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Now that Europe’s worsening refugee crisis and Russia’s stepped up support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad have (finally) focused the world’s attention on Syria’s four-year, bloody civil war, inquiring minds want to know: how did it happen that the country, which is now at risk of becoming a failed state, descend into chaos?

Of course when we speak of “inquiring minds” we mean those of the general public which, to this point, has remained largely ignorant of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying in a place that shares a border with the country the US supposedly just got done “liberating.”

Generally speaking, the line you’ll get from the mainstream media is that Syria is just one more example of a Mid-East country where the populace finally reached its breaking point with the injustices created by the brutal regime of an evil autocrat. The resultant chaos, the narrative continues, created a breeding ground for terror which explains why Raqqa has become the de facto capital for ISIS, the Western media’s boogeyman par excellence.

Not to put too fine a point on it – and this won’t surprise anyone who frequents these pages – but that narrative is pure, unadulterated garbage. The real story (again, generally speaking), is that Syria is pivotal for the existing balance of power – and not only the regional balance of power, but the global balance of power as well. The alliance between Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Moscow, Tehran, and Hezbollah serves as a kind of counterbalance to cooperation among the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey (among others). Should the Assad regime be allowed to fall and the West allowed to influence the post-regime political outcome, the scales would tip, Russia would lose its naval base at Tartus, and Iran’s access to Hezbollah, not to mention the scope of its regional influence would be severely constrained. Assad’s move to support the Islamic Pipeline while rejecting the Qatar-Turkey pipeline was a manifestation of the situation described above.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Propaganda Alert: Feds Arrest And Charge Three Men “Accused of Prepping For Martial Law”

August 5, 2015

Propaganda Alert: Feds Arrest And Charge Three Men “Accused of Prepping For Martial Law”

As reported by SHTF Plan, three men have been arrested on federal conspiracy charges for buying guns, stocking up on ammunition, and attempting to build explosives. We will get to the actual details of those arrests in a moment.

Look at the headline of this story. Feds charging people for prepping for martial law? This is how these arrests have been portrayed in the mainstream media.

That’s what the headline says over at Associated Press, the outlet which supplies much of the mainstream media with its news/talking points:

This headline obviously makes it sound as if prepping for martial law is now a federal crime.

AP’s article has now been splashed all over the mainstream media from ABC News to theWashington Post and back. New York Magazine spelled it out a bit more:

Some outlets, like this one from Officer.com, took it a bit further:

This time it straight up says these men were “charged with prepping for martial law.”

Since when did prepping for martial law become something the FBI can arrest you for?

These men were reportedly stockpiling food and weapons, at least in part in response to Jade Helm, as many people across the country have been.

Here are the details of what actually went down straight from the Justice Department news release:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Hand in the Syrian Mess

July 21, 2015

The US Hand in the Syrian Mess

Exclusive: Neocons and the mainstream U.S. media place all the blame for the Syrian civil war on President Bashar al-Assad and Iran, but there is another side of the story in which Syria’s olive branches to the U.S. and Israel were spurned and a reckless drive for “regime change” followed, writes Jonathan Marshall.

Syria’s current leader, Bashar al-Assad replaced his autocratic father as president and head of the ruling Ba’ath Party in 2000. Only 35 years old and British educated, he aroused widespread hopes at home and abroad of introducing reforms and liberalizing the regime. In his first year he freed hundreds of political prisoners and shut down a notorious prison, though his security forces resumed cracking down on dissenters a year later.

But almost from the start, Assad was marked by the George W. Bush administration for “regime change.” Then, in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, there were some attempts at diplomatic engagement, but shortly after a civil conflict broke out in 2011, the legacy of official U.S. hostility toward Syria set in motion Washington’s disastrous confrontation with Assad which continues to this day.

Thus, the history of the Bush administration’s approach toward Syria is important to understand. Shortly after 9/11, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark learned from a Pentagon source that Syria was on the same hit list as Iraq. As Clark recalled, the Bush administration “wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”

Sure enough, in a May 2002 speech titled “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” Under Secretary of State John Bolton named Syria as one of a handful of “rogue states” along with Iraq that “can expect to become our targets.” Assad’s conciliatory and cooperative gestures were brushed aside.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

July 19, 2015

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The government released their monthly CPI report this week. Even though it came in at an annualized rate of 3.6%, they and their mouthpieces in the corporate mainstream media dutifully downplayed the uptrend. They can’t let the plebs know the truth. That might upend their economic recovery storyline and put a crimp into their artificial free money, zero interest rate, stock market rally. If they were to admit inflation is rising, the Fed would be forced to raise rates. That is unacceptable in our rigged .01% economy. There are banker bonuses, CEO stock options, corporate stock buyback earnings per share goals and captured politician elections at stake.

The corporate MSM immediately shifted the focus to the annual CPI figure of 0.1%. That’s right. Your government keepers expect you to believe the prices you pay to live your everyday life have been essentially flat in the last year. Anyone who lives in the real world, not the BLS Bizarro world of models, seasonal adjustments, hedonic adjustments, and substitution adjustments, knows this is a lie. The original concept of CPI was to measure the true cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. It should reflect your true inflation of out of pocket costs to live a daily existence in this country.

Instead, it has become a manipulated statistic using academic theories as a cover to systematically under-report the true level of inflation. The purpose has been to cut annual cost of living adjustments to Social Security and other government benefits, while over-estimating the true level of GDP. Artificially low inflation figures allow the mega-corporations who control the country to keep wage increases to workers low. Under-reporting the true level of inflation also allows the Federal Reserve to keep their discount rate far lower than it would be in an honest free market.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Putin Leads BRICS Uprising

July 11, 2015

Putin Leads BRICS Uprising

There’s been a virtual blackout of news from this year’s seventh annual BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia. None of the mainstream media organizations are covering the meetings or making any attempt to explain what’s going on. As a result, the American people remain largely in the dark about a powerful coalition of nations that are putting in place an alternate system that will greatly reduce US influence in the world and end the current era of superpower rule.

Let’s cut to the chase: Leaders of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) realize that global security cannot be entrusted to a country that sees war as a acceptable means for achieving its geopolitical objectives. They also realize that they won’t be able to achieve financial stability as long as Washington dictates the rules, issues the de facto “international” currency, and controls the main levers of global financial power. This is why the BRICS have decided to chart a different course, to gradually break free from the existing Bretton Woods system, and to create parallel system that better serves their own interests. Logically, they have focused on the foundation blocks which support the current US-led system, that is, the institutions from which the United States derives its extraordinary power; the dollar, the US Treasury market, and the IMF. Replace these, the thinking goes, and the indispensable nation becomes just another country struggling to get by. This is from the Asia Times:

“Leaders of the BRICS… launched the New Development Bank, which has taken three years of negotiations to bring to fruition. With about $50 billion in starting capital, the bank is expected to start issuing debt to fund infrastructure projects next year. They also launched a foreign-exchange currency fund of $100 billion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CBC and the Control of Narratives, A Rant

July 10, 2015

During the CBC’s Ontario Today show (July 10) the theme was one of cheerleading the Pan-Am games taking place in the Greater Toronto Area and sharing plans for those games. I called to share a contrarian perspective, basically that it was another example of a massive misallocation of diminishing resources and energy (not meant as a slight to anyone involved who are caught up in trends and behaviours long regarded as positive).

Getting through on my first attempt surprised me, perhaps as much as the person on the other end when I shared my thoughts. She assured me that I would be on shortly and to wait patiently. After fifteen minutes she returned to the line to inform me that I was the next caller. I was not. After another fifteen minutes, and listening to continual gushing about the event, I was informed that there was a ‘timing mishap’ and that there would likely not be the time for me to share but they would take my phone number ‘just in case’ (I was not surprised as this has happened to me before when I called with a non-supportive viewpoint).

I view this as yet another example of media manipulation of perspectives, of controlling the narrative. Being one of the ‘official’ media outlets of the games, the CBC has a vested interest in portraying primarily positive support for this event. Yes, there has been some coverage of the ‘inconvenience’ to drivers but little else in terms of ‘negative’ publicity.

I am not surprised, just disappointed (again) with our national broadcaster at not offering a wider perspective and/or challenging the mainstream narrative.

My view, if anyone cares, is that the event is a great distraction from the various crises exploding on the globe. Most ‘humourously’, Ontario has just completed a conference on climate change (with the leaders from the Pan-Am countries…what a coincidence) with a major ‘insight’ that it is transportation that is contributing significantly to anthropogenic climate change and changes must be made to alter this. Consider, then, the amount of transportation fuels burnt just for this one event; from the travel to/from for all the participants and spectators, to the movement to/from the widely-spaced venues during the games.

We can’t speak about caring for the environment and reducing our role in climate change and continue to pursue policies and actions that are the anti-thesis. Well, I suppose we can, but that just makes us hypocrites.

Looking Inside Fukushima Prefecture

July 6, 2015

Looking Inside Fukushima Prefecture

An Insider’s Story

Because of Japan’s unconscionable open-ended new secrecy law, it is very likely journalism in the nation has turned tail, scared of its own shadow. Nevertheless, glimmers of what has happened, of what is happening, do surface when brave people come forward.

On May 22nd 2015 Hiromichi Ugaya, a photojournalist who is well-informed, insightful, and engaging, was interviewed about what he witnessed in the aftermath of one of the world’s most horrendous disasters.

Hiromichi Ugaya was born in Kyoto City, Japan in 1963. He is an accomplished photojournalist with experience in both Japan and the United States, receiving his bachelor’s degree at Kyoto National University and his master’s degree at Columbia University.

Naïveté of Public

Hiromichi first visited Fukushima within two weeks of the disaster, and he has returned nearly 50 times to photograph scenes. His is a personal mission because the tragedy does not receive adequate media coverage. According to him, very few journalists cover the aftermath; television in Japan has lost interest; the public is blasé and dangerously naïve; Japanese publishers do not entertain stories about Fukushima, and the mainstream media in Japan ignores the impact of the aftermath.

Curiously, it’s as if a news blackout has been covertly instituted, and maybe it has. What people do not see, do not hear becomes invisible, out of sight out of mind, similar to the after-affects of radiation exposure, which are not felt, not smelled, not tasted, not physically recognized by people, until it’s too late, until it’s too late, until it’s too late.

Then again, maybe The Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets, Act No. 108 promulgated on December 13, 2013 is quelling public opinion?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Phantom Economy

June 15, 2015

Our Phantom Economy

Those who believe that phantom recoveries and phantom metrics can be substituted for reality are in for a shock in the next downturn.

Stripped of artifice, there are only two kinds of media stories: those that support the status quo narrative, and those that are skeptical of that narrative.

What is the status quo narrative? Simply this: not only is this the best possible arrangement of labor, assets and money, it is the only possible arrangement of labor, assets and money.

It is impossible to challenge a system that is the only possible arrangement; the only option is to accept it.

One of the greatest and most important PSYOPS of the Imperial State (U.S. Government) and its faithful lapdog the mainstream media is the unemployment rate. As I will show tomorrow, the real unemployment rate is between 20% and 40%, depending on whether you think someone earning $1,500 a year selling stuff on eBay and Etsy should be counted as “employed.”In effect, the mainstream media is a vast Psychological Operation (PSYOPS) aimed at persuading the American public that the status quo Imperial system of predatory, debt-based crony-capitalism that benefits the few at the expense of the many is not just beneficial to all its debt-serfs and welfare recipients, but it is the only possible system–there is no alternative(TINA).

The federal government is delighted to count everyone earning $100 a year as employed, and equally delighted to label everyone without a job (even one paying $100/year) who doesn’t qualify for unemployment insurance a job market zombie–a once living person who is no longer counted as among the living.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No, you can’t go back to the USSR!

May 19, 2015

No, you can’t go back to the USSR!

One of the fake stories kept alive by certain American politicians, with the help of western media, is that Vladimir Putin (who, they vacuously claim, is a dictator and a tyrant) wants to reconstitute the USSR, with the annexation of Crimea as the first step.

Instead of listening to their gossip, let’s lay out the facts.

The USSR was officially dissolved on December 26, 1991 by declaration №142-H of the Supreme Soviet. It acknowledged the independence of the 15 Soviet republics, and in the place of the USSR created a Commonwealth of Independent States, which hasn’t amounted to much.

In the west, there was much rejoicing, and everyone assumed that in the east everyone was rejoicing as well. Well, that’s a funny thing, actually, because a union-wide referendum held on March 17, 1991, produced a stunning result: with over 80% turnout, of the 185,647,355 people who voted 113,512,812 voted to preserve the USSR. That’s 77.85%—not exactly a slim majority. Their wishes were disregarded.

Was this public sentiment temporary, borne of fear in the face of uncertainty? And if it were to persist, it would surely be a purely Russian thing, because the populations of all these other Independent States, having tasted freedom, would never consider rejoining Russia. Well, that’s another funny thing: in September of 2011, fully two decades after the referendum, Ukrainian sociologists found out that 30% of the people there wished for a return to a Soviet-style planned economy (stunningly, 17% of these were young people with no experience of life in the USSR) and only 22% wished for some sort of European-style democracy. The wish for a return to Soviet-style central planning is telling: it shows just how miserable a failure the Ukraine’s experiment with instituting a western-style market economy had become. But, again, their wishes were disregarded.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Tale Of Two Graphs——Why Bubble Finance Will Fail

May 13, 2015

A Tale Of Two Graphs——Why Bubble Finance Will Fail

On Friday the BLS reported, among other things, that full-time employment in April had dropped by 252,000 from the prior month and that the weekly earnings of production workers had risen by the grand sum of 67 cents (0.1%) before inflation and taxes. But why should still another confirmation that the main street job market is dead in the water stop the robo-traders from another romp higher?

In fact, this incongruous spectacle of dead wages and soaring financial assets has been going on for several decades now——a transparently obvious trend obfuscated by the unrelenting recency bias of the MSM and the authorized Wall Street/Washington narrative. So let Friday’s incongruous stock market rip serve as a portal into the ugly interior history of how central bank bubble finance has fostered an existential crisis in what remains of American capitalism.

On the main street side, this isn’t a matter of sluggish recovery from a mysterious financial crisis that arrived, apparently, on a comet from deep space in September 2008. Alas, for three decades running now, the constant dollar weekly wages of full-time workers have been flat as a pancake.

And let’s be clear. We are not talking here about after school jobs held by quasi-perpetual students, the meager pay of moonlighting moms or the episodic work gigs of society’s tens of million of loosely attached drifters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Food Supply Interruptions: The Biggest Gamble

May 6, 2015

FOOD SUPPLY INTERRUPTIONS: THE BIGGEST GAMBLE

Nowhere have I witnessed a normalcy bias so strong as when it pertains to food. It has always been available at the grocery stores and in restaurants; at least that is the view of most people alive today. And if one falls on hard times, then the government in this country (the US) will probably supply you with an Electronic Benefit Transfer allowance (food stamps) and perhaps direct you to local food banks and/or co-ops to supplement your cupboards.

We take for granted that these operations are a given, for this is the way it has always worked…..or so we believe. But this is far from accurate, as many hungry Americans already know. While I welcome more and more of my fellow Westerners becoming aware of food reality, I cringe to think it will hit them where it hurts the hardest. It is not in the wallet, but in their bellies.

Currently, the global food chains are taking enormous hits. Many of these revelations are under reported in the mainstream media, who seem to rarely dig far into themes which require out of the box thinking. These events, which are decimating parts of the world’s food supply, will in my opinion continue to escalate for the foreseeable future.

There are steps we can each take to hedge against the worst, and I discuss some of them below. But first let’s look at some of the growing threats. While any one situation taken alone might be easily compensated for, when looked at in the aggregate, a stark picture begins to form.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Trustworthy Are U.S. & Western ‘News’ Media?

April 19, 2015

How Trustworthy Are U.S. & Western ‘News’ Media?

During the days of the Soviet Union, and in all dictatorial countries, the ‘news’ media were and are actually propaganda-media, which filter out information that the aristocracy (the people holding the real power, which in the Soviet Union were the Communist Party bosses) don’t want the public to know. Is the United States like that now?

I first came to the conclusion that the U.S. is a dictatorship in 2002, when I found proof that George W. Bush was lying to claim that he possessed proof that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his WMD (weapons of mass destruction) stockpiles, and when the U.S. and UK ’news’ media hid this crucial fact that their heads-of-state were lying. Bush and British Prime Minster Tony Blair were arguing in 2002 against sending IAEA inspectors back into Iraq in order to verify whether or not Saddam was rebuilding his WMD stockpiles; they alleged that they (Bush-Blair) already possessed proof that he was accumulating WMD.

Here is how I found out that they were lying about that: On Saturday 7 September 2002, the White House issued “Remarks by the President and Prime Minister Tony Blair in Photo Opportunity Camp David” (still googlable at here), with the following exchange between a journalist and Bush-Blair:

THE PRESIDENT: AP lady.

Q Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear — new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NBC’S CONDUCT IN ENGEL KIDNAPPING STORY IS MORE TROUBLING THAN THE BRIAN WILLIAMS SCANDAL

April 17, 2015

NBC’S CONDUCT IN ENGEL KIDNAPPING STORY IS MORE TROUBLING THAN THE BRIAN WILLIAMS SCANDAL

Throughout 2012, numerous American factions were pushing for U.S. intervention in Syria to bring down the regime of Bashar Assad, who throughout the War on Terror had helped the U.S. in all sorts of ways, including torturing people for them. But by then, Assad was viewed mostly as an ally of Iran, and deposing him would weaken Tehran, the overarching regional strategy of the U.S. and its allies. The prevailing narrative was thus created that those fighting against Assad were “moderate” and even pro-Western groups, with the leading one dubbed “the Free Syrian Army.”

Whether to intervene in Syria in alliance with or on behalf of the “Free Syrian Army” was a major debate in the West through the end of that year. Then-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry was openly discussing ways for the U.S. to aid the rebels to bring about regime change. Sen. Joe Lieberman was saying: “I hope the international community and the U.S. will provide assistance to the Syrian Free Army in the various ways we can.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while ruling out direct military intervention, said: “[W]e have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future.”

A U.N. resolution calling for Assad to step down was supported by NATO states but vetoed by China and Russia, who were concerned that it would be depicted as a “regime change” endorsement to justify Western military intervention. By the following year, John Kerry, by then Obama’s secretary of state, was arguing that direct U.S. military action in Syria against Assad — a full-scale bombing campaign — was a moral and strategic imperative.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Reliable Is Reuters?

April 17, 2015

How Reliable Is Reuters?

People see their own nation, and foreign nations, through the filter of the press that’s available to them; so, if that filter is systematically distorting (distorting in ways that most of the others similarly do), then democracy cannot function, public opinion can be manipulated and warped; and wars might even start that shouldn’t — something Americans have tragically been experiencing lots of, during recent decades, such as when we invaded Iraq in 2003 (just to cite the most famous of many examples).

A typical Reuters ‘news’ report will be examined here, in order to determine how high the journalistic standards of the Reuters ‘news’ organization actually are. Reuters is an internationally respected ‘news’ organization, as reliable as any major ‘news’ organization in the U.S. and Europe — thus, it’s a good source to provide a case-example.

The particular report, dated Thursday, April 16th, is titled “Russia blames U.S. for security crises and turmoil in Ukraine.”

Its first sentence is a simple and true statement of fact:

“Top Russian officials accused the United States on Thursday of seeking political and military dominance and sought to put blame on the West for international security crises, including the conflict in east Ukraine.”

The second sentence is anything but factual: it is instead contemptuous of the Russian speakers and of what they said, yet offering no evidence that what they said was false, nor is it offering evidence in support of the report’s own contemptuous attitude toward them:

“Evoking Cold War-style rhetoric, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said a drive by the United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West was a threat to Moscow and had forced it to react.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 4

April 11, 2015

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 4

In the first three installments of this series, we examined the realities behind supply and demand, unemployment and personal debt, and national debt. As has been proven in each consecutive article with ample evidence, mainstream establishment numbers are, for the most part, utter garbage. They are not legitimate. They are meaningless.

The figures and stats that do have some truth to them are so obscured from the public view and unreported by the media that they may as well be state secrets. The average person has no clue of their existence because his primary sources of information are establishment-dominated. Even MSM talking heads and economic “analysts” are so mesmerized by the false version of the economic world that they have no point of reference when suddenly confronted with singular facts. Some people call this catastrophic behavior a “positive feedback loop.” It is a mainstream echo chamber that has become a financial tomb.

Now that I have covered the lies within our economy that I can prove absolutely, it is time to move on to the lies that are more difficult to pin down. These lies often slip past our investigations because the hard data that could be used to expose them is simply not available to the general public. In fact, much of the data is not even available to government officials. I am, of course, talking about the hard data behind the activities of central banks across the globe — the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve in particular. In this installment, we will explore the purpose of these lies; to hide the imminent destruction of our currency — by hook, by crook and by fiat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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