Ronald Fino, son of a Buffalo, New York, Mafia capo, told Newsweek they were known as “the sneaker brigade” for “remov[ing] the asbestos illegally.” (Through the years, Trump denied knowing about the illegal workers, but in 1998, after years of litigation, he quietly paid a total of $1.38 million “to settle the case, with $500,000 of it going to a union benefits fund and the rest to pay lawyers’ fees and expenses,” The New York Times revealed in 2017.)

“New York was so totally corrupt and so controlled by the mob in the ’80s that in order to be a successful businessman, you had to have some way to work that world,” former FBI agent Walt Stowe, who grew close to Trump through the years and says he never saw the developer do anything illegal, told The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. in 2016. But by 1988, Trump was feeling so comfortable associating with Mafiosi that he did his first name-licensing deal with a luxury limo rental company owned by John Staluppi, a made member of the Colombo crime family, according to William Bastone, founding editor of The Smoking Gun website. And by that time, Trump was deep into his quest for an Atlantic City fortune.

But early on, Trump relied on his associations with underworld characters to open his grandiose (and ultimately bankrupt) gambling dens on the boardwalk. One of the more interesting characters back then was Daniel Sullivan, “a 42-year-old giant of a man with great charm and a criminal record,” who “dealt with labor problems at Trump’s construction sites,” according to O’Harrow’s deep-dive story. Trump went into a drywall manufacturing business with Sullivan, which was “among the firms implicated in a racketeering scheme involving the carpenters’ union and the Genovese crime family” represented by Cohn, O’Harrow wrote. Sullivan also brought Trump into an Atlantic City land-leasing deal with Kenneth Shapiro, whom law enforcement authorities had identified as a financier and agent for Philadelphia mobster Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo.

Advised by the head of New Jersey’s Gaming Enforcement agency that the Sullivan connection could hurt his chances for casino licenses, Trump bought him out and told the FBI that he was severing all ties with the big guy. But they stayed in touch, according to a 1983 civil suit Sullivan filed against New Jersey authorities: At one point, Trump offered him a job as his organization’s chief labor negotiator, with a $75,000 salary, he swore in court documents. In the end, no evidence has surfaced showing Trump was ever charged in any Mafia-related probes.

THE SNITCH ?

Former law enforcement officials say Trump had a close and curious relationship with the New York division of the FBI. “We saw Trump in the office all the time,” former FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini tells Newsweek. He was a “hip-pocket source,” Rossini says, for James Kallstrom, a wiretapping expert who supervised Mafia investigations in New York, and Rudy Giuliani, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan who would later become mayor of New York and, eventually, Trump’s personal lawyer amid the “Russiagate” probe. (Kallstrom denied that Trump was a source. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.) Rossini wonders whether Trump’s cultivation of FBI agents protected him in the Mafia probes. “All the construction unions were mobbed up” in the 1980s, Rossini noted. “How did he deal with the mob all these years and never appear before a grand jury?” Fuller also thinks “Trump was an informant for somebody in the FBI New York office.”

But Bruce Mouw, who headed the New York FBI’s investigation into the Gambino crime family, dismisses insinuations that Trump was either a mob asset or confidential bureau source. “I don’t believe it,” he tells Newsweek. Contacts with mobbed-up union chiefs, he says, “were done through the construction companies, not the developers.”

But a remark Trump himself made at an event years later suggested he was well placed to share tips on Mafia personalities with favored FBI officials. During the height of his fame as star of The Apprentice, Trump claimed that “every network“ tried to get him to do a reality show, but he refused.

“I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters and everyone else I have to deal with in my business,” he told a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio in L.A. “You know, mobsters don’t like, as they are talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”

What’s clear is that Kallstrom, a former Marine, grew close to Trump over the years. The real estate developer donated over $230,000 to Kallstrom’s Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation and provided it free space in his Atlantic City casinos for fundraisers, according to several accounts. Kallstrom’s foundation, in which Rush Limbaugh is a director, was also “the single biggest beneficiary of Trump’s promise to raise millions for veterans” in a lead-up to the 2016 Iowa Republican debate, Barrett wrote. “A foundation official said that Trump’s million-dollar donation this May, atop $100,000 that he’d given in March, were the biggest individual grants it had ever received.”

Kallstrom became an influential Trump defender and Hillary Clinton critic during the 2016 campaign, bashing then–FBI Director James Comey for failing to nail Clinton on her private email server and accusing Obama administration officials of committing “perjury” in their pursuit of Russian ties to Trump and his associates. In March 2018, he went further, accusing Comey and disgraced former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok of having “a backup plan to frame Donald Trump” as a Russian agent.

Neither federal prosecutors nor U.S. intelligence officials have reported evidence of any “plot to frame Trump.” To the contrary, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate alleged Russian plotting to tilt the election to Trump—with the candidate’s knowledge and approval. One of Mueller’s subjects of interest has been a now-infamous 2016 meeting that Trump’s son Donald Jr., then–campaign chief Paul Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner eagerly took with a Russian agent offering “dirt” on Clinton.

Russia’s intelligence services, oligarchs and gangsters are seamlessly connected, according to multiple news accounts through the years. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian mob has made huge inroads into the American underworld, sometimes forming alliances of convenience with La Cosa Nostra. As a teenager, Trump’s future lawyer Cohen, The Wall Street Journal reported last year, “frequented Brooklyn’s ethnic Russian neighborhoods and married into a Ukrainian family.” At a friend’s wedding, he “bragged to another guest that he belonged to the Russian mob.” The friend didn’t believe it, but when Trump pursued a hotel deal in Moscow, Cohen was dispatched to seal the deal, working through shady characters to offer Putin a top-floor penthouse, according to BuzzFeed News.

The Trump Organization had long been awash in illicit Russian money, author Craig Unger claimed in a 2018 book, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. “It started out as a simple money-laundering operation at Trump Tower in 1984, when a Russian mobster came to Trump Tower with $6 million in cash and bought five condos. This is the template for what begins to unfold. At least 1,300 Trump condos in the United States have been sold similarly. All cash purchases through anonymous sources,” Unger told Newsweek last August.

Russian mafia expert Mark Galeotti says it’s all about greed. “I have seen no serious evidence of any explicit link between Trump and Russian mobsters. Rather, what I have seen is evidence of the extent to which the Trump Organization seems to have been willing to engage with dubious investors and buyers—some Russian, many not—whom more reputable corporations would not have touched,” Galeotti recently told Vice.

That seemed the case all the way back in 1976, when Trump calmly told FBI agent Fuller that he had “heard about” a pitch for him to buy the notoriously mob-connected Fontainebleau hotel. There was no shock in his response, no indignation that the FBI would present him with such an allegation. Fuller thinks back to that moment in the construction site trailer, and he wonders how history might have taken a different course if he or someone else in the FBI had kept a more critical eye on Trump.

#donald trump #u.s. news #politics #trump administration #republican politics #legal issues #president donald trump #trump #trump scandals #republican party #russia investigation #politics and government #white house #corruption

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: Recently, there has been much talk about “free speech” in light of Alex Jones’s Infowars being cast out in a seemingly organized campaign of censorship by social media platforms, such as YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest, Facebook, and Apple, which some called “the great de-platforming of Alex Jones.” Unsurprisingly, Jones has decried it as “censorship” and abridging his “free speech.” Those who support such actions of these platforms include liberal Amanda Marcotte of Salon who said that it was a “sudden bout of atypical decency and common sense” in fighting against “disinformation” and Mike Snider of USA Today noting that “free speech is a principle that businesses often choose to follow, but aren’t bound to.”1 Similarly, Christine Emba blares in the Washington (Amazon) Post that the social media companies were within their rights and did “nothing wrong,” as they are not obliged to “host your speech on their platforms…[or] promote your content” and The Economist, a magazine that represents the interests of the British bourgeoisie, declared that these companies are “not the state,” meaning they are able to “write their terms of service as they wish and police posts as they choose.” Following in suit was Hartford University Professor Adam Chiara, who declared that “tech companies are private…they have the right to decide what content goes on their platforms…social media platforms own the access to his [Jones’s] audience, and they have every legal and moral right to cancel it.” T.C. Sottek of The Verge write that InfoWars was hypocritical because it still claims the right to purge “objectionable” content from their website while Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wrote that “…if no one else on the planet feels like giving him [Alex Jones] a soapbox to extract money from gullible conspiracy theorists, that’s fine with me.” Furthest in this viewpoint was David Zurawik, an oft media critic for the Baltimore Sun, who openly applauded the action against Jones: “Finally, the giants of digital media are showing some social responsibility…It is long overdue…it is a step in the right direction…Here’s hoping the crackdowns continue.” Even the libertarians of Reason.com jumped on board. While they expressed some reservations about selectively “policing” harmful speech and claimed that conservatives “need to worry,” arguing that “private companies are under no obligation to provide a platform” to those like Jones and that “Facebook, YouTube, and other media…have a right to dictate the contours of permissible speech on their sites and to enforce those standards…No one seriously disputes this…There’s no God-given right to be on Facebook or Twitter.” Even some in the ACLU seemed to accept the power of these social media platforms, only asking for transparency and “protections…against misuse” with nothing much more. On the other side was Cory Doctrow, co-editor of Boing Boing, who argued that the “online world has almost no public spaces…and a tiny handful of incredibly large, powerful companies control the vast majority of our civic discourse online,” with Harvey Silvergate of NY Daily News adding that “when the haters are allowed to expose themselves through their words, we are all safer for knowing who they are and who, over time, they morph into,” saying the current debate over the actions against Jones is really “about what it means for our society if a few tech companies should be able to decide for everyone what information is available.” At the same time, Black Agenda Report’s Margaret Kimberley quipped that “there is no reason for anyone on the left to cheer Jones being censored. The move against him will be used to defend further censoring of left wing voices…His absence helps no one except the intelligence apparatus.” Even, Matt Taibbi, a piece of bourgeois trash for other reasons (like not supporting reproductive rights while smearing Venezuela and Karl Marx), wrote in Rolling Stone that there is a “union of Internet platforms and would-be government censors” and that “the sheer market power of these companies over information flow has always been the real threat. This is why breaking them up should have long ago become an urgent national priority”, admitting that “there was no First Amendment issue with the Jones ban.” Beyond the views of The Economist, Reason.com, some ACLU members, Marcotte, Snider, Emba, Chiara, Sottek, Drum, Sottek, Zurawik, Doctrow, Silvergate, Kimberley, and Taibbi, many others expressed their views on the actions against Jones, a number of whom worried about “free speech” and the power of these social media platforms over people’s lives.2 Taking all the views mentioned in the last paragraph into consideration, we don’t need a number of Loyola University academics or David Pozen of Columbia Law School to tell us that social media has become an important “one stop shop” for many, allowing the internal rules, a form of private regulations of these platforms, to shape the existing public discourse. Undoubtedly, huge social media giants, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Pinterest, Instagram (owned by Facebook), and Tumblr (owned by Yahoo), have control of vast amounts of information.3 Amazon has a related role with its web services controlling “roughly 40 percent of the cloud market, running the backend for Netflix, Pinterest, Slack and dozens of other services with no visible connection to the company,” showing the reach of their “server empire.” Additionally, a recent study by Gallup showed that the populace of the U$ not only opposes news personalized toward them, but the role of the companies as gatekeepers of content, with companies having to disclose why they have selected certain content for users. However, these companies, legally, have the right to determine the speech that is allowed on their sites. As such, Ron Jacobs, a writer for CounterPunch, is right: while the action against Jones “may effect the ability of leftist and anarchist groups and individuals to provide content and share events on these corporate platforms” it isn’t right to support “those liberals and leftists who think they need to defend Alex Jones” since the latter should not “have unfettered access to spout his outright lies and hate,” and, I might add, those on the Left are under no obligation to protect the speech of bigots, war criminals, or otherwise detestable people. Jacobs concludes, correctly, by saying that “free speech will be further limited to those who can afford to pay for it…[with] propagandists funded by wealthy…millionaires and billionaires…strengthen[ing] their control over the so-called free press,” meaning that we should let “Alex Jones fight his battles without our help.” Such societal dynamics mean that certain people have more privilege to speak than others. Without a doubt the Left is on the chopping block, but this is due to Russiagate and efforts by social media giants to pander to the Right, which dominates the political scene in the U$. After all, when Twitter was in “hot water” since it had not fallen in line with other social media giants on efforts against Jones, its CEO, Jack Dorsey, did his first interview on the subject with right-wing loudmouth, Sean Hannity!4 While the social media network temporarily suspended Infowars for seven days, Alex Jones still continues to spout unflinching support for the current sitting US President including anti-immigrant racism, anti-socialism, anti-vax nonsense, and harping on the “censorship” card, even tweeting cartoons of notoriously anti-Left cartoonist Ben Garrison to support his “case.” According to news reports, Jones made direct appeals to the current sitting US President to make “censorship” a big issue in the upcoming election and deal with purported (by him) “Chinese infiltration” of the Democratic Party and tech industry. Such claims of censorship by Jones and others ring a bit hollow as the right-wing in the U$ has their ready propaganda network of video platforms, social media sites, and even dating apps!5 Alex Jones can be promoted there, apart from his Twitter account which still has over 895,000 followers. So, he isn’t going anywhere. Recently, Senator Chris Murphy infamously wrote on Twitter that “Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.” Despite Don Trump, Jr complaining about “Big Tech’s censorship campaign” is about “purging all conservative media,” and conspiracist David Icke decrying censorship, conservatives are not really the target of these proposed measures. Sure, some fascists, apart from Jones, have been removed from social media, like the hideous Proud Boys or Milo Yiannopoulos (for harassing Black actress Leslie Jones), while some liberal groups like Media Matters, Share Blue, and American Bridge have called for social media platforms to take more action against the right-wing.6 The conservative narrative of themselves as victims of social media censorship is only strengthened when those like Marcotte of Salon, quoted earlier in this article, say that journalists (and social media outlets) should serve as “gatekeepers” against conservatives! Instead, it is the Left that is under attack by these outlets. Just look at the permanent removal of the Haiti Analysis on Facebook, the temporary de-publishing of TeleSur English‘s page on the same site, with the same happening to Venezuela Analysis, the takedown of an Occupy London page which had “pro-Palestinian posts,” censoring the alternative media outlet SouthFront out of existence, and Facebook’s deletion of pages which had up to 40 million followers, including a number of alternative media outlets. Yet another example is when an episode of Abby Martin’s The Empire Files (currently targeted by U$ sanctions on Venezuela) on YouTube, which highlighted military violence of Zionists, was “blocked…in 28 countries for supposedly violating “local laws,”” possibly due to the participation of the stalwart Zionist group, the Anti-Defamation League, in “YouTube’s flagging system” since the group “considers actions tied to Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment…and opposition to Israeli occupation as racism.” Also YouTube banned a video showing a boy murdered by Zionist soldiers, Google downranked and alternative website named Dandelion Salad, Facebook began ranking news sources by their “truthworthiness” with the help of establishment organizations, and social media giants meeting about “information operations” for the upcoming midterm elections in the U$. Most recently, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have begun going after Iranians whom they declare (and claim) are “government trolls,” another clear act of censorship. This isn’t surprising since Facebook is, as one should note, letting the Digital Forensics Lab of the Atlantic Council sort through content, leading to a further crackdown on the left. Even the changing of YouTube’s algorithm which turns the site into a “censored, walled garden which gives you search results from a tiny cadre of establishment media outlets,” will not “hurt” conservatives as some declare, but will undoubtedly hurt those on the Left even more, as there is so much propagandistic content about left-leaning ideas out there! Such an attack on the Left could possibly intensify for a number of reasons: if these social media companies adopt the Chinese or European models of net regulation, the former being easily accepted by more tech companies every day, and if the U$ government is successful in forcing Facebook to help break the end-to-end encryption of their voice calls in messenger in order to supposedly fight the MS-13 gang.7 Twitter’s policy of ranking tweets and search results in an effort to downgrade those they deem “bad faith actors,” like the Russians perhaps, “who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation,” and the uneven moderating on Facebook doesn’t help matters. The same applies to the removal of accounts by Twitter following the indictments of 12 Russians by Robert Mueller and an effort to target so-called “fake” accounts, and Reddit removing 944 “suspicious” accounts which they claimed were tied to the Russians even though they had little impact. Most worrisome is YouTube working with establishment media organizations to promote “quality journalism” with breaking news highlighting videos from CBS, Fox News, the New York Times, and CNN, to go by their examples, while YouTube is also showing information from “third parties” (so-called “information cues”) from sites such as Encyclopaedia Brittanica and Wikipedia on “a small number of well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation” or those that are the “center of debate.” The latter effort by YouTube to link to Wikipedia, which wasn’t informed about the initiative beforehand and expressed their concerns about content scraping, to counter “misinformation” and define certain media outlets is uneven. Looking at Wikipedia links on the videos of the Channel News Asia, TeleSur, TeleSur English, RT, SABC Digital News, and Al Jazeera, they are all described as “funded” by specific governments. However, for BBC, it is only called a “British broadcast service,” not that it is directly funded by the British government! Additionally, videos on the CNN, Bloomberg, ABC News, Vice News, Vox, Fox News, MSNBC, Washington Post, National Geographic, and The Guardian channels have no links to third-party websites even though they are funded and owned by corporate entities! Hence, this effort by YouTube will, without a doubt, disadvantage outlets like TeleSur and RT, which buck the general narrative of the corporate media, as it will assist in imperialist propaganda about those outlets. And no, YouTube, TeleSur is not funded by “the Latin American government” as it says below every single video from their two channels (TeleSur and TeleSur English), a racist conception that denies the reality in the region, as this news organization is funded jointly by the Cuban, Bolivian, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Uruguayan governments. Such actions by YouTube and many other major social media platforms are led in part by what Hiroyuki Hamada rightly called the “Putin panic, an epidemic spewing hatred against anything Russian” while ignoring that “Russia was subjected to political and economic intervention by the US in the 90s” with the U$ backing Boris Yeltsin who helped rip apart the country’s social fabric. Currently, the U$ is waiting for “Russia to jump on its Pearl Harbor or a 9/11,” with such a panic being an “obvious scheme of imperialism” leading to war. As such, as he rightly notes, “we must not be a voice for the capitalist lords nor for the hitmen…we must reach out to people like us in Russia, China, Syria, Iran, and other peoples of the planet, and people like us in our communities, with messages of peace, sharing and mutual respect.” As such, not only should there should be support for those on the Left who have been censored on these social media platforms but there should be local and international connections in the way that Hamada describes in order to counter the general narrative spread in capitalist societies. * There were many articles on this subject, so it is hard to pick just a few, but I would say that the articles on Boing Boing, Washington Post, The Verge, New York Times, Washington Examiner, Reason.com, The American Conservative, and Rolling Stone were most informative on this subject. For those that want he full list of sources I used to make this determination, you are free to email me, and I will send you the list of sources I’m talking about here. * At the same time, left-leaning comedian, Jimmy Dore, posted many YouTube videos on the topic, with him and his guests rightly criticizing corporate control of social media, arguing that social media should be public utility, and defending (especially by Jimmy himself) the right of Alex Jones to speak, sticking to the free speech absolutist line, even defending the ACLU’s stance of defending the speech of horrid bigots. To the credit of Jimmy and his guests, they are right that Russiagate can be used to silence the Left, while criticizing U$ wars and the corporate press. * Some, like Reuters, define social media giants as only encompassing Facebook, YouTube (owned by Google), Twitter and Microsoft. But there are many more, as noted by LifeWire and DreamGrow, like LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram (owned by Facebook), Pinterest, Tumblr (owned by Yahoo!), Snapchat, Reddit (mainly owned by Advance Publications), Flickr (owned by SmugMug), Swarm (owned by Foursquare), Kik (owned by Kik interactive), Periscope (owned by Twitter), Medium (owned by A Medium Corporation), Soundcloud (owned by SoundCloud Limited), Tinder (owned by IAC (InterActiveCorp), WhatsApp (owned by WhatsApp Inc.), Slack (owned by Slack Technologies), Musical.ly (owned by Tik Tok, Chinese company), Meetup (owned by WeWork), and Peach (“a tiny journaling service of Byte, Inc” according to their terms of use). Others, most of which are not for English speakers but for those of other languages, include Weibo (owned by Sina Corp), Ask.Fm (owned by Noosphere Ventures), VK (owned by Mail.Ru Group), Odnoklassniki (owned by Mail.Ru Group), and Qzone (owned by Tencent Holdings Limited). For more about Amazon’s Web Services, see Russell Brandom, “Using the internet without the Amazon Cloud,” The Verge, July 28, 2018. * Also consider a recent post by the Twitter company saying that “while we welcome everyone to express themselves on our service, we prohibit targeted behavior that harasses, threatens, or uses fear to silence the voices of others” saying they have certain rules, policies and enforcement options in place for a safe environment, while working to “Twitter better for everyone” admitting they have a role to play in society and a “wider responsibility to foster and better serve a healthy public conversation.” As for Apple, it still offers the InfoWars mobile app in its App Store even after removing many of Jones’s podcasts, saying they support “all points of view being represented” in their online marketplace. Additionally, the App is still in the Google Play store! The above information is extracted from Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech,” New York Times, August 7, 2018, Casey Newton, “Twitter’s fear of making hard decisions is killing it,” The Verge, August 17, 2018, and Avery Anapol, “Twitter CEO on decision not to ban Alex Jones: ‘He hasn’t violated our rules’,” The Hill, August 7, 2018. * Brandy Zadrozny, “Right-wing platforms provide refuge to digital outcasts — and Alex Jones,” NBC News, August 9, 2018. This article lists Mike Adams’s Real.Video (like YouTube), Andrew Torba’s Gab.ai (like Twitter), Codias (like Facebook), Conservapedia (like Wikipedia), Hatreon (like Patreon), TrumpSingles (like Tinder), and Rebel Media (like YouTube) as examples. And that’s not counting right-wing media sites like The Daily Caller, Drudge Report, Fox News, Newsmax, The Blaze, One America News Network, National Review, The American Conservative (more critical of U$ imperialism than other outlets), The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Daily Wire, Gateway Pundit, The Federalist, TownHall, Breitbart, Hot Air, Instapundit, and Red State, along with talk radio shows and various others! * Jim Hoft, “Top Far Left Organizations Bragged About Working with Facebook and Twitter to Censor and Eliminate Conservative Content,” The Gateway Pundit, August 20, 2018; Rob Shimshock, “Twitter Suspends Libertarian Commentator Gavin McInnes And His Activist Group,” The Daily Caller, August 11, 2018; Keith Wagstaff, “Twitter suspends Proud Boys and Gavin McInnes,” Mashable, August 10, 2018. And, no, these are NOT “far left” organizations. That’s what Jim Hoft gets wrong, like many people on the Right, who think that liberal organizations are more left-leaning than they actually are in reality! * Daniel Taylor, “Free Speech Under Fire: Globalists Bet On Chinese Dominating the Internet’s Future,” Old Thinker News, Aug 13, 2018; Xeni Jardin, “Feds ask court to force Facebook to break Messenger’s end-to-end voice encryption for MS-13 gang probe,” Boing Boing, Aug 17, 2018; Sam Haysom, “Undercover footage exposes Facebook moderators’ disturbing policies,” Mashable, July 18, 2018; Bruce Haring, “Twitter Account Purges Continue As Service Cuts Guccifer 2.0 And DCLeaks,” Deadline, July 14, 2018; April Glaser, “YouTube Is Adding Fact-Check Links for Videos on Topics That Inspire Conspiracy Theories,” Slate, August 14, 2018; Lucas Matney, “Reddit has banned 944 accounts linked to the IRA Russian troll farm,” TechCrunch, April 11, 2018. http://clubof.info/

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Balkanizing Syria: The Rothschild Genie in the NATO Lamp

Rothschild! It's a name that instantly conjures up a conspiracy. Illuminati! Learned Elders! Reptiles! Masked balls and orgies with strange modern art accouterment! Alas, this story will only be about the destruction, dismemberment, rape, and violation of another mid-east country. Sorry to disappoint. Oil and gas resources, pipeline real-estate, these are just the spoils of war. We are used to this story by now; though this one is outrageously close to triggering WWIII.

That last statement sounds like hyperbole. WWIII? Actually, yes. My first article John Bolton’s NATO Crusade for Zion in this Balkanizing Syria series, laid out some pieces on a mid-east chessboard which is quickly approaching the point where the normal rules of engagement may become irrelevant, the board being flipped in the air. But at least a zealous looking John Bolton received the 2017 Guardian of Zion award. Almost makes millions of corpses worth it, right?

#TBT to Monday when I was in Israel to receive the "Guardian of Zion" award from @BarIlanU's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies. pic.twitter.com/9uWowxEdt5

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) June 1, 2017

Pipelines and power projection

To rehash quickly, the previous article revealed two major geopolitical alignments at the core of the Syria crisis, both of which require conflicting but revolutionary pipeline infrastructures to be built in the mid-east :

Shiite bloc supported strongly by Russia, consisting of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; including an increasing courtship of the Shiite regimes in Tehran and Baghdad by China. In the larger scheme of things, this bloc will be a cornerstone relationship in cementing the power of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the New Silk Road project. It will greatly amplify the geopolitical positions of the Russia-Iran-China relationship, protecting their interests through cheap energy access relationships, insulating them from NATO power plays.

Sunni bloc supported by NATO and Israel, consisting of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey. This bloc currently has an uneasy internal relationship between the three main components of NATO; the US-UK ‘special relationship’, the rest of the European Union, and Turkey. NATO member Turkey had become quite exasperated attempting to compromise (on Kurds and Iran) in regards to Arab and US expectations, leading to a failed NATO sponsored 2016 Gulenist coup d'état against Erdoğan, critically wounding this core relationship. Additionally, the US-UK relationship with the EU is highly tense (BREXIT, etc). NATO right now is fragile and could fracture very easily.

Qatar is revealed to be a key player in this chess game due to its being in possession of by far the largest natural gas field in the world, shared with Iran; a monster which should be nicknamed the Gazprom Killer. This gas field is larger than the next thirteen biggest fields combined. It’s not just a potential goldmine for exploitation profits but clearly a deadly market weapon desired by NATO – if it can be tapped by pipelines. If Saudi cheap production crude is the weapon of control for NATO within the OPEC cartel, the Qatar gas field – known as the North Dome field – should be considered a weapon of mass Kremlin destruction.

Above can be seen the Gazprom Killer. Below can be seen the competing pipedreams which were expanded upon in the previous article. All of these pipedreams relate in some way to the Gazprom Killer. The large Galkynysh gas field in Turkmenistan and the associated TAPI pipeline will be expanded upon in a future article on Pakistan and China.

This big-picture view of mid-east conflict tends to – on the surface – relegate Israel to a secondary position of influence in this unfolding conflict. This is most definitely not the case.

Central to this conflict is the Zionist agenda of Likudnik right-wing war-hawks and their chosen foreign policy wonks like John Bolton; a puppet on strings pulled by – among others – the Jewish-American casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson. Adelson was the largest donor during the 2016 POTUS election, choosing Trump at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting known by some as the ‘Sheldon Primary’ held at his hotel and casino The Venetian Las Vegas. After endorsing Trump in May 2016, Adelson eventually donated $25 million to the Trump campaign and $5 million to the inauguration ceremony – the largest Trump donor.

Before we explore the Rothschild influence, let’s peek into the world of Trojan horse national security groups serving Zionist agendas.

American National Security or Israeli National Security?

Bolton is a true swamp creature who intimately understands the deep-state bureaucracy he’s been rolling in like a pig in shit for most of his career. A major philosophy practiced by this man and his Zionist associates is to divide and conquer; especially when it comes to the Sunni-Shiite sectarian fault line. This doctrine is accepted regardless of the potential fallout for western nations so long as it serves Israel. Maintaining and building up Islamic boogeymen – ideally as radical as possible – is an outcome to be desired by these men who thrive on Hegelian dialectic.

Bolton’s connections with past and present events condense most clearly around two men; fellow chicken hawks Douglas Feith and Dick Cheney. These three cemented their personal power through membership in the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). These three men from JINSA curiously pop up as the sinew connecting a web of highly influential Likudnik Israeli aligned neocon interest groups.

JINSA Mission Statement: The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) is dedicated to educating Congressional, military and civilian national security decision-makers on American defense and strategic interests, primarily in the Middle East, the cornerstone of which is a robust U.S.-Israeli security cooperation. JINSA believes that a strong American military and national security posture is the best guarantor of peace and the survival of our values and civilization.

‘Strong’ simply means perpetually engaged in mid-east warfare. Constant war in Islamic countries will generate enmity towards NATO/aligned countries, triggering terror attacks, fueling western support for Israel; our ‘greatest ally’ in the mid-east. A cursory glance at the JINSA logo and website header reveals its true purpose: The six-pointed Star of David is the shadow behind a five-pointed patriotic American Star; in other words, the US is simply to use its larger resources to create a protective geopolitical shadow for Zionist aims.

Take note that Iran has its own dedicated drop-down menu!

Between 2013 and 2018 while in cold storage during the Obama Administration, John Bolton was the Chairman of the Gatestone Institute; one of a plethora of primarily Israeli aligned foreign policy think-tanks posing as patriotic American interest orgs. Previously known as the Hudson Institute New York, this think-tank was founded and is still run by Sears Roebuck heiress and Zionist Jewess Nina Rosenwald (President). Nina was the Vice President of JINSA and is active in AIPAC. The VP of Gatestone is Naomi H. Perlman, another Zionist Jewess.

Rosenwald is a supporter of illegal settlements in the West Bank and also contentious settlements in the occupied Golan Heights region stolen from Syria in 1967. As reported by The Nation in 2012 :

The Rosenwald Family Fund has provided at least $100,000, for example, to the Golan Fund, an initiative of the Israel Land Fund that aims to increase the “Jewish presence” in Israel’s Galilee region and the occupied Golan Heights by “obtain[ing] more of that [Arab] land for agricultural use,” according to its website. Extending its influence across the Green Line, the Rosenwald Family Fund has also provided financial support to the College of Judea (now Ariel University Center of Samaria) in the Israeli mega-settlement of Ariel; the Beit El yeshiva, a religious nationalist school situated in a West Bank settlement that instructs students to disobey government orders to abandon illegal settlement outposts; and to the Central Fund for Israel, a New York City-based nonprofit that serves as a major funding artery between American-based donors and the hardcore settlements of the West Bank. . . . Rosenwald counts among her closest friends Norman Podhoretz, the octogenarian neoconservative activist and former Commentary magazine editor who argues that Jewish Democrats are heretics betraying their religious duty to support the Jewish state. Rosenwald, according to one friend, is also close to Podhoretz’s daughter, Ruthie Blum, a right-wing columnist who lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of Har Adar and writes a column for Israel Hayom, a newspaper published by far-right billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a chief financial supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Father and daughter echo the line of Likudnik Greater Israel ideology and anti-Muslim fanaticism, with Podhoretz urging the Western world to wage “World War IV”...

Other than rallying white western nations to wage ‘World War IV’ for Zionists, the diversity of causes taken up by this Gatestone think-tank is quite impressive; such as this January 2018 article by Alan Dershowitz published at Gatestone, then promoted by Nina in this tweet :

. @AlanDersh: Here's the real reason why US President Donald #Trump commuted the unjust sentence imposed on a Chasidic Jew named Sholom Rubashkin: https://t.co/dzGwWfF5ig pic.twitter.com/8Tq26QzF4J

— Nina Rosenwald (@ninarosenwald) January 3, 2018

That’s right; the first sentence commutation Donald Trump issued in December 2017 was for the release of a Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic bank fraudster named Sholom Rubashkin. Released after only serving 8 years of a 27-year sentence, Nina and her friends were elated their clique had obtained this release from Donald Trump months before Bolton entered the White House. Shlomo was the CEO of Agriprocessors, a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa raided by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for employing 389 undocumented illegals. MAGA!

Shlomo had thousands in cash stashed at his house and was defrauding lenders for amounts over $20 million. Paul Nehlen, as usual, hit the nail on the head with this FB post requesting a 20-year sentence commutation for First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, convicted of murder for protecting the safety of his troops in Afghanistan in 2012 :

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To date, President Trump has made one prison sentence commutation. Today I released "The Lorance Statement" and call on #Trump to act👇

Posted by Paul Nehlen on Sunday, 31 December 2017

Shlomo looks like such an honest, model citizen. Clint looks so evil.

As one final example that Trump is operating primarily for the interests of hard-right Zionist orgs: On Friday, April 13th during the Syria missile strike, Trump chose to exercise his third pardon. NYT reported :

… the president granted a full pardon to I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Mr. Cheney’s top adviser before he was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame. ... “I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Mr. Trump said in a statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”

PNAC war-hawk and Zionist Jew Scooter Libby was rightfully disgraced in 2005. This corrupt pardon was clearly executed during the Syrian missile strike to distract from the toxic PR it deserves. Libby had actually endangered US intelligence assets overseas, willfully, seeking revenge for the criminal actions of his bosses Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Even John Bolton was implicated with Libby in this intrigue. These crimes were exposed by Valerie’s journalist husband who told the truth about non-existent ‘aluminum centrifuge tubes’ supposedly to be used in an Iraqi nuclear program; lies being deliberately cooked up by the Bush White House to push for war. Libby then committed perjury to protect Cheney and Bush. Nina Rosenwald was Libby’s longtime champion for a pardon. Imagine my shock.

As always, the truth suffers in silence while world-class liars get Presidential pardons! Trump: Have you no decency, Sir? Libby gets a pardon but patriotic servicemen rotting in jail for doing their job, well, that’s obviously not on Trump’s radar. Libby is of course very well connected. As Iraq War author Gary Vogler reports :

Scooter Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in Washington. Libby had a secure communications link to Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad during the summer of 2003. Libby was also linked to the nefarious [Jewish] oil trader Marc Rich [founder of Glencore]. That name might be familiar to you. Marc Rich was the person who President Clinton pardoned on his last day in office from crimes of income tax evasion of $100 million and trading with the enemy. Libby was Marc Rich’s lawyer for many years while Rich made $billions moving Iranian crude oil through a secret pipeline through Israel.

Illegal Iranian oil through Israel? $anctions have many inventive uses!

Keep the name Glencore in mind as you approach the Rothschild Genel Energy section towards the end of this article. As we can see, Democrat Bill Clinton served this particular clique as well, issuing his elite pardons with similar corruption; though kosher, just like Trump. I wonder where and by whom the Clinton’s could have been persuaded to pardon Marc Rich who worked closely with the Rothschild Bank in Switzerland?

FUN FACT: Evelyn de Rothschild and Lynn Forester de Rothschild honeymooned at the Clinton White House. Because nothing says “I rule America” like being able to use the Executive Mansion as your bridal suite. pic.twitter.com/XNLwOvHgq6

— James Perloff (@jamesperloff) February 10, 2018

Cheney was close with Rothschild connected Democrat James Woolsey. Both were in PNAC and Woolsey is also an ex-Chairman at Gatestone. Woolsey spoke bluntly at the 1994 Wye Plantation Policy Conference while serving as Bill Clinton’s CIA Director :

The Role of the Intelligence Community Throughout the decades of American involvement in the Middle East, the intelligence community has been a silent partner with Israel ...

A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

In 1996 – the year Netanyahu first became Israeli Prime Minister in a Likud coalition – Douglas Feith of JINSA teamed up with fellow Zionist Jew Richard Perle to produce an agenda for the incumbent Netanyahu entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm; the ‘realm’ in question being a robust one-state solution (read: Greater Israel) which would actively shed all willingness to consider an independent Palestinian State. One year later – clearly aligned with this study – came the Project for a New American Century think-tank (PNAC). Bolton and Cheney were core members.

"And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while." ~ President George W. Bush, five days after September 11th, 2001, on the White House lawn.

This PNAC neoconservative think-tank which dominated the Bush Administration was headed by Jewish Zionists Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol; the former married to Victoria ‘F-the-EU’ Nuland, the latter admired – nay worshipped – by Israel-Firsters such as Ben Shapiro and other orthodox Jews who live like tapeworms up Netanyahu’s colon. Likewise, these tapeworms have now gained dominance in the GOP, but they also hedge their bets with a presence on the left; gatekeepers such as ‘independent’ Senator Joe Lieberman (current JINSA board member), and other assorted Zionist Congress critters.

The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria, are the legacy of this group of demonic spawn who unfortunately hide behind Christian conservatives, corralling this voter demographic using predictable reactionary emotions triggered by the screeching neo-Marxist left led by Jewish Senators such as Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer. These Christian conservatives are preyed upon by the likes of Gatestone and the plethora of Jewish/Israel lobbies posing as friendly to what remains of Western Christendom.

WARNING: Beware of groups who concentrate solely on the threats posed by Islam, especially if they’re aligned with overt or shrouded Zionist fronts. These Zionist groups are far more dangerous to the safety and security of the western world, in my informed opinion.

Due to the rabies infested activist left of the Obama era, these neocons have also managed, ironically, to become entrenched within a similarly reactionary libertarian wing within the GOP; despite being war-hawks primarily serving hard-right Zionist aims. This has been achieved at the expense of real conservatism – America First conservatism – of the type advocated by Pat Buchannan. Populist Trumpism emerged from the hope Trump would be able to solidify what Buchannan could not, though it seems true populism will now be sacrificed on an altar of ‘basic bitch’ conservatism – now no different from a vacuous, pointless, rootless libertarianism.

MAGA hat + slogans + philosemitism = Opiate?

“They put the Jewish interest above America's interest, and it's about goddamn time that the Jew in America realizes he's an American first and a Jew second.” ~ Richard Nixon tapes.

Where the destiny of populist Trumpism is concerned, this is a very dangerous turn of events, for Bolton is a carbon copy of Henry Kissinger who held the same office of National Security Advisor under Nixon. Kissinger was a Rockefeller hack, but Bolton, he takes orders from a strengthened right-wing Zionist movement far advanced from the Nixon era.

Since day one of his Presidency, deep-state stonewalling compounded by obstructionism – from both sides of politics on Capitol Hill – have left Trump floundering. Now, as if he were a grim psychopomp akin to Charon punting the river Styx, Bolton offers Trump the only lifeline he’ll ever be offered to navigate this swamp. It’s a fool’s bargain; the destination is Hades.

Rothschild: Guardians of Zion, but businessmen first

The Jewish family in the west which has supported Zionism more than any other is that of the super-elite Rothschild banking dynasties. These dynasties are still very prominent today. Hillary Clinton supporter Evelyn de Rothschild who represents one of two main British branches is an official personal financial advisor to Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, having also been an usher at the royal coronation. Through nineteenth-century interfamilial marriage alliances predominantly between the Paris, Frankfurt and London branches, this family has maintained its wealth and placed itself at the heart of many Zionist projects.

Dorothy de Rothschild, wife of James Armand de Rothschild of the Paris branch, for instance, donated the iconic Israeli Supreme Court building in Jerusalem crowned by a Masonic pyramid with circular windows imitating the Eye of Providence. Likewise, when James Armand died in 1957, his will contained a gift to the State of Israel for a new government building to be known as the Knesset. Built adjacent to the Supreme Court building it was only fitting that the nation would name the street which passes by both the legislative and judicial branches, Rothschild Street.

In addition to any direct political agendas of right-wing Zionists highlighted in this article thus far, there’s also, seemingly, various opportunistic business concerns associated with Jewish Zionist interests looking to profit from the spoils of war. This is always the case when larger aligned power blocs are already committed for a bold move towards a known goal. Why only serve the purposes of your chosen political allies if you can also make a fortune along the way? Better still: Why not attempt to arrange events in the unfolding conflict such that you maximize profits for yourself and your preferred business partners?

This very same well known Rothschild family, curiously, happens to appear in two separate zones of influence which will – or could have – greatly benefitted financially from a speedy 2011 ouster of the secular Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad; that is, before Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, stepped into the fray to protect Syria’s sovereignty. Due to there being many branches of the Rothschild family worldwide, for the purposes of this article, henceforth, it should be made clear I am referring solely to Lord Jacob Rothschild of RIT Capital Partners and his only son and heir Nathaniel Rothschild.

Together with Dick Cheney and James Woolsey (mentioned above in relation to JINSA and PNAC), Jacob Rothschild appears on the advisory board of the New Jersey oil concern Genie Energy which operates in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. Jacob’s son Nathaniel, however, appears as a co-founder and prominent shareholder of the Iraqi Kurdistan oil and gas concern Genel Energy which operates in partnership with the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

Both of these companies would have (and will?) profit substantially from an overthrow of the Assad regime and/or a balkanized Syria. Let’s start in Kurdistan with the heir, then work up to the Genie in Israel shall we?

Genel Energy cannot handle its Vodka

Genel Energy is an oil company with a registered office on the Isle of Jersey (for tax reduction/evasion purposes) and a field office in Turkey. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange with an HQ in London. The founding CEO and Chairman was Tony Hayward who was infamously the CEO of British Petroleum during the Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico – now the ex-CEO of BP, and Genel.

In September 2011 Hayward’s venture capital firm Vallares took part in a 50/50 merger with a Turkish company called Genel Enerji, forming the new entity. The who-is-who of this company is interesting, involving investments associated with large western banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Cazenove. The headliner is Nathaniel Rothschild. The Turkish partner in this concern is Mehmet Emin Karamehmet; the richest man in Turkey and one of very few mid-east non-Jews to be given an award by JINSA.

“Genel's big backers are banking scion Nathaniel Rothschild and Turkish billionaire Mehmet Emin Karamehmet. The company's CEO is Tony Hayward, the former head of BP , who also happens to be chairman of commodities giant Glencore PLC. Genel's CFO [Julian Metherell] used to be the head of U.K. investment banking for Goldman Sachs. . . with pull like that, no wonder Genel has plunged into developing virgin oilfields in the region despite insistence from Iraq's oil ministry in Baghdad that their contracts with the KRG are illegal.” ~ Christopher Helman, 2014, Forbes.

Illegal? Hey Baghdad, this is a Rothschild with Goldman alumni !!

Nathaniel for a decade has made one bad deal after another, failing to live up to the eminence of his pedigree. A $200 million black hole which appeared in his Indonesian Bumi Plc investment greatly embarrassed the family. Doubling down, in 2016, he married Loretta, a ‘page three’ nude centerfold model for Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid The Sun. This is his second marriage to a model, the first marriage being wrecked in 1997. Lord Jacob was not invited to the second wedding so one can only guess how the relationship between father and sole heir is progressing. Nathaniel currently resides in Switzerland to avoid UK taxes.

Genel Energy is no exception to this story of woe which plagues Nathaniel. Genel, his main investment and its many misfortunes, have greatly impacted Nathaniel’s personal aspirations to build an independent fortune to his father regardless of his being the heir to this much larger inheritance. Central to Nathaniel’s bad investments has been his choice to go almost all-in on resource ventures – such as Glencore – right at the height of the resources boom. It’s been all downhill from there. Financial Times reported in June 2017 :

At its peak in 2014, Mr Rothschild’s [Genel] holding would have been worth more than £253m but on paper it is now worth less than £20m.

Now, that is embarrassing, especially for a Rothschild!

Over the past four years, the Genel stock price has shed 90% of its value, though it could revive some of its fortunes based on recent assessments of Kurdish gas reserves showing 40% more gas than expected. This may be too little too late, however, since the forecasted reserves for the flagship Taq Taq field have been revised down to 59m barrels from 683m barrels (!) when first listed. As if this wasn’t dire enough, the Kurdistan Regional Government for long held off on $500 million of oil revenue payments to Genel in order to fund the fight against ISIS/Daesh; as of 2018 this seems to have been settled.

Due to these issues, Genel reported a loss of $1.25 billion in 2016 which followed a $1.16 billion loss in 2015. This isn’t good news for a company which since its inception was planning to expand to other geopolitical zones but, got bogged down, ending up with two gas fields and six oil production sharing contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan :

“Genel Energy, a group formed via a merger of Vallares and Turkey's Genel Enerji, plans acquisitions in Northern Iraq and aims to expand in the Middle East and North Africa, according to reports quoting chief executive Tony Hayward. ” ~ Upstream online.

Mid-east? North Africa? In 2011? Timing is everything, as they say.

If Iraqi Kurdistan in particular was to become independent – as it desires – Genel could either be greatly advantaged due to better concessions deals with a smaller government entity, or destroyed due to Turkish backlash. Turkey could simply turn off the tap to a vital pipeline built by Iraq from Kirkuk through southern Turkey to the Med port of Ceyhan. Geography is vital to understanding oil and gas operations in Kurdish territories; they’re land-locked by nations which resent Kurdish separatism, causing huge problems for resource extraction ventures. This Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline which was opened in 2009 is the biggest risk for the Genel business model, as will be seen.

The 2011 timing of the creation of Genel signals a possible intrigue surrounding the outbreak of conflict in Syria. Rothschild and Hayward loaded up their Vallares investment vehicle in June 2011, raising $2.2 billion in London. This vehicle was then used to execute the 50/50 merger with the pre-existing Turkish concern Genel Enerji in possession of access and usage of the pivotal Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline in September. The new entity was valued at $4.2 billion. Curiously, the Syrian civil war fueled by NATO proxies (as per Wikileaks) had broken out in March of that same year. The oil and gas bearing lands of north-east Syria in Sunni/Kurd territory represent 95% of Syria’s oil and gas reserves.

A key question needs to be asked: Was this Turkish-Rothschild partnership expecting Syria’s Kurds to open the concessions floodgates upon a successful balkanization? Was it a ‘sure thing’ that Assad would be promptly overthrown and Syria chopped up in a literal fire sale?

Five years after its founding in February 2016, Hayward, now President, had to break some bad news to the Genel board. Reuters reported :

“the firm’s prized [Taq Taq] oil field was worth much less than they had thought.”

In fact, over the coming years, it would come to light that Genel’s Taq Taq reserves are actually 10% of that announced upon Genel’s birth. Curiously, in a May 2016 Reuters article we read :

“Up to and including the first half of 2015, there was no cause for concern – the Taq Taq reservoirs were performing in line with expectations,” Chief Executive Officer Murat Ozgul told Reuters. “Once we started to see the wells decline... we took appropriate steps.” Some industry figures argue however that Genel might have been able to avoid the surprise if it had conducted reviews of its oil fields annually, as is standard in much of the industry, instead of allowing a four-and-a-half year gap between audits.

Four-and-a-half years until a second audit?

Is it possible that the initial audit was deliberately ‘optimistic’ in order to fuel investment into Genel, a startup counting on quick growth? If you’re going to raise capital in London and NYC to venture into a quagmire like Kurdish occupied territories, you would want to make damn sure your PR cannons are loaded ready to fire: A Rothschild; a rockstar ex-CEO of BP; the richest man in Turkey; access to a required pipeline to get around Baghdad; a chief financial officer who headed Goldman Sachs London IB ops; a flagship oil field to provide a stable return until expansion.

Quite the bullet-proof résumé, maybe even suicide bomber proof!

But Putin-proof? Reality bites! Especially after Vladimir Putin invites himself to the party. It’s BYO! Vodka anyone? The drinks just got stiffer.

Was Genel hoping to grow so fast from an oil-minor into an oil-major with additional possessions in north-east Syria – maybe even Libya – making a later Taq Taq downgrade inconsequential? There’s also the small matter of the oil illegally pumped and shipped out of north-east Syrian fields during the civil war; the major source of funding for the anti-Assad insurgency. This oil is known to have transited the Turkish border into Ceyhan. A 2015 University of Greenwich study finds :

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) began to take over oil fields in late spring 2014. Since then, ISIS has expanded its operations by creating a loosely integrated and thriving black economy, consisting of approximately sixty percent of Syria’s oil assets and seven oil producing assets in Iraq. ... the commodity is first lightly refined on site and then a shadow supply-chain network takes over, to bring it to the market.

According to this study, this illegal oil was sold through the port of Ceyhan; the closest port with facilities and with an existing flow of oil to shroud the actual point-of-origin. But how would one ‘legally’ export this oil on paper? Would it not need to show up in the export figures of certain oil concerns which already ship through Ceyhan? Interesting questions indeed; Turkey has no oil of its own so all oil shipments through Ceyhan originate in Northern Iraq. Anyone buying and selling this cheap stolen oil for a profit was essentially funding a terrorist insurgency while banking some hefty blood-stained Benjamin Franklin’s.

The Kurdish forces in this vital part of Syria will become primary recipients of balkanization after terrorist proxies reduce the existing authority of Assad. The Kurds in Syria – including the PKK hated in Turkey – are known to work closely with the KRG in Iraq. On the surface it sounds ludicrous that any Kurdish aligned oil and gas company in their right mind would consider partnering with Turkey on a plan which could materialize the creation of a new Kurdish State in Iraq and/or Syria.

However, as explained in the previous article, it’s not hard to understand why Turkey would want Syria fractured in order to create – with Saudi partnership – the NATO pipeline corridor needed to tap the Gazprom Killer in Qatar. Turkey would never again have an energy diversification crisis and would also make mega bucks on massive GCC gas flows transiting its territory. Turkey could simply use a ‘stabilization’ mandate to occupy these Syrian lands in a condominium with the Saudi’s, after the fact, suppressing the Kurds further. Under this scenario the temporary usage of the Kurds becomes merely a fit-gap solution – a means to an end.

Israel is also no stranger to this zone: Netanyahu supports Kurdish aspirations for independence and in September 2017, during the recent non-binding referendum, he openly endorsed a sovereign Kurdish state, infuriating Erdoğan in Ankara and al-Abadi in Baghdad.

This endorsement is a sure sign Israel is strategically investing in this region where we find a rapacious Rothschild and a desperate Genel eyeing further asset acquisitions. Israel has long been playing a hand here, attempting to build an anti-Shiite ally on Iran’s border. This Israeli ally will also be poised to push back the al-Abadi Shiite regime ruling Iraq from Baghdad, probably taking the major oil assets of Mosul and Kirkuk in the event of a hot conflict; NATO in tow, executing and paying for most of the fighting, of course.

Flag-draped coffins, war debts, MIC profits. Oh say, can you see?

Turkey also has interests in this area which transcend tensions they may have with the Kurds; Turkey has no oil or gas reserves and desperately needs to diversify away from Russian natural gas dependence. As reported by FT in June 2017 regarding Genel development of the prospective Miran and Bina Bawi gas fields :

“Turkey has a strategic interest in the project,” says Murat Ozgul, Genel’s chief executive. “They are looking to diversify their sources of gas and [northern Iraq] is the closest and cheapest option and, politically, it is the right one.”

It is hard to know what outcome Genel’s board desires regarding Kurdish independence knowing what the Turkish reaction would be, which is why the timing of the attempted coup against Erdoğan by the NATO/CIA aligned Hizmet Movement of Fethullah Gülen on July 15th, 2016, is suspicious. As Barçın Yinanç reported in a 2017 article entitled “Once against Kurdish initiative, Gülenists turned into sympathizers of Kurds”: Around about the year 2015, Fethullah Gülen began to change his tune on Kurdish reconciliation after he’d been initially against reconciliatory action, increasing tension with the leading Erdoğan AKP faction.

In light of this, another key question needs to be asked: Was the July 2016 Gülenist coup perhaps connected to Kurd oil and gas companies like Genel, whose Turkish owner is the richest man in Turkey?

If there were any substance to this suspicion, after the failed coup we would expect to see signs of realignment or damage control on the Turkish (Karamehmet) side of Genel’s boardroom. Coincidentally, this is exactly what can be observed. Around one year after the attempted coup and shortly before the next available Annual General Meeting, in June 2017, Rothschild including many of the clique surrounding him – Lockett, Hayward and Monaghan – resigned from their positions at Genel.

Although the company did not disclose the reason for the board exodus, simple dissatisfaction with the performance of the company couldn’t have been the only issue because Hayward’s replacement CEO, Murat Ozgul, serving since 2015, was retained by the majority of shareholders. Given the new political realities in Turkey, is it possible these non-Turkish directors and officers were resigning in advance to save face, rather than being inevitably ousted at the AGM by the Turkish cohort? Was this a boardroom coup triggered by a literal coup? It seems that other internal struggles over the prior year bubbled up at this shareholder AGM which was a standout, exhibiting irregular voting defections.

Boardroom thanksgiving: The Turkey is ready, honey!

At the 2017 AGM: 30.51% voted against re-election of Turkish non-executive director Gulsun Nazli Karamehmet Williams – the daughter of Mehmet Emin Karamehmet and his longtime representative on the board; 30.51% voted against re-election of Turkish CEO Murat Ozgul; 30.69% voted against the 2016 director remuneration and the proposed remuneration policy; 51.61% voted against re-election of Umit Tolga Bilgin, a Turkish non-executive director appointed only months prior, forcing his ouster.

What do we see here? Based on the British exodus right before this meeting, it’s pretty clear which dissatisfied ~30% bloc of shareholders were staging a dummy-spit. Simply put: Less than one year after the attempted coup against Erdoğan, a rift between the London investors and the Turkish investors had materialized at the next available AGM. Regardless of protestations from London, the Turkish interests seem to have gained ascendancy in the company. In May 2016 right before the meeting we hear from Reuters :

Hayward owns just 0.5 percent of Genel, while Rothschild owns around 8 percent, making him the third largest investor after Turkish businessmen Tolga Bilgin and Mehmet Karamehmet.

As the owner of the Çukurova Holding conglomerate with interests in the largest telco in Turkey known as TurkCell, Karamehmet has much to lose if he were to oppose Erdoğan, who has strengthened his control immensely in Turkey after completely subduing the Gülenists. Karamehmet is no stranger to being strong-armed by Erdoğan, prior to the 2016 coup.

Çukurova Holdings had previously owned BMC (a motor company) and TurkMedya (a media conglomerate), but was forced to sell these assets to the state (TMSF) in 2013 as part of a government tax debt settlement. Reporters Without Borders reports :

Another example [of state-sponsored media shake-downs] is the case of Ethem Sancak … He famously said he's "in love" with Erdoğan and would sacrifice his family for him, and has admitted to having entered media to support him. … In 2013, Sancak bought the newspapers Güneş and Akşam as well as Sky360 TV, along with two radio channels and various magazines from the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF), which had seized them from Çukurova Group. In leaked phone conversations attributed to Sancak, he can be heard complaining that he had to acquire these bankrupt media outlets.

Savings Deposit Insurance Fund: For shake-downs? Baste that Turkey!

Poor Sancak! The price of love! He shouldn’t complain too much though, he hadn’t paid the $62 million for the media assets as of 2015; after all, it’s just the TMSF, serving Erdoğan. This tax settlement technique seems to follow a pattern of strong-arm tactics used to wrest control of all disobedient media in Turkey. This same tactic was repeated in March 2018 in order to hustle away ownership of the Dogan Media Company into the TMSF, to be sold off to Erdoğan friendly owners. NYT reports :

In 2009, the company [Dogan] was fined $2.5 billion for unpaid taxes, a decision widely seen as an attempt by the Turkish government to punish it for its criticism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the prime minister and now the president.

What was Karamehmet doing before 2013 to attract the ire of Erdoğan? Was he openly supporting the Gülenist Movement perhaps? I think not. Karamehmet is a well-known secularist so it is unlikely he was overtly supporting the highly religious Gülenists looking to install an Islamic system of Sharia in Turkey. Karamehmet is ideologically opposed to this, though he could have been a clandestine supporter of installing any regime more closely aligned with NATO aims and willing to appease Kurdish reconciliation; such as a Gülen inclusive coalition promised by certain NATO aligned backers of Gülen. Months prior to the attempted coup, in March 2016, the pro-Erdoğan Daily Sabah reported :

The Istanbul Public Prosecutor's Office decided to detain 44 suspected Gülen Movement-affiliated police officers accused of orchestrating illegal wiretaps of 59 people via terrorist organizations with fabricated documents. The 45th suspect is the Gülen Movement's U.S.-based, self-exiled, controversial imam, Fethullah Gülen. Many well-known figures, including businessmen such as Ferit Şahenk, Ali Koç and Mehmet Emin Karamehmet, are among the victims.

If Karamehmet did indeed have designs on regime change, Erdoğan may have offered him a lifeline, including him in the list of wiretap victims. Karamehmet definitely had motive to support the coup after losing his media holdings to a paranoid Erdoğan in 2013. By now, however, in 2018, he would well and truly know his place in Erdoğan’s virtual dictatorship. His daughter would definitely be singing sonnets for Erdoğan within the Genel boardroom. In November 2016, Turkish Minute reported :

Many of the country’s richest men, not knowing whose assets may be targeted next, are either hunkering down, traveling abroad or going out of their way to show loyalty, said the [Bloomberg] article, adding: “Aydin Dogan, a secularist billionaire, has already tamed the coverage at his vast media holdings ... The wireless giant founded by communications tycoon Mehmet Emin Karamehmet, Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS, was once a cultural icon for westernized youth for its wildly popular “Free Girl” ad campaign that cheered individualism. Now he’s promoting Islamic education by funding students involved with the Ensar Foundation.

This is quite the reversal for Karamehmet. Because of the increasing influence of the Gülenists and their use of the more religious elements of Turkish society, Erdoğan has been forced to also increase his religious rhetoric to compete for the loyalty of these segments. This explains Karamehmet now supporting the pro-government Ensar, including why the Turkish half of the Genel boardroom seems to have popped the ideological bubble of London investors like Rothschild. Likewise, Tolga Bilgin – the second largest investor in Genel – is a major player in the Turkish renewable energy sector, so he’d also be singing a love song to Erdoğan; though not from the board of Genel due to his ouster.

Hayward and the Glencore connection to Genel

Tony Hayward, the initial CEO of Genel and later the Chairman, is also the Chairman of Glencore, mentioned earlier. The Anglo-Swiss Glencore is one of the world’s foremost commodities trading and mining giants with an HQ in Switzerland and a registered office on the Isle of Jersey (for tax reduction/evasion purposes). As of 2015, Glencore ranked tenth in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world's largest companies. Its primary listing was in 2011, in London, a process in which Nathaniel Rothschild was a keen investor. The CEO is Ivan Glasenberg; a Jew from South Africa. The company was founded as Marc Rich & Co., named after the infamous Jewish super criminal pardoned by Bill Clinton.

Glencore is highly relevant, thus an extended excerpt from seasoned economist R. T. Naylor’s Hot Money And The Politics Of Debt is in order :

After the oil price hike of 1973, [caused by the Yom Kippur War] a window of opportunity opened. Firms could sell oil from old wells, which had been profitable at pre-1973 prices. To prevent such sales, the US government set price ceilings on old oil. But according to charges filed by the US government against Marc Rich & Co., the company acquired oil from old price controlled wells, passed it through a daisy chain of intermediate ‘sales’ to hide its origin, and then resurfaced it falsely labelled as new oil, which could then be sold at world market price. During the Iranian hostage crisis and the American embargo on trading with Iran, Marc Rich purchased Iranian oil, passed it through subsidiaries marketing Nigerian, Algerian and Peruvian oil, and sold it to desperate American refiners for several dollars per barrel above the already skyrocketing spot price. Part of the payment for the Iranian oil was allegedly made in arms. The alleged ‘fraud’ label posed an additional problem. In order to funnel the profits into its Swiss headquarters, Marc Rich reportedly would buy tanker loads of crude oil from its own Swiss parent and resell them at a much lower price to the American affiliate, ‘losing’ tens of millions of dollars on the deals. According to the US government, the result was the largest American tax fraud to date. As the American government leveled charges against it, Marc Rich & Co., tried to delay a grand jury investigation long enough to liquidate American assets, to prevent their seizure by the American government. Before the US authorities froze liquidations, many millions were funneled out via the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas. Yet another defensive action involved securing a loan from the Rothschild’s Bank in Zurich. The loan was collateralized by a mortgage on a company tanker, the lien preventing the US from seizing the tanker in partial compensation for the tax arrears.

Okay. You get the picture by now, right?

Marc Rich was known to work with (for?) the Rothschild’s in Zurich. This particular branch of the Rothschild banking web was operated jointly by the French and British branches of the family. Not only was it wracked by scandal, coming under investigation by Swiss magistrates for serious irregularities, but it has also been connected to the flagship Quantum Fund NV of George Soros; domiciled in the Netherlands Antilles. A one page Larouche EIR publication from 1993 summarizes these revelations rather well, though for the sake of brevity we must move on.

After selling his company in 1994 to Glencore International, the new company was to remain private up until 2013. While private the owners of Glencore were very mysterious indeed, hidden behind walls of secrecy. When it comes to Genel however, Hayward only owns 0.5% of Genel stock but since its inception until his resignation he retained key positions. Nathaniel Rothschild seems to have been joined at the hip with this man. Is Tony Hayward actually just another Rothschild dynasty retainer and does the Rothschild dynasty control Glencore?

The following Reuters report from November 2016 right before the 2017 boardroom beat-up seems to stand out :

Glencore is seeking to raise $550 million from investors via a debt issue guaranteed by oil from Iraqi Kurdistan in an attempt to secure a big slice of the high-risk – and high-reward – market in a region at war with Islamic State. ... It says Glencore expects to enter into a new 5-year agreement with the government of Kurdistan to buy its crude ... Six cargoes a month would represent a quarter of overall exports from Kurdistan and would be worth over $1.7 billion a year at today’s price of around $40 per barrel for Kurdish oil, and more than $8 billion over the course of five years. ... Glencore’s planned five-year note would carry an interest rate of 12 percent ... “You can argue that in a way it is not Glencore but Kurdistan who is paying that interest rate as it is the ultimate borrower,” said one industry source close to the deal.

Never let a bad situation go to waste, I guess.

A few months after the boardroom brawl, in September 2017, the KRG finally held a referendum on independence which inflamed Baghdad and Ankara, eliciting a stern response from Erdoğan who threatened – among other things – to turn off the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, starving the KRG and thus Genel. Baghdad also sent a contingent of troops into south-east Turkey to take part in joint military drills on a border which is quickly becoming a major flashpoint. As this pipeline was not turned off it becomes clear that Karamehmet is now wielding Genel as a weapon for Erdoğan; meaning Genel may still profit in north-east Syrian assets if Erdoğan were to enact an occupation.

In October 2017 after the KRG independence referendum, Baghdad with the help of Iranian militias recaptured the massive oilfields in Kirkuk which had been occupied by the Kurds in 2014 – who were pumping it illegally, of course. Bloomberg reported that the KRG had taken on a total of $3.5 billion in loans (!) from a number of companies: Independent traders Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Petraco; but also, notably, the trading arm of Rosneft – that pesky Putin has moved in. Pumping was only at 225k barrels per day, far lower than usual. People were panicking. The Bloomberg report ended as follows :

The turmoil could extend beyond the traders as they turned to banks and other investors to share the risk. Glencore, for example, raised about $500 million through a 5-year note that paid a 12 percent coupon to underpin its loan to the Kurdistan government, according to people familiar with the matter.

But, now the KRG can’t possibly pay with oil volumes it can’t pump!

These western loan sharks had banked on the massive Kirkuk and Mosul oil fields becoming theirs to keep! Kirkuk or Mosul make Taq Taq look like a puddle. These fields have traditionally been part of Baghdad controlled northern Iraq, though due to the confusion unleashed by ISIS, the Kurds had swept down to risk what became an attempted annexation of Kirkuk; Mosul still being occupied by ISIS and no doubt pumping that field into the independent pipelines also. If allowed, this would have effectively tripled the power of the KRG and made them masters of all of northern Iraq. This seems to have been the reason they held a referendum on independence at this time.

As of 2018, Baghdad-KRG tensions over oil exports and tax revenues have started up again with a legal case beginning this May. Baghdad, being back in control of Kirkuk and Mosul, has the win thanks to Iran. Pivotally, both Baghdad and the KRG now seem to agree that Russia’s Rosneft is welcome in the region (!) for further $billion investment and development deals; despite western sanctions on Moscow. This bodes ill for Glencore and its bankers. in March 2018 Reuters reported :

The Russian oil major [Rosneft] took over ownership of the region’s oil and gas pipelines last year and agreed to provide it [KRG] with over $2 billion in loans, but the deal is not recognized by Baghdad, which says independent Kurdish oil exports are illegal. ...Iraq’s oil minister has said Baghdad has no problem with Rosneft operating in the Kurdistan region.

It’s quite clear what happened at the 2017 AGM: Vodka happened!

It would seem Russia is now stepping right into the heart of Rothschild’s coveted territory, no doubt attempting to confront the new Erdoğan-aligned Genel, to reach a compromise on the energy diversification plans of Turkey. As usual, Putin is also keeping Baghdad on tenterhooks to get a better deal when he acts as a peacemaker between the KRG and Baghdad; yet another upcoming foreign policy coup for Putin.

Due to these oil producers having taken on epic amounts of debt to absorb the cost of the anti-ISIS campaign and the constant pipeline problems, Rosneft is now strolling right in with billions in dollar reserves the Russian Federation needs to dump, gaining the upper hand with these corporations and their KRG corporate prison wardens. These power plays are highly complex to understand but they all start to make more sense upon a detailed inspection of this multipolar tug-a-war. It’s the Oil & Gas Olympics and Russia is about to sweep all the gold medals.

NATO seems to have critically wounded whatever plans they initially had to somewhat smoothly slot Turkey into their larger Gazprom Killer pipeline stratagem using Gülen. Erdoğan now wants Fethullah Gülen extradited from the US to Turkey; probably a major condition for future cooperation with NATO. To this day, the US has refused to extradite. Will Trump throw this CIA asset – who knows too much – to the wolves, or will Gülen perhaps have an ‘accident’?

Where to now? To Haifa – via Golan – of course!

Moving forward, if we forget Rosneft for the time being, these long feared pipeline problems would forever be rectified for Genel if the Assad regime were to fall and a Sunni aligned regime was to rise in Damascus. A pipeline could, theoretically, transit Syria in the north along further Kurdish territory to meet the Mediterranean; however, Karamehmet, Rothschild, and Erdoğan would quickly kiss and makeup if such a blessing was bestowed upon them. This would remove the need for such a pipeline in northern Syria. Rosneft would of course have to be forcefully removed from KRG territory by NATO, forcing a conflict with Moscow, Baghdad and probably Tehran; the Zionists would lick their lips and waive their Talmud’s.

Such a passionate Erdoğan-Karamehmet-Rothschild reunion aside, Genel and its partners such as Glencore – under an Israel aligned Rothschild masterplan – would have initially desired something else on their shopping list entirely: Upon expansion into Syria, Genel could construct a new pipeline (dashed blue line below) to run south-west through southern Syria directly into the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. Such a plan would directly connect newfound and strengthened Kurdish allies to Dear Mother, Israel. Nathaniel and Jacob Rothschild would be heralded as virtual warriors for the cause of Greater Israel.

This same function was previously filled by the Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline (green line above) which connected the huge oil fields near Kirkuk to the Haifa oil refineries. This pipeline was decommissioned in 1948 when the Iraqi government refused to continue pumping during the first Arab-Israeli War. It was never again to be used. This older pipeline had become operational in 1935, transiting lands under British mandate from the Iraqi Hashemite puppet kingdom down through the irregular-looking strip of land in eastern Jordan.

Passing through Jordan which was one with Israel in those days (British Mandatory Palestine), this pipeline ended in northern coastal Palestine, at the port of Haifa where large oil refineries are located. This irregular-looking, jutting, eastern border for Jordan, was arranged during the secretive 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France. Jordan’s borders were drawn this way specifically so such a pipeline could be laid down. After WWI while Great Britain was the big dog in this sandpit, the oilfields of Mosul and Kirkuk were a major inducement; as they still are today for Israel and some of its allied London based corporations like Genel.

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Some historians convincingly argue (above) that aggression towards the Ottoman Empire by the British Empire, during WWI, was precipitated specifically to rob Turkey of Palestine and these Iraqi oil fields. Why? To secure an accessible oil flow for Europe on the Med – with French partnership – bypassing the Suez which the British Empire knew was too vulnerable a choke point to rely on so heavily. There’s a great irony in this because essentially this same century-old border agreement is plaguing the vital NATO-aligned Turkey-Saudi Gazprom Killer pipeline system (dashed red line above). We reap what we sow?

Israel has always suffered from bad petroleum security due mostly to suppliers being Muslim nations who can refuse supply in regional confrontations between Islam and Israel; as happened in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. A substantial oil supplier aligned with elite Zionist Rothschild’s would be very useful for Israel’s national security. In fact, shipments of oil from the KRG through to Ceyhan – which Baghdad had declared illegal – have been sent to Israeli refineries because no other country would accept the disputed loads. Reuters reported in 2015 :

Iraq’s semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan has for the first time detailed its secretive oil exports operations and said it plans to sell more, whether Baghdad likes it or not, as it needs money to survive and fight Islamic State. The region’s minister for natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, said that to avoid detection oil was often funneled through Israel, transferred directly between ships off the coast of Malta, and decoy ships used to make it harder for Baghdad to track.

I’m sure no illegal ISIS oil stolen from Syria ended up in Israel.

Genie Energy in the NATO Lamp

In the very north-east of Israel at the base of Mt Hermon, lies a seemingly insignificant but very beautiful patch of land only 460 square miles in area known as the Golan Heights. This area was captured by the Zionists from Syria in June 1967 during the Six-Day War; a war in which the Old City of Jerusalem was also captured. Both prizes were never given back to the original owners.

In 1981 the military law over this area – under which an influx of Jewish settlers had rolled in – was removed and the Golan Heights Law was passed in the Knesset, officially annexing this war prize and extending to it the full force of Israeli Law. This event occurred in the same year as an accidental find by the Israeli Water Company (Mekorot) of ‘dirty water’ in the Southern Golan settlement of Ein Sid. The dirty water turned out to be indicative of the presence of oil. In the same year, the government swept into gear, obviously solidifying a policy where occupied Golan would never be returned to Syria. It was annexed.

Long before this oil was discovered, the Golan Heights was considered of immense military and strategic value for Israel. Although they officially deem this territory to be a part of the nation, to this day the international community, by UN resolution – including the United States – considers this to be an illegal occupation. Thus, the exploitation of the water, oil, or natural gas resources in this area is also illegal. The importance of this area for water security is critical for a nation which is quickly draining the fresh water from the Sea of Galilee; also known as Lake Tiberius or Lake Kinneret; a lake filled by springs recharged from the snowfall on Mt Hermon.

Regardless of these illegalities, shaft-sinking permits were granted in the early 1990’s by the Israel National Oil Company (INOC). Early estimates indicated only two million barrels of oil; no big deal. Within a few years, the permits were suspended during peace negotiations. Then, in 1996, Netanyahu first came to power under Likud with the JINSA Clean Break agenda of Douglas Feith hot in hand (as explained previously). Netanyahu granted preliminary approval for INOC to proceed with oil exploration drilling.

In 1997 INOC then underwent a process of privatization. Drilling permits were retained by the state. In 2012, however, Golan exploratory drilling for oil and gas was once again opened up after Netanyahu had been in power for three years. In February 2013 it came to light that a strange bidding process had seen a 36-month exploratory oil drilling license awarded to a company named Afek Oil. This license covered over half the area of the Golan Heights. Headed by Effie Eitam – a resident of the Golan Heights moshav of Nov – Afek Oil started out with great ambitions. As the Afek Oil website states :

Thirty years after that “failed” water drilling attempt [in1981], our experts performed a new analysis of the data gathered during the process of the original water drilling. The evidence found in the subsoil samples taken during that drilling reinforced the evaluation that hidden on the Golan was one of the largest natural oil reserves in the Middle East.

This statement should be taken with a pinch of salt. Not only is it good for investment that Afek reinforces such hyperbole, but it provides political fuel for the Likud – of which Eitam is a hard-right religious member – to hold strong on a ‘no return’ policy for the disputed Golan region citing national energy security. In reality, this oil deposit is ‘in the rock’, not liquid in a reservoir; it is a relatively high-cost shale, though looks to be an especially deep deposit. As a long-term, known, strategic reserve, as shale technology progresses, it has much value for Israel.

While oil and gas finds native to Israel might provide some energy security, analysts tend to fixate on these resources more than the geostrategic value of the land itself. The true reason the Golan is cherished by Israel is due, primarily, to its being the doorway for the vital pipeline corridor mentioned above. Such a corridor could bring not only oil and gas from the Kurdistan and north-east Syria region, but water from reservoirs on the Euphrates to recharge the Sea of Galilee.

Israel does not want to access these resources by transiting Jordan or Shiite parts of Iraq; players which would create too many problems for Israel at this point in time. Syria is fragile; it is tasty, low hanging fruit, but it is also, correctly, northwards. Developing very close alliances with the Kurds in northern Iraq and Syria – offering to help make them independent – will reap rewards for Israel unimaginable in its current position locked up within a very small, dry, marginal nation-state.

Such an empowered Kurdish state under Israeli influence – which would be almost complete once initiated – would create devastating leverage against Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. By stretching its influence to the Euphrates, the Greater Israel agenda can be realized using the aspirations of the Kurdish peoples as a Trojan horse. Golan is a Zionist gateway to unleash what many religious Jews, like Eitam, believe is an ethnic Promise wrapped in religious Providence. This Imperial attitude is hidden well as a ‘national security’ argument; as can be seen from this 2008 Ynet News report from when Eitam was in the Knesset and Netanyahu was still steaming as opposition leader :

'Giving away Golan is like giving away Tel Aviv' MK Eitam added during the meeting that as many people as possible should visit the Golan. He warned against manipulations aimed at changing the public opinion, which he said opposed a withdrawal from the Golan. Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) joined the meeting in the middle, saying that "when one sticks a hoe in the Golan land, what does one discover? Syrian antiques? One discovers synagogues and other antiques belonging to the Jewish people." Netanyahu went on to say that "the late Rabin said in 1992 that whoever withdraws from the Golan Heights would be endangering Israel's security. This statement was true then, it is true today, and it will be true tomorrow as well." Minister Eitan said that three of his granddaughters live in the Golan, adding that "the security argument is a first-class argument. Iran is joining the Shiites and Hamas, sooner or later it will come, and then what will we say? That the Syrians are on Lake Kinneret? For me, giving away a part of the Golan Heights is like giving away a part of Tel Aviv."

“Giving away Tel Aviv” will be the same cry given for any inch of land Israel is allowed to take: Even if it is Lake Assad on the Euphrates!

Above is a map of the Syrian War situation as of March 2018. An important extended ‘buffer zone’ can be seen in the above map contained by the bold blue line and cross-hatching. This was one of the key areas where the war broke out in March 2011 – not a coincidence! Assad has already pushed well into this zone with tanks and heavy artillery. As Israel indirectly ‘strikes’ Assad by funding these opposition forces – including terrorists – the Jews ‘cry out in pain’ as Assad fights back. As The Intercept reported in January 2018 :

Israel is expanding its influence and control deeper into opposition-held southern Syria, according to multiple sources in the area. After failed attempts to ensure its interests were safeguarded by the major players in the war next door, Israel is pushing to implement the second phase of its “safe-zone” project — an attempt to expand a buffer ranging out from the occupied Golan Heights deeper into the southern Syrian provinces of Quneitra and Daraa. The safe zone expansion marks a move toward deeper Israeli involvement in Syria’s civil war.

This extended ‘buffer zone’ is part of a plan for a three-phase repulsion of Assad – to lock him up in Damascus – and the beginning of a ‘Free Syrian Army’ puppet state which Israel and NATO will enforce once Assad is left with no option but to actively engage Israel over this encroachment. Then NATO will act. This is the first stage of the necessary pipeline corridor towards the Euphrates and Kurdistan.

Note the small holdout of ISIS/Al-Nusra/Al-Qaida fighters in the very south-west corner of Syria. This is in the Daraa countryside, protected up against the Israel/Golan Heights border. This is no coincidence; they are being supported by Israel, as are the ‘rebels’. Haaretz reported on February 21st, 2018 :

To Push Iran Back, Israel Ramps Up Support for Syrian Rebels, 'Arming 7 Different Groups' With the Assad regime's advances the civil war and America's reduced involvement in the region, Israel has been forced to make significant changes in its policies in the Golan Heights

Finally, the Genie: Rub the lamp dear reader

QUESTION: So who is behind Afek Oil?

ANSWER: The Genie is!

Afek Oil is a subsidiary of Genie Energy; an energy company spun off from IDT Corp on October 31st, 2011. How ominous the Genie was created on Halloween, and, it’s full of ghouls. The advisory board reads like a who-is-who of the hard-right Zionist orgs mentioned in the article thus far. You might recognize some names: Lord Jacob Rothschild; Dick Cheney; James Woolsey; Rupert Murdoch; Larry Summers; Michael Steinhardt; ex-Senator from Louisiana Mary Landrieu (who sponsored the passed 2014 US-Israel Energy Cooperation Enhancement Bill paving the way for the Golan annexation to be formalized). As can be gleaned from these names, just like Genel Energy, this is no ordinary energy company.

Even more scintillating (sickening?) are the connections between the Rothschild Genie and the Trump White House. Ira Greenstein of the Trump Administration, a Jewish lawyer, just happened to be the President of Genie Energy from December 2011 until May 2017; meaning he stepped down after the April 2017 Trump missile strike on Syria (conflict of interest?) though he claims he stepped down in January; such SEC filings do not exist and Genie has not appointed a replacement President – Hmmm!

Greenstein, together with another Jewish lawyer Martin Silverstein, and lawyer Anthony Scaramucci, worked with ex-Congressman John Sweeney to hunt down and interview applicants for the administration; ranking them on a scale of 1-to-5 for suitability. These four men nicknamed the “Tiger Team” built the Trump White House. Greenstein was also one of Trump’s earliest donors in 2015 and currently works in the Office of the Chief of Staff – subordinate to John Kelly – as Deputy Assistant to the President and Strategist. Regarding Greenstein and the Jewish Kushner family of New Jersey, Politico reported in June 2017 :

Charlie Kushner [Jared’s criminal father] might be keeping the Trump administration at arm’s length, but he has some old pals working in government under his son with whom he also stays in touch. One example: Ira Greenstein, a former Newark-based executive and longtime Kushner family friend, who quit his job as chairman of IDT Corp. and now works out of the Old Executive Office Building on Kushner’s team as a lawyer ...

Zionists run the Trump White House and there’s something rotten in the State of New Jersey!

Genie Energy and its parent company IDT Corp – an American-Jewish telecom company – were founded by Howard Jonas; a Zionist Jew from Newark, New Jersey, where the HQ of both companies are situated. Jonas funds a range of Orthodox and other assorted Jewish causes across the Zionist spectrum, as well as having secured major investments in Israel. Apparently, 25 to 40 percent of IDT Corp’s employees are Orthodox Jews (diversity!). Jonas is a top Netanyahu donor. In mid-2017, under the Trump FCC, Jonas was able to close a communications deal worth billions. Fox Business reports :

It is a big premium [$3.1 billion] for an obscure company called Straight Path Communications Inc. that has just nine employees and has yet to build out a network. And it is another windfall for Mr. Jonas, who made a splash in 2000 by selling a stake in internet-calling company Net2Phone for more than $1.1 billion in cash to AT&T.

Wow! If Jonas happens to be one of the big men behind the throne, with Trump in charge of the FCC for four years, the two manic bidders – AT&T and Verizon – might have aggressively competed for this wonderful product for some strange reason, which, I’m, completely, utterly, missing; Barron’s felt the same. Hey, maybe those nine employees were veritable Zuckerberg’s? To get a feeling of this billionaire, one of Jonas’ very close associates, Michael Glassner, explains the effect Jonas had on his life in a 2016 piece for the Jewish Journal :

Upon moving to New Jersey in the late nineties, Glassner served as a senior advisor to Lewis Eisenberg, the then-Chairman of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and a prominent Republican Jewish leader. He worked out of the Port Authority’s World Trade Center office [in the Twin Towers] but left just before 9/11 [good timing] to join IDT Corp in Newark. Glassner credits his former boss, IDT founder Howard Jonas, whom he referred to as “a strong Zionist and an AIPAC guy,” with encouraging him to become more active in pro-Israel politics. ... Glassner would take time off to ... [campaign for] … George W. Bush’s general election campaign in Iowa, fundraising for Bush’s ’04 re-election effort … “My interest in pro-Israel politics had grown exponentially,” Glassner recalled. “Particularly since 9-11, which represented a real credible threat to all Americans and in particular as a Jew, I felt very strongly about the threat of radical Islam and so I became more and more involved with AIPAC.”

Michael Glassner went on to serve as the national political director and deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Donald Trump For President campaign. Glassner is also credited for easing the January 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump by Sarah Palin during the GOP primaries; a woman Glassner had previously campaigned for. In January 2017, it was announced that Glassner is the chief strategist for Trump’s re-election bid in 2020; to be in charge of a small staff working out of Trump Tower.

Glassner’s boss Jonas is also a major funder of the Central Fund of Israel (CFI), which supports yeshiva leaders who advocate the killing of gentile babies because of “the future danger that will arise if they are allowed to grow into evil people like their parents.” This fund is also a supporter of illegal settlements in occupied territories. Nina Rosenwald, our billionaire Zionist friend mentioned above who founded and runs the Gatestone Institute inhabited by John Bolton and James Woolsey, is also a heavy funder of the CFI.

The primary function of CFI seems to be a vehicle for channeling donations from illegal West Bank settlements over to a Manhattan textiles office run by the Jewish Marcus Brothers, then surreptitiously back to the settlement donors in order to generate tax deductions via a loophole. This provides a monetary incentive for illegal settlement Jews in occupied areas to remain entrenched while the Likud turn a blind eye to what is essentially at this stage a government subsidy. According to Arthur Marcus who is vehemently against a two-state solution :

“Any Palestinian state is going to be a mortal threat to the state of Israel.”

Dear reader, if you’ve made it this far, you’re definitely as keen as mustard, so I have one last connection to point you towards. It’s the big elephant in the room. Upon entry into the White House, Trump brought along his longtime friend Wilbur Ross, another businessman from New Jersey; born and bred. In the 1970’s, Ross began his career at the New York City offices of N M Rothschild & Sons, where he started off running the bankruptcy-restructuring advisory practice. By the 1980s he had become the senior managing director of Rothschild Inc. At this same time, Donald Trump was in severe financial trouble, having overextended himself on three Atlantic City casinos. Forbes reports :

In stepped Ross, then head of Rothschild Inc’s bankruptcy advising team, to represent bondholders, who were pondering forcing the casino into involuntary bankruptcy and ousting Trump. Ross reportedly saw crowds pressed against Trump’s limo windows to get a peek at the mogul, and realized the value of Trump’s celebrity.

The VALUE of celebrity, indeed.

Ross, along with another Jewish billionaire, Carl Icahn, charged in on white horses to restructure bondholder debts, allowing Trump to keep control of the businesses without declaring bankruptcy. For this service, Ross, now a billionaire, was appointed Secretary of Commerce; one of three important business and finance-related positions in the White House. The second important position is the Secretary of the Treasury, currently held by Jewish billionaire Steve Mnuchin. The third such position was the Director of the National Economic Council, filled initially by Jewish billionaire Gary Cohn; Co-CEO of Goldman Sachs.

President Trump might as well move the Israeli Embassy into the West Wing.

VITAL READ: WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006 ~ Ivan Stamenkovic, MPN. October 26th, 2016.

VITAL READ: Israel Preps for Syrian War with Golan’s Oil and Water in its Sights ~ Whitney Webb, MPN. February 13th, 2018.

Stay tuned for the third installment :

Balkanizing Syria: NATO Wishes Thrice of the Rothschild Genie.

In this next article since we’ve now rubbed the NATO lamp to expose the Rothschild Genie, Republic Standard will dig deeper below the surface, and back into the past, to expose the influence of this Genie within the Trump White House. Additionally, we will reveal the three wishes the Genie can grant for NATO (or is it the other way around?). Here at Republic Standard, we’re wishing for peace, but they’re wishing for war.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2HT9ITK via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine

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thetrumpdebacle · 6 years

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Benge Nsenduluka For Daily Mail Australia

Published: 03:33, 1 January 2018 | Updated: 03:49, 1 January 2018

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US President Donald Trump recently marked his first year in office.

And Australian psychic Georgina Walker has sensationally claimed there will be an impeachment this year.

The self-proclaimed ‘psychic to the stars’ claimed President Trump faces a ‘very rocky’ year ahead amid the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US election.

Impeachment? Australian psychic Georgina Walker has sensationally claimed Donald Trump will be impeached in 2018

‘[I see] an impeachment,’ she told the Today show on Monday.

EXCLUSIVE: ‘The only way to protect myself is to hit back’:…

‘She’s lovely and very down to earth’: Margot Robbie…

‘We getting married this year!’ Shanina Shaik flaunts her…

‘Absolutely disgusting’: Charlie Pickering forced to…

‘I saw a ball and chain around his ankle. I saw President Bill Clinton’s shadow over him, so he went through that process, but he did escape it.

She continued: ‘There is a black cloud over the White House this year … I feel it’s a rocky, rocky year. He may just escape through the impeachment proceedings as Clinton did. But there’s enough to take him down.’

Prediction: ‘I saw a ball and chain around his ankle. I saw President Bill Clinton’s shadow over him, so he went through that process, but he did escape it,’ Georgia said on the Today show

‘Rocky road ahead’: The self-proclaimed ‘psychic to the stars’ claimed President Trump faces a tough year ahead amid the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US election

Also included in her bold predictions were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate Middleton as well as Beyonce and Jay Z.

She claimed to know the gender and name of the royal couple’s third child – a baby girl named Victoria.

She added that superstar Beyonce’s nine-year marriage to hip hop mogul Jay Z will remain strong, despite infidelity claims ‘as long as they keep their separate careers.’

A baby girl? Also included in her bold predictions were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate Middleton. Georgina claimed to know the gender and name of the royal couple’s third child – a baby girl named Victoria

Last year Georgina successfully predicted William and Kate would have a baby girl.

On Sunday, another psychic Kerrie Erwin told Sunrise that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry won’t last.

‘I do get [feelings of] a pregnancy for her next year. But actually I don’t think it’s going to last,’ she said.

‘I’d probably give it five years. I feel there is a lot of personal things going on between them because they’re two very strong individuals.

She continued: ‘Which is a sad thing. I wish them all the best. But it doesn’t look good.’

Wedded bliss! Beyonce’s nine-year marriage to hip hop mogul Jay Z will remain strong, despite infidelity claims ‘as long as they keep their separate careers,’ Georgina claimed. The couple are pictured with their first child Blue Ivy, who turns eight this week

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gaperezmakes · 6 years

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Insurrection - The Making of a Grand Paladin Part IV

< First | Previous | Next | Last >

The three candidates stood behind their podiums in front of the remaining seven leaders of the Prime. The Dealer and Synoth both sat behind a table, writing notes down and exchanging quiet comments. Orvyn, standing between Kalman and Sheamus, looked to his friend on his right. Kalman met Orvyn’s gaze and nodded as if knowing he too was nervous. Behind the Dealer and Synoth sat the four Grand Magni and Grand Marshall Hugues.

It had been a week since the three of them received their nomination letters. Both Orvyn and Kalman knew they were fighting an uphill battle; Sheamus had the benefit of a united six votes if all the magi voted together. Trying to uncomplicate the situation, Orvyn had approached the Dealer after receiving his nomination to formally withdraw from the race.

“Orvyn, what did I tell you about Mary Sue-ing?” The Dealer looked at the nomination letter coldly.

“Sir, I don’t completely understand what you mean, but this is not some sense of honor forcing me to throw this away.” Orvyn pushed the letter towards his superior.

“Grand Marshall, I won’t tell you who nominated you. I can’t,” he pushed the letter back, “But I’d like to see why.”

“But sir, if we split our votes, Grand Marshall Sheamus will win, and I don’t believe he’s the right man for the job.”

“And you believe Grand Marshall Kalman is? You think he’d be better than you?”

“Not necessarily, but we’re both certainly more qualified than Sheamus.”

“Then don’t give up.” The Dealer’s stare intensified, “Run like you want to win. Go ahead and give Kalman your vote if you really want to, but don’t give up.”

Orvyn told Kalman that there had been a change in plans. Kalman was frustrated with the development but was assured by Orvyn that there was still a way for him to win. There was no way Orvyn had any dog in this race, so both he and Hugues would vote for Kalman. They assumed that the Dealer would vote for Kalman, which gave him a solid block of four votes. All he would need to do from there would be to get one more vote so he could force a runoff election that only involved the Paladin Corps, and a vote like that was sure to go in his favor.

And now was the moment for their entire plan to come together.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” The Dealer announced, looking to the small group behind him, “Thank you for attending, although I suspect most of you are here because you had no other choice. Today is unprecedented, as it is not only our first debate like this, but it is our first debate where we have three candidates. Please welcome Grand Marshall Richard Kalman!” There was a short applause from the crowd. “Grand Marshall Sigurd Orvyn!” To his surprise, Orvyn received some applause of his own, although he figured it was more of a formality than anything else. “Grand Marshall Keaton Sheamus!” To neither Orvyn nor Kalman’s surprise, Sheamus’ welcome was much louder and longer than theirs.

“Now, Archmage Synoth and I have prepared a list of questions for each of the candidates. They will have three minutes to answer each question, and after their opponents will be given two to rebut their statements. Hopefully, after today, we will have selected our new Grand Paladin!” Another short round of applause filled the room. “Gentlemen, any opening statements?”

“To whoever nominated me for this opportunity, I appreciate your faith and hope I do not let you down,” Kalman’s attempt to project calm and confidence was undercut by the slightest twinges of nervousness in his voice.

“I hope to prove today that nobody can succeed on blind luck alone, but with hard work and determination,” Orvyn spoke loudly and proudly, “And I hope that, if I am chosen, I will be able to lead the Paladin Corps with the same grace and dignity as Grand Paladin Mira.”

Sheamus looked surprisedly at Orvyn. He hadn’t expected such boisterous posturing in an election he was going to win handily. “I--I will do my best to prove that I am the best suited to lead the Paladin Corps in Grand Paladin Mira’s absence.”

“Thank you, Grand Marshalls. The questioning begins now. Archmage, I believe you have the first?”

“Grand Marshall Sheamus,” Synoth locked his fingers and looked critically at the scruffy blond-haired man, “What do you think is the most pressing issue facing the Paladin Corps going forward?”

“I believe that we in the Paladin Corps carry a greater burden on our shoulders than the Mage Corps. I believe that by delegating some of our responsibilities to the mages, we will become a more effective machine in leading the Prime.”

“Respectfully, Grand Marshall, I disagree,” Orvyn spoke up, “I have also noticed that the Paladin Corps has a larger set of responsibilities than the Mage Corps, but the solution to that issue is not to sacrifice our power and influence. You use the word ‘delegating’ to explain how to reduce our workload, but you forget that the Mage Corps is an authoritative co-equal faction of the Prime.”

“I see,” Synoth finished writing some notes down, “A follow-up, if I may?” The Dealer deferred to his subordinate, “Thank you. Grand Marshall Orvyn, how would you handle the issue Grand Marshall Sheamus has presented to you?”

“I believe that a more effective solution to the issue is not with handing our power to the magi, but with a restructuring of the Paladin Corps as a whole. An expansion of the responsibilities performed by the lower ranks will help reduce the burden on our highest officers, who currently feel that they have to carry this army on their shoulders alone. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take assistance from our mage brethren--after all, we lean on them much more than we realize--but we can’t just unload all the work we don’t want to do on them.”

Orvyn looked over to Kalman, who seemed at a loss for words. The two of them looked back at the Dealer as he cleared his throat, “Very nice. Thank you, Grand Marshall Orvyn. Grand Marshall Kalman, I’m sure you remember the incident about a year ago where former Grand Marshall Palmer was caught leading a conspiracy to undermine the authority of the upper leadership of the Prime. How would you prevent another scandal of that magnitude from overshadowing your service as Grand Paladin?”

“Well, sir, I would,” Kalman mistakenly paused, collecting his thoughts, “Push for a reorganization of our promotional procedures, so that in the event that a change needed to be made to the promotional boards or results, either you or the Archmage or myself would have to be physically present to confirm that such changes have actually been authorized by us. I understand that I was ultimately a beneficiary of his ouster--both Grand Marshall Orvyn and I did receive our promotions in the wake of his expulsion--but we as the paladins lost a huge chunk of our soldiers--several of which were very good at their jobs.”

“So you’re suggesting, Kalman, that the Grand Paladin do more paperwork?” Sheamus leaned forward a bit to look past Orvyn, “With all due respect, Grand Paladin Mira was a charismatic leader, but she was terrible and overburdened with paperwork. It’s not unfair to assume that we would be beset by the same issue if we don’t change things.”

“I’m not saying we have to fill out or sign anything else, but that we must physically authorize any major changes to our promotional nominations. One of the reasons that Palmer was able to get so far with his scheme was because he was able to use his authority to appear as though he was executing Grand Paladin Mira’s wishes. If we remove the ability for our subordinates to advocate for us, we remove the power of any conspiracy to undermine our authorities.”

“Thank you Grand Marshall.” Synoth looked to Sheamus again, “Grand Marshall Sheamus, same question.”

“Well Archmage, I believe that we set a very clear precedent with Palmer. He and his cohorts were very publicly exposed and expelled, and I believe that sends a very clear message about how we intend on dealing with those who would betray our trust like that.”

“And you believe we should do nothing because the punishment would deter any potential conspirators?” Orvyn berated Sheamus, who seemed taken aback by the interjection.

“I was about to explain how we could prevent this crime from happening again.” Sheamus fumbled with some half-thought sentences, “We could design a mutli-tier confirmation process for all promotional nominees. The first tier is a confirmation from us as the leaders of our branches that the nominations are correct. The second would be that no changes can be made to the nomations after this confirmation has occurred. After the promotional boards have met and decided which candidates will be moving up, no changes can be made to those promotions.”

“So not only would you increase the paperwork load on our Grand Paladin--which you just berated Grand Marshall Kalman for,” Orvyn gave Sheamus a cold stare, “But you would commit us to what could potentially be a disastrous choice if it turned out your candidate was wildly unqualified for the position they were about to move into. Right now the process for demoting anyone is incredibly difficult because of the burden of proof required. So not only are you requiring more paperwork on the front-end of promotions, but you’re potentially putting more on the back-end if we have to remove unqualified people from their positions. Frankly, I believe Grand Marshall Kalman has the better strategy for dealing with this issue.”

“Thank you, Grand Marshall, but that is all the time we have for that issue,” the Dealer turned a page in his notes, “While I still have your attention, Grand Marshall Orvyn, how do you suggest we defend and expand our claim to the land in Capital City?”

“I believe that this is an area where we could ask the Mage Corps for more assistance. We shoulder so much of the burden of running the Prime’s defenses that I often see my paladins leaving for their watch as exhausted as they came from it. I might not be able to speak for everyone here, but my men are being pushed to their limits, and that is setting us up for catastrophic failure if we continue on this course. I propse setting up a joint defense committee with the magi so that we can better delegate the responsiblities of defense and expansion while not sacrificing the well-being of our men.”

“So you’re allowed to sell us out to the mages, but I can’t?” Sheamus shook his head. “Such hypocrisy,” he muttered.

“No, this is a committee we run as the equal branches we are. The Grand Paladin wields no more authority than the Archmage, so I feel it is only right that they participate in crafting our defenses, as well as pulling their fair share of weight while actually defending our territory.”

“Very interesting,” the Dealer nodded as he finished writing his notes down. He looked at a piece of paper Synoth pushed towards him. “You have the last question, Archmage.”

Synoth looked annoyed, but looked over to Kalman, “Grand Marshall Kalman, what do you believe is the biggest internal threat the Prime faces?”

“The biggest internal threat?” Kalman whispered quietly to himself. Orvyn looked to him in panic. He couldn’t not answer this question. It would doom his entire bid to become Grand Paladin. They both needed him to find an answer and quickly. He suddenly found his composure, “I believe our biggest internal threat are the remaining few from Palmer’s conspiracy who were not caught and continue to undermine us. I believe that we must be vigiliant in preventing them from gaining the same level of influence they had while Palmer led them.”

“Please, Palmer’s conspiracy is over. We found and detained or expelled all of his cronies.”

“We can’t know that for sure. Palmer may have had some very low-level operatives who are still working in our ranks.”

“And what if they are? Palmer is dead. We all witnessed his execution.”

“But--”

“Gentlemen,” the Dealer interjected quickly, “That is all the time we have. Thank you for your answers. We are now prepared to take this to vote.” One-by-one, everyone filed up to the lone voting booth off to the side of the debate stage. Everyone waited patiently as the last of the ten voters walked out. A Private walked into the booth and brought out the ballots. All ten were handed to the Dealer, who counted the votes and received a confirmation from Synoth.

“And the results are in. Grand Marshall Richard Kalman,” both Kalman and Orvyn held their breath, “Two votes.” Kalman’s shoulders fell and Orvyn’s eyes opened wide. They had failed and Sheamus was going to become the next Grand Paladin.

“Grand Marshall Sigurd Orvyn,” the number didn’t matter. Orvyn rubbed his eyes in defeat. Kalman was their best shot to-- “Four votes.” Both paladins looked up at the Dealer. Something lit up in Kalman’s eyes. Four votes for Orvyn?

“Grand Marshall Keaton Sheamus: Four votes.”

A tie.

Everyone stood up and applauded the two paladins. Sheamus walked up to Orvyn and extended a hand. They exchanged a good-natured handshake, and Kalman offered his congratulations.

“Gentlemen,” the Dealer caught their attention, “You have one week to prepare for your next debate. We’ll have the vote after that, and in three days we’ll promote our new Grand Paladin. Be ready.” He dismissed everyone. They all left quickly after congratulating the two paladins. Orvyn managed to catch Kalman before his compatriot disappeared.

“Kalman, what happened?”

Kalman shrugged, “You did what I couldn’t.”

“But we had a plan! We agreed! If we both voted for you, then that means Hugues--”

“Hugues probably voted for me, because I voted for you.”

Orvyn was stunned. “What?”

“S., you were ready. You took him to task and you challenged him at every turn. I just stood there and fumbled over my words. I can’t beat him in the general vote, but you can. I have no idea who else voted for you, but if they saw what I saw, then you’ve got this.” Kalman put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, “And I will be damned if I see Sheamus selling us out to the mages.”

< First | Previous | Next | Last >

{Gabe here, as usual! I had planned for this to be the penultimate part of this short story, but it looks like it’ll go on a little longer than expected. Don’t worry, it shouldn’t go past six parts, which gives me enough time to not think about what the next short story will be! Hooray!

Anyway, as usual, here’s a link to buy Insurrection.

Please do that!}

#my writing #side story #Insurrection #Age of the Black Empire #Fantasy #Orvyn #Politics #Debate #Not boring #Except #It is boring #lol

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nancyedimick · 6 years

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May the government restrict political T-shirts and pins inside polling places?

(Eric Thayer/Reuters)

Many states ban overt electioneering near polling places, including on public sidewalks, where speech is generally broadly protected. In Burson v. Freeman (1992), the Supreme Court upheld those restrictions. The four-justice plurality concluded that they were narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest in “preventing voter intimidation and election fraud.” (Among other reasons, the justices noted that specific bans targeted at voter intimidation and election fraud, rather than at electioneering generally, would be ineffective because “law enforcement officers generally are barred from the vicinity of the polls to avoid any appearance of coercion in the electoral process,” so that “many acts of interference would go undetected.”) Justice Scalia’s concurrence concluded that the long tradition of banning electioneering outside polling places made the sidewalks into “nonpublic fora,” in which otherwise protected speech could be restricted.

Minnesota and some other states, though, also add restrictions that are narrower in some ways but broader in others — they limit speech within polling places (not on sidewalks outside them) but go beyond overt electioneering, also covering other political advocacy. Minnesota, for instance, forbids people from wearing insignia (including slogans on clothing) that contains “issue oriented material designed to influence or impact voting” (such as “‘Please I.D. Me’ buttons”) and “material promoting a group with recognizable political views (such as the Tea Party, MoveOn.org, and so on).” Is this constitutional? The Supreme Court will decided that in Minnesota Voters Aliance v. Mansky, which it just agreed to hear Monday. Let me offer a few thoughts about the case.

1. Polling places are essentially government-controlled property (even if the government has just borrowed it for the day). And when it comes to the government’s power as landlord, the court has split property into five “forum” categories:

The traditional public forum: “government property that has traditionally been available for public expression” — sidewalks, parks and the like. Here, the test is the same as when the government restricts speech on private property: content-based restrictions are generally forbidden unless they fall within existing First Amendment exceptions (such as for libel or true threats or obscenity), or are narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. The government has no extra authority to restrict content stemming from its ownership of the traditional public forum property.

The designated public forum: “government property … intentionally opened up for [the] purpose” of being a forum for the public at large to speak freely. Speech restrictions in such a forum “are subject to the same strict scrutiny as restrictions in a traditional public forum,” but the government may close the forum if it wishes. There isn’t a lot of property like this, but open spaces at public universities that have been opened to all comers might qualify. The mail isn’t formally labeled designated public fora, but it has generally been treated this way.

The limited public forum: government property intentionally opened up for speech, but only “by certain groups” or for “the discussion of certain subjects.” Here, “a governmental entity may impose restrictions on speech that are reasonable and viewpoint-neutral.” “Reasonable” here means “consistent with the [government’s] legitimate interest in preserv[ing] the property” “for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated.”

Nonpublic forum: all other government-owned property that’s generally open to a defined group of people, but not for the purpose of promoting private speech (but instead just for the purpose of, say, flying from one city to another). Here the rule appears to be the same as for the limited public forum — the restriction must be reasonable and viewpoint-neutral, but more restrictions are seen as reasonable precisely because the property isn’t dedicated to speech purposes.

Not a forum at all — place for government speech: government property or a government funding program that the government uses to speak (through its employees or other agents). An example might be a government-owned television channel, or perhaps an announcement board in a government building. Here, the government acting as speaker generally may decide what speech to allow, even based on viewpoint.

It seems very likely that the court will view polling places as nonpublic fora: The government hasn’t opened them for speaking. People who visit for other purposes may incidentally speak, whether in conversations when standing in line, or in writing or symbols on their clothing. But the government need not allow freewheeling political expression there, and any restrictions are constitutional so long as they are reasonable and viewpoint-neutral.

2. Now the reasonableness requirement isn’t entirely deferential to the government. One famous example is Board of Airport Comm’rs of L.A. v. Jews for Jesus, Inc. (1987), where the L.A. airport authority banned all “First Amendment activities” in the airport, as a means of restricting charitable fundraisers and others. The court didn’t view the airport as a traditional, designated, or limited public forum; indeed, five years later the court expressly held that government-owned airports are nonpublic fora. But the court held that the restriction was still unconstitutional:

On its face, the restriction was unreasonably broad, because it “prohibits even talking and reading, or the wearing of campaign buttons or symbolic clothing. Under such a sweeping ban, virtually every individual who enters LAX may be found to violate the resolution by engaging in some ‘First Amendment activit[y].’ We think it obvious that such a ban cannot be justified even if LAX were a nonpublic forum because no conceivable governmental interest would justify such an absolute prohibition of speech.”

The city tried to avoid this by interpreting it as covering “only expressive activity unrelated to airport-related purposes,” and that “read[ing] a newspaper or convers[ing] with a neighbor at LAX” is “permitted ‘airport-related’ activity because reading or conversing permits the traveling public to ‘pass the time.‘” But such a dividing line, the court held, was unacceptably vague and thus risked viewpoint discrimination: “The result of this vague limiting construction would be to give LAX officials alone the power to decide in the first instance whether a given activity is airport related. Such a law that ‘confers on police a virtually unrestrained power to arrest and charge persons with a violation’ of the resolution is unconstitutional because ‘the opportunity for abuse, especially where a statute has received a virtually open-ended interpretation, is self-evident.'”

3. One key question in the case, then, is whether the prohibition is unreasonable — whether it is much broader than what is needed to serve the government’s interests in “‘maintain[ing] peace, order and decorum’ in the polling place.” On one hand, the restriction is limited just to speech (including passive speech, such as displays on clothing) “designed to influence or impact voting” or “promoting a group with recognizable political views”; this isn’t a ban on all “First Amendment activities,” or even all speech about politics. On the other, merely passive display of ideological views on shirts, pins and the like is commonplace in American life, and very rarely interferes with “peace, order and decorum.” Whatever problems might be posed by groups of campaign workers electioneering outside the polling place (and certainly in the polling place), I doubt that voters merely wearing T-shirts while standing in line would cause any undue commotion, much less intimidation or fraud.

4. Another question is whether the policy, though facially viewpoint-neutral, will be so vague that it is likely to be implemented in discriminatory ways. As the challengers’ petition argued, the law “often requires election officials to rely on their own subjective judgments about whether certain apparel falls within the ambit of the law’s ban on ‘political’ speech.” Which groups have “recognizable political views”? Which “issue oriented” messages are “designed to influence or impact voting”? What about religious insignia in elections where some religious group is closely associated with a particular position on a particular ballot measure? What about rainbow insignia, when a gay rights measure is on the ballot? Clothing that’s used as a symbol of racial or ethnic identity, when an election campaign has had a prominent racial or ethnic dimension? Once the law goes beyond express advocacy (itself not the sharpest of lines) and covers mention of groups with “recognizable political views” or “issue oriented” messages, the lines get murkier still.

I hesitate to predict the outcome here (and in any case, my soothsaying powers have proved quite inadequate in the past); but I hope this lays out the main issues. The Republic, to be sure, won’t stand or fall based on the Supreme Court’s decision here; but it’s an interesting case, and I look forward to reading the justices’ views on it.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/13/may-the-government-restrict-political-t-shirts-and-pins-inside-polling-places/

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wolfandpravato · 6 years

Text

May the government restrict political T-shirts and pins inside polling places?

(Eric Thayer/Reuters)

The city tried to avoid this by interpreting it as covering “only expressive activity unrelated to airport-related purposes,” and that “read[ing] a newspaper or convers[ing] with a neighbor at LAX” is “permitted ‘airport-related’ activity because reading or conversing permits the traveling public to ‘pass the time.'” But such a dividing line, the court held, was unacceptably vague and thus risked viewpoint discrimination: “The result of this vague limiting construction would be to give LAX officials alone the power to decide in the first instance whether a given activity is airport related. Such a law that ‘confers on police a virtually unrestrained power to arrest and charge persons with a violation’ of the resolution is unconstitutional because ‘the opportunity for abuse, especially where a statute has received a virtually open-ended interpretation, is self-evident.'”

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/13/may-the-government-restrict-political-t-shirts-and-pins-inside-polling-places/

#Law #Lawyer

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growing420news · 7 years

Text

UK Police Cautions/Warnings and US Immigration Law

The way in which US immigration law treats criminal matters for purposes of determining a non-US citizen’s admissibility to the United States is complex. Notably, travellers from the United Kingdom are often surprised that a UK police caution or formal warning, in which there was no court or judge involvement and no filing of formal criminal charges, could render them “inadmissible” to the United States for any reason.

Their astonishment arises not only from the complex intersection of criminal and US immigration law, but also from the fact that the US Department of State has not been consistent in the way it treats UK cautions/warnings, adopting a new approach as recently as 2014. The recent 2014 policy, described below, could mean that non-US citizens with UK cautions who were previously traveling to the United States without issue may now be barred from the United States, unless eligible for an exemption or waiver of inadmissibility.

Below is a brief summary of the current state of UK police cautions/warnings and US immigration law. The article demonstrates that the prudent approach would be to treat all formal UK police cautions and warnings as “admissions” for purposes of determining criminal inadmissibility, unless there is evidence showing that the admission was not obtained in compliance with controlling US legal precedent.

I. Overview of Criminal Inadmissibility under INA § 212(a)(2)

An alien is inadmissible to the United States for committing a “crime involving moral turpitude” (CIMT) or a crime involving a controlled substance, including an attempt or conspiracy to commit them, if (1) the individual was convicted of such crime; or (2) the individual admitted to having committed such a crime, or admitted to its essential elements.

Further, (3) if the US immigration official has a mere reason to believe the alien was or is involved in the trafficking of a controlled substance (e.g., intent to sell), the alien can be rendered inadmissible under INA § 212(a)(2)(C)(i), even though the alien was not convicted (e.g., acquitted) of the crime and has not admitted to its commission or essential factual elements.

A finding of criminal inadmissibility is not the end of the road. Once an individual is considered to be inadmissible, he or she should then pursue, through legal counsel, any applicable exemption or waiver of inadmissibility for the US visa type being sought.

II. UK Cautions/Warnings Defined

Below are three UK out-of-court dispositions particularly relevant to US immigration law:

i) Simple Police Caution. A simple caution is a formal notice from a police officer that a person has committed an offence. Under current policy, the individual will generally be fingerprinted and photographed. The police will likely offer a caution if it is a minor offence and usually if there is no other criminal history. The police can only issue a simple caution if the person admits to the offence and agrees to be cautioned. If the person refuses the caution (e.g., denies the offence), then formal criminal charges will be brought against the individual.

ii) Conditional Police Caution. A conditional police caution is the same as a simple caution in all respects, including an admission to the offence, except the individual is subject to certain conditions. Failure to comply with the conditions will result in formal criminal charges being brought against the individual.

iii) Cannabis Warnings. A cannabis warning is not a caution, but a verbal warning by a police officer to a first-time offender possessing a small amount of cannabis for personal use. The police cannot give the formal verbal warning unless the person admits ownership of the cannabis. The police officer will record that the individual has admitted to owning the cannabis and will be asked to sign this record. Warnings will show up on an ACRO report and will need to be addressed for purposes of US immigration.

The consistent element in all of these UK out-of-court dispositions is that the individual must “admit” to the offence. As discussed below, whether the admission under UK law qualifies as an admission under US immigration law requires a case-by-case analysis.

III. UK Cautions/Warnings Are Not “Convictions”

A “conviction” for purposes of US immigration requires (i) a formal judgment of guilt entered by a court; (ii) or if adjudication is withheld: a finding of guilt by a judge or jury, a plea of guilty or nolo contendere by the alien, or admission of facts from the alien sufficient for a finding of guilty; or (iii) the imposition of some form of punishment by a judge.

Based on this definition, UK police cautions or warnings do not qualify as convictions for purposes of US immigration. On April 9, 2014, the US Department of State’s Visa Office agreed. The reasoning being that there is no official court or judicial action. However, as explained below, the absence of a “conviction” does not preclude a finding of criminal inadmissibility for purposes of US immigration.

IV. UK Police Cautions/Warnings Can Be “Admissions”

If there is no conviction on the applicant’s record, the immigration official can nevertheless render the applicant inadmissible to the USA if the applicant “admitted” to the crime or its essential factual elements. Such admission can be elicited before a police officer, federal law enforcement, judge, medical doctor, or US immigration official.

i) An “admission” for purposes of US Immigration Law

The legal criteria for an “admission” for purposes of INA § 212(a)(2) is defined in the Matter of K: the alien must (1) prior to the admission be given an adequate definition of the crime, including all essential elements; (2) admit to conduct that constitutes the essential elements of the crime; and (3) provide an admission that is explicit, unqualified, voluntary and unequivocal. There is no requirement that the alien admit the legal conclusion or non-factual elements of the crime.

Formal criminal charges are not required for there to be a valid admission. For example, in 2013, in a highly-publicized UK fraud trial against the former assistants of UK celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, Ms. Lawson admitted under oath to having used cocaine seven times and “smok[ing] the odd joint.” She denied ever being a habitual drug user or addict.

Even though Scotland Yard never brought criminal charges against Ms. Lawson for her admitted drug use, and does not intend to do so; on March 30, 2014, British Airways refused to allow Ms. Lawson to board a plane for her holiday to the United States.

The US government did not explicitly release the exact reason for its refusal; however, a reasonable analysis of US immigration law’s approach to controlled substance violations shows that her highly-publicized admission in court to having violated a controlled substance law is consistent with a finding of inadmissibility, provided that the other elements of Matter of K were met in eliciting her admission.

Thus, even though Ms. Lawson’s potential admission took place in a criminal trial against her former assistants for fraud, such admissions have the potential of rendering a person inadmissible, even though there were no criminal charges pending against that individual.

Moreover, an admission does not need to be made under oath. For example, an admission to an immigration official during a visa interview or at the border would qualify. Notably, US federal law enforcement officers are trained in the Matter of K criteria to properly obtain a valid “admission” from aliens seeking entry to the United States for the purpose of excluding them.

Further, an admission by an alien to a medical doctor during a required medical exam for a US green card that the applicant had smoked marijuana for a number of years could be a basis for rendering an alien inadmissible to the United States on the basis of having admitted to violating a controlled substance law, provided the doctor obtained the admission in accordance with Matter of K.

Interestingly, if an admission is made subsequent to (i) a valid acquittal/dismissal of criminal charges or (ii) a valid pardon of a conviction, the subsequent admission by itself will not generally render the person thereby inadmissible. However, if the criminal charges were related to the trafficking of a controlled substance (e.g., intent to sell), an admission following an acquittal/dismissal of the charges could nevertheless provide the US immigration official with “reason to believe” that the offence occurred and render the applicant inadmissible, notwithstanding the court’s disposition.

ii) UK Police Cautions/Warnings as “Admissions”

For an individual to receive a formal UK caution or cannabis warning under current policy, the individual must admit the offence to the police officer. In order for there to be a finding of inadmissibility based on the admission: (1) the criminal offence must be a CIMT or controlled substance violation, as defined by US regulations, and (2) the admission to the UK police officer must comply with the requirements set forth in the Matter of K.

The US Department of State’s policy regarding UK police cautions has not been consistent. On September 23, 1997, there was an Advisory Opinion from the Dept. of State that stated UK police cautions were “not an admission” for purposes of US immigration law.

In late 2013, the US Embassy in London requested new guidance from the US Department of State and began placing visa applications in which the applicant had UK police cautions in “administrative processing” until the new advisory opinion was released.

In February 2014, the Embassy began adjudicating the on-hold “UK caution cases” consistent with convictions and admissions. Although this implied that the US Department of State had issued its new formal advisory opinion to the US Embassy in London, the opinion has not been released to the public.

In April 2014, the US Department of State clarified to the American Immigration Lawyers Association that, although UK cautions are not convictions, they can still be “admissions” for purposes of inadmissibility, appearing to depart from its prior 1997 opinion. The Dept. of State stated that there must be a “case-by-case” determination, presumably because UK police officers are not trained in eliciting Matter of K admissions or US immigration law.

The US Dept. of State implied that a “case by case” analysis is required to determine whether, for example, the UK police policy at the time of the caution required an admission for the issuance of the caution, an adequate definition of the crime was provided to the individual prior to its issuance, or whether the admission was voluntary.

The US Dept. of State’s current policy appears to treat UK cautions as admissions, unless this type of evidence can be provided to show insufficient compliance with the Matter of K.

The current policy also means that individuals with UK police cautions who have traveled to the United States based on the Dept. of State’s 1997 policy may now need to obtain an exemption or waiver of inadmissibility in order to return to the United States.

It is important to note that even if a UK caution or warning is “spent” for purposes of UK law, it remains on the individual’s record under US immigration law: the mere elapsing of time does not remove a formal police caution or warning for purposes of criminal inadmissibility determinations.

V. Exemptions and Waivers of Criminal Inadmissibility

A finding of criminal inadmissibility is not the end of the road for a potential traveler to the United States. Depending on the visa being sought and crime(s) at issue, the applicant may be eligible for an exemption or a waiver of inadmissibility. The applicant should arrive fully prepared at his or her interview at the US embassy/consulate with succinct legal arguments and supporting documentation in favor of such exemption or waiver of inadmissibility applications.

VI. Conclusion

Considering the way in which the US Embassy in London is now treating UK cautions, the prudent approach would be to anticipate that the Embassy will treat an individual’s UK caution as an “admission”, unless there is evidence showing that compliance with Matter of K was deficient. Because UK cautions are never “spent” for purposes of US immigration law, this new policy may have the effect of rendering previously authorized travelers to the United States inadmissible, absent an exemption or waiver application that was not previously necessary.

Criminal matters must be carefully addressed and analyzed before attempting to travel to the United States. The intersection of criminal law and US immigration law is complicated, requiring first an analysis of whether the crime at issue falls into the definition of a “CIMT” or “controlled substance” violation; whether there exists a “conviction”, “admission”, or – if applicable – “reason to believe”; and if so, whether any applicable exemption or waiver of inadmissibility can be pursued. It is advisable to seek legal counsel to properly assess and, if needed, to seek relief from these complex criminal inadmissibility grounds.

Source by Orlando Ortega-Medina

from 420 Growing News http://www.growing420.net/2017/06/26/uk-police-cautionswarnings-and-us-immigration-law/

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growing420 · 7 years

Text

UK Police Cautions/Warnings and US Immigration Law

I. Overview of Criminal Inadmissibility under INA § 212(a)(2)

II. UK Cautions/Warnings Defined

Below are three UK out-of-court dispositions particularly relevant to US immigration law:

III. UK Cautions/Warnings Are Not “Convictions”

IV. UK Police Cautions/Warnings Can Be “Admissions”

i) An “admission” for purposes of US Immigration Law

ii) UK Police Cautions/Warnings as “Admissions”

The US Dept. of State’s current policy appears to treat UK cautions as admissions, unless this type of evidence can be provided to show insufficient compliance with the Matter of K.

V. Exemptions and Waivers of Criminal Inadmissibility

VI. Conclusion

Source by Orlando Ortega-Medina

from 420 Growing News http://www.growing420.net/2017/06/26/uk-police-cautionswarnings-and-us-immigration-law/

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bestnewsmag-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Bestnewsmag

New Post has been published on https://bestnewsmag.com/concord-police-officer-risks-life-to-save/

Concord Police Officer Risks Life to Save

UK Police Cautions/Warnings and US Immigration Law

The way wherein US immigration regulation treats criminal matters for functions of figuring out a non-US citizen’s admissibility to the use is complex. Notably, travelers from the UK are frequently surprised that a United kingdom police warning or formal warning, wherein there has been no court or decide involvement and no submitting of formal crook expenses, should render them “inadmissible” to the united states for any motive.

Their astonishment arises not handiest from the complex intersection of crook and US immigration law, but additionally, from the truth that the USA Department of Kingdom has not been consistent within the manner, it treats United kingdom cautions/warnings, adopting a brand new approach as recently as 2014. The current 2014 policy, described under, may want to imply that non-US residents with Uk cautions who have been formerly journeying to America without issue may additionally now be barred from us until eligible for an exemption or waiver of inadmissibility.

beneath is a brief precis of the current Country of United kingdom police cautions/warnings and US immigration law. The article demonstrates that the prudent technique would be to deal with all formal United kingdom police cautions and warnings as “admissions” for functions of determining criminal inadmissibility until there is proof displaying that the admission turned into not acquired in compliance with controlling US prison precedent.

I. Review of criminal Inadmissibility beneath INA § 212(a)(2)

An alien is inadmissible to the united states for committing a “crime regarding moral turpitude” (CIMT) or a crime concerning a controlled substance, consisting of a try or conspiracy to dedicate them, if (1) the person turned into convicted of such crime; or (2) the individual admitted to having dedicated such against the law, or admitted to its critical elements.

In addition, (three) if the united states immigration professional has a mere cause to consider the alien turned into or is involved in the trafficking of a managed substance (e.G., cause to promote), the alien can be rendered inadmissible underneath INA § 212(a)(2)(C)(i), despite the fact that the alien turned into now not convicted (e.G., acquitted) of the crime and has no longer admitted to its commission or critical real factors.

A finding of criminal inadmissibility is not the quiet of the street. Once an individual is considered to be inadmissible, she or he need to then pursue, thru legal suggest, any relevant exemption or waiver of inadmissibility for America visa type being sought.

II. United kingdom Cautions/Warnings Described Police Officer Officer

Beneath are 3 United kingdom out-of-court dispositions especially applicable to US immigration regulation:

i) Easy Police warning. An Easy caution is a proper observe from a police officer that a person has devoted an offense. under the contemporary policy, the person will commonly be fingerprinted and photographed. The police will in all likelihood provide a warning if it’s far a minor offense and commonly if there is no other crook history. The police can most effective issue a Simple caution if the individual admits to the offense and concurs to be advised. If the individual refuses the warning (e.G., denies the offense), then formal crook costs can be added towards the person.

Ii) Conditional Police warning. A conditional police caution is similar to a Simple warning in all respects, which include an admission to the offense, except the person is the concern to certain situations. Failure to conform with the conditions will bring about formal criminal fees being added in opposition to the character.

Iii) Hashish Warnings. A Cannabis warning isn’t a caution, however a verbal caution with the aid of a police officer to a first-time culprit possessing a small amount of Cannabis for non-public use. The police cannot deliver the formal verbal warning except the individual admits possession of the Hashish. The police officer will file that the man or woman has admitted to owning the Hashish and could be asked to sign this report. Warnings will display up on an ACRO document and will need to be addressed for purposes folks immigration.

The steady element in all of this United kingdom out-of-court docket dispositions is that the person should “admit” to the offense. As discussed under, whether the admission beneath United kingdom regulation qualifies as an admission under US immigration law requires a case with the aid of case analysis.

III. Uk Cautions/Warnings Aren’t “Convictions”

A “conviction” for purposes folks immigration requires (i) a formal judgment of guilt entered with the aid of a courtroom; (ii) or if adjudication is withheld: a locating of guilt by a choose or jury, a plea of guilty or nolo contendere by the alien, or admission of information from the alien sufficient for a finding of responsible; or (iii) the imposition of some form of punishment with the aid of a judge.

Based totally on this definition, United kingdom police cautions or warnings do not qualify as convictions for purposes of our immigration. On April nine, 2014, us Branch of State’s Visa Workplace agreed. The reasoning being that there may be no reputable court docket or judicial movement. However, as defined underneath, the absence of a “conviction” does no longer prevent a finding of criminal inadmissibility for purposes of our immigration.

IV. United kingdom Police Cautions/Warnings may be “Admissions”

If there may be no conviction at the applicant’s record, the immigration authentic can though renders the applicant inadmissible to America if the applicant “admitted” to the crime or its essential authentic elements. Such admission may be elicited before a police officer, federal law enforcement, choose the scientific doctor, or US immigration official.

I) An “admission” for purposes of us Immigration law

The criminal standards for an “admission” for functions of INA § 212(a)(2) is Described within the Depend of Okay: the alien ought to (1) prior to the admission take delivery of a good enough definition of the crime, which includes all crucial factors; (2) admit to conduct that constitutes the critical factors of the crime; and (three) offer an admission this is specific, unqualified, voluntary and unequivocal. there’s no requirement that the alien admits the felony conclusion or non-genuine elements of the crime.

Formal criminal charges Are not required for there to be a legitimate admission. For example, in 2013, in an extraordinarily-publicized Uk fraud trial against the former assistants of United kingdom movie star chef Nigella Lawson, Ms. Lawson admitted underneath oath to having used cocaine seven times and “smok[ing] the unusual joint.” She denied ever being a habitual drug user or addict.

despite the fact that Scotland Yard by no means added criminal expenses in opposition to Ms. Lawson for her admitted drug use, and does no longer intend to do so; on March 30, 2014, British Airlines refused to allow Ms. Lawson to board a plane for her excursion to America.

American government did now not explicitly release the precise reason for its refusal; However, an inexpensive analysis people immigration law’s approach to managed substance violations suggests that her especially-publicized admission in courtroom to having violated a managed substance law is regular with a finding of inadmissibility, supplied that the other factors of Matter of Okay have been met in eliciting her admission.

Consequently, despite the fact that Ms. Lawson’s potential admission happened in a crook trial in opposition to her former assistants for fraud, such admissions have the ability to render a person inadmissible, even though there had been no crook prices pending towards that person.

Moreover, an admission does not want to be made under oath. For example, an admission to an immigration legit throughout a visa interview or at the border would qualify. Considerably, US federal regulation enforcement officials are educated inside the Be counted of Okay standards to properly acquire a valid “admission” from aliens searching for entry to America for the motive of except for them.

Similarly, an admission by using an alien to a scientific health practitioner all through a required scientific exam for a US inexperienced card that the applicant had smoked marijuana for a number of years will be a basis for rendering an alien inadmissible to the united states on the basis of getting admitted to violating a controlled substance law, furnished the medical doctor acquired the admission according to with Depend of Okay.

Interestingly, if an admission is made subsequent to (i) a valid acquittal/dismissal of criminal expenses or (ii) a legitimate pardon of a conviction, the following admission via itself will now not commonly render the individual thereby inadmissible. But, if the criminal expenses have been related to the trafficking of a managed substance (e.G., motive to promote), an admission following an acquittal/dismissal of the expenses could nonetheless provide the united states immigration legit with “motive to consider” that the offence passed off and render the applicant inadmissible, however the courtroom’s disposition.

How a Medical Review Officer Can Help You

A clinical review Officer has the ability to help you in a spread of methods. Their services will-will let your hand off as little or as a whole lot of the drug testing software as your preference. This could make it less difficult in an effort to awareness on different components of jogging your commercial enterprise.

Behavior Drug checking out

A clinically evaluate officer may be capable of Behavior all the drug take a look at the review on your behalf. The principle advantage to this is that you’ll have a 3rd-birthday celebration dealing with the whole lot. It ensures that you aren’t tampering with any of the consequences for you to make yourself (or your employees) appearance higher than they may be.

You furthermore may have other things to do with your time. You don’t have the time Behavior drug trying out on all your personnel, specifically if you have a big payroll. By operating with an MRO, they will Conduct the entirety on your behalf. they will virtually offer you with the consequences so you can take the vital motion.

Inspect consequences

In a few instances, an employee will take a look at advantageous for capsules and actually, be drug-unfastened. this is while you want a clinical assessment officer to analyze the outcomes. This might involve interviewing the employee to find out what has been taking place with them. It can be that they were prescribed remedy from the health practitioner and one of the lively ingredients became strong enough to trigger a superb end result.

The importance of investigating is that you want, to be honest to all personnel. Specifically whilst someone says that they’re now not on pills, you want to provide them the gain of the doubt. You furthermore might don’t need to lose properly personnel virtually because you failed to the trouble to analyze the effects of a superb drug test. Because you want to be an impartial birthday party, having a third-birthday celebration will let you stay compliant.

Control this system

A scientific evaluation officer can without a doubt Control the complete program for you. This consists of running the checks, figuring out the randomization, in addition to submitting all the essential reports with the DOT. The benefit to this is that you are compliant always. Some other benefit is that it’ll be much less in an effort to worry approximately. You can now not be an expert on this region and consequently, it’s great to allow an expert to do it. You can then consciousness on other regions of your enterprise.

Often, you need an expert “gatekeeper” to preserve track of what is occurring almost about drug testing. A medical overview officer is a certified doctor and could be able to evaluate laboratory outcomes, Behavior the essential investigations, and preserve confidentiality with all the drug testing statistics this is submitted to them.

A Miracle Formula To Lead A Healthy Life During Old Age

As Oprah Winfrey says, “there may be one irrefutable law of the universe: We’re every chargeable for our personal life.” If you are young and when you have great health, you can not anticipate that this may continue for ever. Keep in mind that age can take a toll on your health. No quantity of sugar-coating can hide the harsh reality that aged humans with bad heat might also need to lead a hellish life. If you need to keep away from any such situation in your existence, you need to first take a look at the lives of those antique human beings who have been main fulfilled and wholesome lifestyles. this will help you recognize that those successful and vintage human beings own incredible life abilities. This means that even whilst you are younger, you have to make all feasible efforts for obtaining existence capabilities so that you can also lead a fulfilled and healthful lifestyle for the duration of your vintage age.

However, what is these lifestyles capabilities? Although various specialists have come out with their very own variations, talents like willpower, emotional stability, manipulate, conscientiousness and optimism cover maximum of them. Individuals who practice and accumulate these abilities are nearly probably to revel in the fitness advantages as well as all the suitable social consequences at some stage in their golden years.

Thanks to these capabilities, they will have economic stability, there can be no discomfort by using continual ailments or by using intellectual melancholy and most significantly, they want no longer fear social isolation. Because they will have average general fitness, they’ll lead a clean life. Andrew Steptoe, a Professor working for the College College London, who performed a study on some of the elderly and wholesome humans, also corroborates with this reality. He says, “No single characteristic became extra important than others. Instead, the outcomes trusted the accumulation of lifestyles skills.”

The findings of the take a look at that has been posted in the PNAS magazine, truly reveal that Those who possess these lifestyles abilities have favorable biomarkers in their blood. Their levels of cholesterol are best and the C-reactive protein in their system amazingly stands on the proper stage. It is a known truth that the level of C-reactive protein is a near-perfect marker indicating inflammation that can motive numerous sicknesses.

Similarly, those with those existence talents have smaller waistlines in comparison to the ones who’ve fewer existence competencies. Accumulation of fats around the waist is some other clear indicator of cardiovascular in addition to metabolic illnesses. The have a look at also reveals that those with better lifestyles capabilities stroll quicker and more in a timely fashion than others. Researchers worried in the take a look at factor out that the on foot velocity is surely a goal factor that allows in predicting the destiny mortality of elderly human beings.

In line with Steptoe, “We have been amazed by way of the variety of approaches — economic, social, mental, organic, and health and disability related — that seem to be related to those life skills. Our research indicates that fostering and maintaining these skills in adult existence can be relevant to fitness and properly-being at older a long time.”

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