Thursday, February 04, 2021

Truth, truth and more truth

First up, Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Fraud Squad"

 

fraud squad

 

 

Love that comic!  Now Jimmy Dore.

 

 

 And staying with the truth theme of this post, here's James O'Neill (DISSIDENT VOICE):


The least surprising news item in the past week was that the United States government under President Biden had decided that American troops would after all, despite Ex- President Trump’s order, remain in Afghanistan. This breaks an agreement that had been reached by the Trump administration and the Taliban that US troops would all be gone by May 20 21.

It was unclear in the Trump agreement whether the withdrawal of “US Forces” included the United States mercenaries who for at least the past year have outnumbered formal US troops. What Trump’s negotiated agreement meant for the other “allied” forces in Afghanistan remained unclear at the time of the announcement and remains equally unclear today. The mainstream media persist in referring to those troops as NATO forces, but they include Australian troops who are not members of NATO.

The Australian government has been strangely silent in the light of Trump’s original announcement that US troops would be leaving, and they remain quiet in the light of the new administration’s revision of the Trump plan. It is a safe bet that whatever the Americans finally do will be agreeable to the Australians. There has not been the least hint of an independent Australian position. The actual role of the Australian troops remains a non-topic of discussion in the Australian media.  Even the recent scandal of Australian troops abusing and killing locals was a five-day wonder and has now disappeared from media coverage.

The ostensible reason for Australian troops remaining in Afghanistan is to “train” the Afghan forces. This was always a singularly unconvincing reason, not least because such “training” has been spectacularly unsuccessful with the high death rate of those troops, their even higher rate of defections, and a singular unwillingness to actually fight being their dominant characteristic.

The ostensible reasons for the Biden administration’s change of heart about withdrawing US troops was the unsettled nature of the government and their inability to control the countryside which is variously described as overrun with foreign ISIS fighters; not under Afghanistan government control (certainly true); or uncertainty about the political directions of a Taliban government, including protecting the rights of women in the country.

What never ceases to amaze one is the inability of the western media, and the Australian version are a classic example, to even hint at the real reasons for staying, when the foreigners who occupy Afghanistan are manifestly unwelcome. The protestations of the Afghan “government” that they appreciate the presence of foreign troops on their soil is manifestly self-serving. Their survival rate post liberation could be counted in days.

The real reasons for the American intention to stay were concealed from the very beginning. United States president Bush justified the invasion on the alleged refusal of the Taliban government that then ruled the country, to give up Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the attacks in New York City and Washington DC on 11 September 2001.

Even if that was a legitimate reason, and it manifestly was not, the refusal to surrender bin Laden surely disappeared the day he died, which was in December 2001 from natural causes. His obituary was even published in the New York Times. We were later treated to the charade of an American foray into Pakistan to “capture” bin Laden with the body then being buried at sea. The troops responsible for this charade were later all killed in a helicopter crash. The mainstream media remained singularly incurious about the amazing sequence of events.

The real reasons for the invasion, and the continuing occupation nearly 20 years later, and the reason the Americans and their lackies will stay as long as they can are twofold: drugs and geography.



Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 

 Wednesday, February 3, 2021.  Lesson of the day?  Get drunk off your ass and you can assault whomever you want and not have to pay a price for it.


Before we get to that, as Rebecca notes in "the idiot krystal ball," Krystal Ball and RISING are making idiots of themselves bringing on 'friend of the show' Ryan Grim to lie and gush over AOC.  Ryan Grim is garbage.  He's now lying, not just whoring.  HARD LENS MEDIA notes it in the video below.



Ryan has sided with professional whore Ana Kasparian.  As for National Nurses United?  They didn't push the vote.  There are some good members.  A few.  But that's a whore's organization.  We really need to know our past -- not just long ago but recent.  A number of nurses were active before NNU was created.  Why?


They were calling out Mitt Romney.  Mitt delivered universal insurance in his state as governor -- or that's what he claimed.  These nurses calling him out went all over the country calling him out.  They were on KFPA, for example, and, honestly, in San Francisco, we didn't have a say over what Mitt Romney did in a state miles and miles away from California.  But they'd go anywhere because this was not universal insurance -- passing a law making people buy health insurance is not providing universal insurance.


NNU wanted a public option but what they wanted more than anything -- and this comes from nurses who were speaking out -- was to ensure that ObamaCare passed -- that's why they were created in 2009 -- it was a mirror image of Romney care -- it was a fraud and a fake.  


I've given nurses credit for the work they've done creating support for Medicare For All.  I didn't give that organization credit.

So I really don't give two s**ts what NNU says or does.  They're whores.  They're not here to move the conversation forward, they exist to derail it.  That's why they were founded.  


Yes, nurses spent years working on this issue.  No, NNU was not part of that.  I'm real sorry that people don't learn the past -- especially the recent past.  


Medicare For All is not even on their about page -- grasp that.  This organization that wants to pretend it's fighting for Medicare For All doesn't even include it when explaining who they are and what they stand for.  Are people stupid?  Yes, there are stupid people.  There are also uninformed people and that's because of a media failure and here I'm not blaming the corporate media.  I'm talking about THE PRORGRESSIVE, THE NATION and IN THESE TIMES, DEMOCRACY NOW!, etc.  Then US House Rep Dennis Kucinnich called out ObamaCare and stated he would not vote for it -- then he took the plane ride with Barack and voted for it.  


Dennis is an idiot.  Dennis has always been an idiot.  As he explained to me, he was told by Barack on that flight that Barack would ensure that Dennis face a tough primary and that Dennis would not be re-elected if he didn't vote for ObamaCare -- that's what was discussed on the plane ride.  As I told Dennis to his face, "You're a f**king idiot.  If you'd made that stand you would have support.  Watch now as your friends scurry away and as you do face a primary because Barack always lies."  Guess what?  I was right.  Barack got the vote he wanted but he then used the DNC to primary Dennis and get him out of Congress.


This story wasn't reported by your so-called 'independent' media in real time.  Once Dennis caved, they moved on -- if they even covered it when Dennis was saying nothing could make him vote for the bill.  


So it's not that everyone's stupid and unable to learn as much as it is that everyone's not being informed.  DiFi and her latest scandal?  If Katrina vanden Heuvel had published the article she commissioned all those years ago about Dianne's inappropriate business relationship with her husband, that unethical trash might have been forced out of the Senate.  Instead, she nixed the story and the writer had to take it to a local weekly alternative paper that you get on the street for . . . free.  If THE NATION had published the story, it might have had legs.


Over and over, your 'independent' media betrays you.  THE YOUNG TURKS and JACOBIN's podcasts are only the latest example.  Podcasts -- plural.  I'm not just talking now about the garbage Ana spews, I'm talking about the mid-week one now.  When two adult women act like giggly girls find everything an asshole says funny?  They're garbage.  They did not even object when the toxic male began calling people "pu**ies" and using the vagina as an insult, as a term of weakness.  Equally sad, the topic was Iraq and they didn't give a damn about the Iraqi people as evidenced by the absence of the Iraqi people from the so-called discussion.


Big Fat needs podcasts to tell her what to think.  They told her the lies about Russia were true.  They told her a hundred and one lies.  Then she got a crush on Glenn Greenwald and for a minute and a half she was sane -- or as close as she'll ever be.  But then Glenn told the truth about THE INTERCEPT and published the e-mails.  Instead of siding with her guy, she began repeating the lies of TYT and others.  Because that's what the stupid do.  She's an idiot and she's always been one.  For example, in 2020 she was finally riding high in the art world.  For the first year I've known her, she wasn't begging me for money constantly.  And on that phone call when it all ended, when she started trashing Glenn and I told her I couldn't go through this again like I did during Russia-gate, she said the reason she had called was my son asked her for money.  That shocked me but okay.  How much did he borrow and I'll message it over to you if you need it in cash.  Oh, he didn't get any money.  He bumped into her at an LA gas station and he had put gas in his car up before realizing his wallet was left at a friend's house.  He looked over and saw her and asked for ten bucks.  She didn't give it to him.  She told him she didn't believing in loaning money.


How many thousands has she 'borrowed' from me over the years -- after the first five years, it was obvious I was never going to see that money again.  But she couldn't give my son ten bucks to cover gas?  


Not very smart.  I'm either on the board of this museum or friends with someone on the board of that one and, goodness, there's just not going to be any need now for her art work.  Her 'career' will be a COVID casualty that, if remembered years from now, will be guessed to have lost steam when COVID erupted.  It's over for Big Fat and she's just starting to realize that because she's left three messages since Sunday begging for money.  That well went dry.  Guess what?  She was supposed to get a grant in the new year but somehow -- mmm-hmm -- that got pulled.  Now she's in real hardship -- she might have to get an actual job.  Stupid people like Big Fat believe TYT and they're so stupid that they tick off the person who funded their life.


Stupid people can't learn  But most people aren't stupid.  They're just not given the tools they need.  Presenting National Nurses United as a real group is something Ryan Grim does because he whores.  That's why he gushes every time AOC burps.  "The revolution has started!"  No, Ryan, AOC just had gas.


The people pimping National Nurses United are either whores or uninformed.  When THE MAJORITY REPORT was Janeane Garofalo's show, her worthless sidekick was pimping AARP.  And he was aghast that AARP backed this or that Bully Boy Bush policy that actually harmed seniors.  I said, "Janeane, is Sam so stupid that he doesn't know that the AARP is not an activist group?  It's a lobbying body but it's in the business of insurance.  For profit.  Janeane educated her audience on it.  I'm not sure that the whorish Sam Seder ever got the point.  


But that's why AARP was fine with Bully Boy Bush creating the 'doughnut hole' and not storming the streets as Sam just knew they would be.

NNU will weakly support a bill put forward -- say by Bernie Sanders.  They will not call for real action and they won't challenge any proposal put forward by a Democratic administration.  That's their history and that's reality.


A lot of people are scared of reality -- including the Biden administration.  Caitlin Johnstone (ICH) reports:


A new exclusive from The Daily Beast titled “White House Reporters: Biden Team Wanted Our Questions in Advance” reports that the White House press corps is being pressured to provide briefing questions ahead of time in a way that makes even mainstream media journalists uncomfortable.

“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” one White House correspondent told The Daily Beast. “That’s not really a free press at all.”

“It pissed off enough reporters for people to flag it for the [White House Correspondents Association] for them to deal with it,” another source reportedly said.

While Obama’s deputy press secretary Eric Schultz calls the move “textbook communications work” designed to ensure that Biden’s press secretary has answers ready instead of having to “repeatedly punt questions”, clearly the reporters on the job feel differently.

“The requests prompted concerns among the White House press corps, whose members, like many reporters, are sensitive to the perception that they are coordinating with political communications staffers,” writes the Beast.


And the press is eager to serve who?  Not the people.  Not democracy.  They're eager to whore for the administration -- as NEWSWEEK did.



There are a lot of fakes and frauds.  "The Fraud Squad," in fact.




Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Fraud Squad" and "DiFi Ethics" went up last night.


Moving over to Iraq, SPUTNIK reports:


The United States has not yet decided on its military postures in either Iraq or Afghanistan, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday.

"I think the current level in Iraq is around 2,500 - I have no changes to that to report out to you today," Kirby said.

With regards to Afghanistan, Kirby said "no posture decisions have been made" and the US remains committed to a political settlement.


I had to check the dateline.  John Kirby?  He was the Pentagon's spokesperson at the end of 2013 until he moved over to the State Dept in 2015 and left to to CNN when Donald Trump was sworn in as president.  Now he's back.  Jen Psaki's back, so many are back.  Apparently, there was no need for fresh blood in the vampirish Biden administration.  


In other news, AP reports:

The U.S. Navy on Tuesday dropped sexual assault charges against an enlisted SEAL in a case involving a female sailor at a Fourth of July party in Iraq that had prompted the rare withdrawal of the special operations unit from the Middle East in 2019.

 Under the agreement accepted by the military court at Navy Base San Diego, Special Warfare Operator First Class Adel A. Enayat pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of battery and assault for biting the sailor’s face and grabbing her neck during what his lawyer described as rough, consensual sex. He will serve up to 90 days in the brig.

At the special court martial Tuesday, a masked Enayat wearing his Navy dress uniform said without emotion that he was guilty.

He told the judge he did not have a “solid memory” of what happened in his room because of the “copious amounts of alcohol I’d consumed.”


The same story at another website includes this detail:


Colleen Grace, a former U.S. Navy intelligence specialist who had planned to testify at the trial, told The Associated Press in August that when she saw her friend after the barbecue that night, she had a giant black bruise that marred her jawline and several other marks that lined her neck.

She said her friend told her that the sex started out as consensual in the SEAL’s room, but then he started biting and choking her so hard she couldn’t breathe and she thought she was going to die. Grace said her friend flew to Baghdad in the early morning hours after the barbecue to be examined at a military hospital and report being sexually assaulted.


So he gets away with assault because he claims he was too drunk to remember?  And yet they want to pretend that they treat assault and rape seriously in the military.  This is why criminal charges need to be pulled from military courts, there is no justice.





Earlier this week, community sites did a theme post -- favorite grunge song from the 90s -- Stan went with "P.J. Olsson's "Visine"," Mike went with "Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box","  Betty went with Soundgarden's "Fell On Black Days," Trina went with "STP "Creep"," Ruth went with Alice In Chains' "Rooster," Rebecca went with the Afghan Whigs' ''mr. superlove," Elaine went with "Afghan Whigs' "When We Two Parted"," Kat went with "Tori Amos' Pretty Good Year," Ann went with "Fionna Apple's "Limp"" and Marcia went with the Afghan Whigs' "Creep."



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The following sites updated:




 

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