33 of the Day: SpaceShipTwo Down

Ship had tail # N339SS

Going After Pedophiles, Going After the Evil PTB

It's a start, anyway.

Israel Did 9/11?

This is both too weird and too funny:

It was from Ha'aretz, no less!

The 9/11 Litmus Test

I could quibble with some of the 9/11 info in this video, but in essence, this is spot on.

9/11 truth is a huge test for every political leader-- and they all fucking fail. The mainstream media of course fail, and are complicit in 9/11. Corporations fail on 9/11. Most scientists fail on the 9/11 litmus test. Most governments fail on the 9/11 litmus test. We are a world of cowards, indeed.

You don't have to know exactly "what really happened" but you do have to question the official story to have any integrity.

US Invasion of Panama in 1989-- "Operation Just Cause"

Until reading about it this morning, I really only remembered the siege of Noriega holed up at the Vatican embassy.

Obviously it was another US coup, involving a drug-dealing dictator that the US had nurtured and who apparently had gone rogue.

What I hadn't realized is that several THOUSAND Panamanian civilians apparently died in the US bombing campaign. Fuck.

Fear Mongering ABout Ebola Is Rampant

Sad to see even Washington's blog do this.

Two points--

1) Ebola is only highly contagious at the peak of the disease, when the person is very sick and likely in the hospital or at home. The odds of someone wandering around a city, highly sick with Ebola, is miniscule.

2) Ebola is not a death sentence. We've had several people get infected with Ebola and get treated in the US and recover. A main reason people die from Ebola is dehydration from the vomiting and diarrhea; this is treatable with good medical care.

Rosalind Peterson on Chemtrails-- The Madness of Geo-Engineering and Weather Modification

She seems like a very credible person with very strong and reasonable points about the often-mocked chemtrails.



A few points--
1) I had an incredibly hard time playing this on my phone's video player, it kept crashing over the weekend (although it's behaving better today). I have to wonder if someone is mucking with this video, unless the Youtube site was wonky...

2) There's gotta be a link between this weather modification activity and the severe drought in California.

3) Although (as I've mentioned here before) I think the idea that mankind's CO2 emissions are contributing to climate change is legitimate, it's hard to get too worked up about it when the PTB are doing god's knows what with chemtrails and geo-engineering.

4) too bad the video is from Prison Planet, but really it just has her talking the whole time.

Sometimes I See the Headline of an Article and Just Know It Has a "33"

I hit paydirt in the first paragraph of this piece--

Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required

ARNOLDS PARK, Iowa — For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000. 

The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report. 

“How can this happen?” Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. “Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?” The federal government does.

The article relates to ridiculously abused practice of "civil asset forfeiture", which I mentioned a few posts back.

33 Year Old Doctor with Ebola in NYC

NYC of course, being the worst place in the US for someone with Ebola to circulate, due to the high population density.

While officials have said they expected isolated cases of the disease to arrive in New York eventually, and had been preparing for this moment for months, the first case highlighted the challenges involved in containing the virus, especially in a crowded metropolis. Dr. Spencer, 33, had traveled on the A and L subway lines Wednesday night, visited a bowling alley in Williamsburg, and then took a taxi back to Manhattan.

... and he's had contact with three people, who are now being quarantined.

Afghanistan: Opium Poppy Crop Hits Record High, Despite $7 Billion in U.S. Funds

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

The cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan reached an all-time high last year, despite more than $7 billion in U.S. funds to combat the drug trade. In a new report, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, said the record levels "[call] into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability" of U.S. efforts.

False-Flag (?) "Jihadist" Attacks in Canada-- Keeping the War on Terror Fraud Going

What a weird story... but it forebodes a lot of fucked up shit coming. Is it an Operation Gladio-type event?

Some worthwhile points here:


Maddow also talks about this attack, but interestingly leads off with a story about the crazy military-secrecy policy just enacted last week in Canada.

Few Things Are More Frustrating, Upsetting, Depressing and Wrong as Israel's Treatment of Palestine -- and the Unconscionable Support of Israel from the US

For all his flaws on conspiracy issues, you have to give Chomsky for speaking out forcefully against Israel and the US over the years.

The Dehumanization of War: The Lessons of the US in Vietnam

Lessons that our fucking evil powers that be want to wipe from the memory books.

“When somebody asks, ‘Why do you do it to a gook, why do you do this to people?’ your answer is, ‘So what, they’re just gooks, they’re not people. It doesn’t make any difference what you do to them; they’re not human.’

“And this thing is built into you,” Cpl. John Geymann testified almost 44 years ago at the Winter Soldier Investigation, held in Detroit, which was sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “It’s thrust into your head from the moment you wake up in boot camp to the moment you wake up when you’re a civilian.”

The cornerstone of war is dehumanization. This was the lesson of Nam, from Operation Ranch Hand (the dumping of 18 million gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, on the jungles of Vietnam) to My Lai to the use of napalm to the bombing of Cambodia. And the Winter Soldier Investigation began making the dehumanization process a matter of public knowledge.

It was a stunning and groundbreaking moment in the history of war. Yet — guess what? — the three-day hearing, in which 109 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians testified about the reality of American operations in Vietnam, doesn’t show up on the “interactive timeline” of the Department of Defense-sponsored website commemorating, as per President Obama’s proclamation, the 50-year anniversary of the war.

This is no surprise, of course. The awkwardly unstated, cowardly point of the site, as well as the presidential proclamation — “they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans” — is to “nice-ify” the ghastly war, wipe off the slime, return public consciousness to a state of unquestioning adoration of all U.S. military operations and banish “Vietnam Syndrome” from the national identity.

(snip)

As long-time journalist and Middle East scholar Phyllis Bennis told the New York Times, “You can’t separate this effort to justify the terrible wars of 50 years ago from the terrible wars of today.”

I repeat: The cornerstone of every war is the dehumanization, a terrifying process with long-lasting and infinitely unfolding consequences. And the Vietnam War was the first in which the full horror of this process, stripped of all glory and pseudo-necessity, reached significant public awareness.

(snip)

As Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson pointed out in a 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times (“Civilian Killings Went Unpunished”), based on the examination of declassified Army files: “Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.” The documents substantiated 320 incidents of torture, abuse or mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with many hundreds more reported but not substantiated, they wrote.

The article describes in detail a number of incidents of wanton killing of Vietnamese civilians and includes a letter an anonymous sergeant sent to Gen. William Westmoreland in 1970, which “described widespread, unreported killings of civilians by members of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta — and blamed pressure from superiors to generate high body counts.”

(snip)

“You can check with the Marines who have been to Vietnam — your last day in the States at staging battalion at Camp Pendleton you have a little lesson and it’s called the rabbit lesson, where the staff NCO comes out and he has a rabbit and he’s talking to you about escape and evasion and survival in the jungle. He has this rabbit and then in a couple of seconds after just about everyone falls in love with it — not falls in love with it, but, you know, they’re humane there — he cracks it in the neck, skins it, disembowels it. he does this to the rabbit — and then they throw the guts out into the audience. You can get anything out of that you want, but that’s your last lesson you catch in the United States before you leave for Vietnam where they take that rabbit and they kill it, and they skin it, and they play with its organs as if it’s trash and they throw the organs all over the place and then these guys are put on the plane the next day and sent to Vietnam.”

This much is perfectly clear: American soldiers were pressured from above, indeed, trained and ordered, to treat the “enemy” – including civilians, including children – as subhuman. All the carnage that followed was predictable. And as the morally injured vets who home from Iraq and Afghanistan keep letting us know, it’s still the way we go to war.

This evil and psychotic tactic of dehumanization needs to stop.

In a Billion Years, Life Will Die When Carbon Dioxide Is Depleted?

It's freaking hard to imagine this, but it's interesting and I never heard this before:

In billion-year timescales, it is predicted that plant, and therefore animal, life on land will die off altogether, since by that time most of the remaining carbon in the atmosphere will be sequestered underground, and natural releases of CO
2 by radioactivity-driven tectonic activity will have continued to slow down.^[26] The loss of plant life would also result in the eventual loss of oxygen. Some microbes are capable of photosynthesis at concentrations of CO
2 of a few parts per million and so the last life forms would probably disappear finally due to the rising temperatures and loss of the atmosphere when the sun becomes a red giant some four-billion years from now.^[27]

This is from the Wiki article "Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere", which is actually pretty interesting.

Fucked-Up Feds

Oh for fuck's sake--

Obama Could Reaffirm a Bush-Era Reading of a Treaty on Torture

 And this fucking sucks too--

Obama continues covering up for Bush's torture program

Oh, fucking A--

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

Fuckity fuck--

'Mercenary Class' Now Permanent Fixture in National Security State

Fuck...

Bad Conspiracy Theorizing Alert

I've seen this a lot with the recent ebola situation, but it certainly runs through everything that falls under the term "conspiracy theory".

So, here are a few hallmarks of what I consider "bad conspiracy theorizing":

1) predicting an imminent terrible future: martial law; gun confiscation; mass genocide; everyone dying of disease or radiation; rounding up of the general population into concentration camps

 2) pompous, complete certainty in your theory; acting as if you know exactly what happened without any doubt; rejecting other ideas out of hand; not fully considering other theories

 3) calling every weird thing a psyop and/or calling everything fake/staged; overuse of the "crisis actor" idea.

 4) being overly paranoid about the government and acting as if it is a monolithic entity of malevolence; overly simplifying a large complex entity.

 5) drawing extreme conclusions from vague or fuzzy photo imagery.

 6) not showing sources for information or videos or photos. (This one drives me CRAZY.)

 7) not showing due skepticism from someone making a wild claim; not fully questioning an interview subject.

 8) showing tons of photos, tons of quotes and unrefined information, writing extremely long posts but not giving any sort of synopsis or abstract or doing any real synthesis of the material. These theorists are kind of insidious because they kind of numb you with too much info and make it hard to pass on a clear message to others. It's also hard to know how they have time to do so much research. 


The biggest themes I see in bad conspiracy theorizing are:
1) paranoia about guns
2) paranoia that the government is going to enact martial law
3) paranoia that the government is going to kill us all by Ebola or some infectious agent or toxin. 

Alex Jones of course is a huge offender here. But there are seemingly endless weird conservative-leaning conspiracy blogs that amaze me by writing LONG posts about some issue but then just being useless because there is too much unrefined information. IMO, the worst are many of the people who make YouTube videos about Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, or some other suspicious event. Republicans/conservatives tend to be very bad, even very dumb, conspiracy theorizers. And yes, I'm sure I have done some of this too, as much as I may strive to not. I think early on, I did this more but have tried to not do this in more recent years.

The MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION, of course, is whether these "bad conspiracy theorists" are just dumb, or are lazy or are some sort of intel agents put out to muddle the field and make the conspiracy theory look bad. Of course, it's likely all three types are out there. The bigger ones, like Alex Jones, are clearly agents of some sort. A tricky one is Republican politicians-- most likely they are just kind of dumb and susceptible to people feeding them bad ideas. The real problem is that in all of this "bad conspiracy theorizing", there is usually some germ of truth and some good info. It just gets swamped out or discredited by the problems noted above.

Ebola

Wow, this article about how Texas Health Presbyterian dealt with the Ebola patient is horrifying, and explains who it's no surprise that a second nurse has gotten infected.

From the first article:

DALLAS (AP) — A Liberian Ebola patient was left in an open area of a Dallas emergency room for hours, and the nurses treating him worked for days without proper protective gear and faced constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released late Tuesday by the largest U.S. nurses' union. Nurses were forced to use medical tape to secure openings in their flimsy garments, worried that their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for a patient with explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting, said Deborah Burger of National Nurses United. 

Burger convened a conference call with reporters to relay what she said were concerns of nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Thomas Eric Duncan — the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. — died last week. RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of Nurses United, said the statement came from "several" and "a few" nurses, but she refused repeated inquiries to state how many. She said the organization had vetted the claims, and that the nurses cited were in a position to know what had occurred at the hospital. She refused to elaborate. 

Among the nurses' allegations was that the Ebola patient's lab samples were allowed to travel through the hospital's pneumatic tubes, opening the possibility of contaminating the specimen delivery system. The nurses also alleged that hazardous waste was allowed to pile up to the ceiling.

The fact that she flew on a commercial flight just two days ago is fucking ridiculous.

As to whether there is a larger conspiracy at work here, is still unclear to me. Of course, there is a lot of stuff out there about the outbreak being a hoax and a scam and a ruse to get US troops into Africa. and a ruse to institute mass vaccination of Americans (or possibly worse).

As of now, I really really doubt that the whole Ebola pandemic is fraudulent. The powers that be however, no doubt, have some twisted plans for how to use this outbreak to suit their ends, and of course there is money to be made in anti-Ebola drugs and vaccines and it seems as if the PTB always enjoys poisoning the population.

One oddity to me is that the authorities are ruling out a ban on accepting air travel from west Africa-- I don't quite get the logic for that.  They say they can trace potential patients and their contacts more easily that way, and that a travel ban only creates more fear and confusion. But I'm not sure I buy that.

Right now, I am really hoping that the public health authorities just screwed up big time, particularly in fucked up Texas (where a sick uninsured black guy was clearly not taken seriously at the hospital), and they will limit this outbreak to the first patient (Duncan) and the people he infected.

I still am of the view that Ebola is not very easy to catch, at this point, and one can see why nurses could get infected from this very sick patient. It's harder to see ordinary people on the street getting infected. According to the standard view, an Ebola outbreak can be contained with rigorous but fairly standard procedures; apparently Nigeria was able to do it. Let's hope Texas is up to Nigerian standards.

Bottom line, is my fingers are crossed that the Ebola panic is typical overblown conspiracy prediction crap, and that it will be contained in a reasonable manner.

Ukraine and the End-Game

It seems pretty clear that much of the whole Ukraine crisis has been engineered by the US/NATO, as explained here by Steven Cohen. Clearly, US/NATO expansion threatens Russia and European stability, and Russia seems to be doing what any country would do in its place.

The big picture is that this Ukraine conflict seems designed mainly to provide an excuse for a build up and development of new nuclear weapons by both the US and Russia. Nuclear weapons have deep significance for the PTB, and will likely be used for an end-times and/or quarantine breakout scenario.

But the disturbing thing, which bugs the hell out of me every time I see it (and shows how over-run with intel the media is and the web is, e.g. Democratic Underground), is how there are so many people who (apparently) want to demonize Russia and Putin over this Ukraine situation. The disinfo and propaganda is so fucking thick, you can cut it with a knife. What really gets me is the commenters on DU who seem to care SO MUCH about Ukraine and hate Russia and Putin SO MUCH and scream about Russian atrocities all the time (when the situation is murky at best and Ukraine is no good guy here). Why would normal people do this??? These commenters have to be agents, is all I can figure.

Bush was Right!

I joke.

But this NYT article on the secret stores of chemical munitions found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion is pretty crazy.

First, clearly Bush supporters are going to claim this story about finding WMD as vindication for the war.  But of course it's way more complicated than that.

Second, there were certainly older stories that some old chemical munitions were found in Iraq, but this article indicates the scope was much larger than previously revealed.

Note, all of the old chemical weapons found were from before 1991 and not from an active WMD program. Also, note, many of the weapons had US origins.

The Pentagon kept the findings of most of these caches a secret. Apparently, this was for a few reasons:
a) soldiers kept getting exposed to chemical nerve agents when the Army was unprepared to deal with it, and it made the Pentagon look bad. Apparently the Army was prepared for chemical weapons when they first invaded, but not years later!
b) the Pentagon's handling of these weapons violated international rules on dealing with such weapons.
c) embarrassment that chemical munitions were used by insurgents to make IEDs.
d) embarrassment that --

In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies."

Worth noting that the article is chock full of 3's and threes.

Am I the Only One Who Finds James Corbett's Voice Annoying?

That is, the guy who does the Corbett report. 

Just as annoying, is how Corbett shills for Sibil Edmonds and puts out limited hangouts for various conspiracies, though at times he does have some good info.

Actually, geez-- there's several of these limited hangout people who have annoying speaking styles:
James Corbett
Sibil Edmonds
Alex Jones
Ry Dawson  (only annoying about 50% of time)

But Corbett is a funny one. He makes me think of someone who a dumb person thinks a smart person should talk like.

Literally, Organized Crime

The local police are essentially thugs and robbers, shielded from the arm of justice.

The latest insanity is the stories about how cops abuse civil asset forfeiture laws. It's basically highway robbery.  Couple good 33's in the Wapo piece, too.

Horrifying Video of Mass Beheading Aftermath

Check it out on Facebook, while it's still there.

Some Truth About Iraq and ISIS and the No Good, Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad War

Iraqi Journalist Who Embedded with Shia Militias on Fighting ISIS and Why US Strategy is Bound to Fail (Democracy Now)

JEREMY SCAHILL: The Obama administration, in engaging in this policy, is continuing a Bush administration outcome of the decision to invade Iraq. And that is, they’re empowering the very threat that they claim to be fighting. Who is ISIS? What is this group made up of? Is it just people that are radical Islamists that want to behead American journalists? No. One of the top—and this almost is never mentioned in corporate media coverage of this—one of the top military commanders of ISIS is a man named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri al-Takriti. Who is Izzat Ibrahim? Izzat Ibrahim is the leading Baathist, who was on the deck of cards, that the United States has not captured. He was one of Saddam Hussein’s top military commanders. He was not just some ragamuffin Baathist. He actually was a hardcore general in the Iraqi military during the Iran-Iraq War, and he was a secular Baathist.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Jeremy Scahill speaking to Democracy Now! last week. So, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, could you talk about the former Baath members who are joining ISIS and also go back to the point that you raised earlier about the extent to which Shia militias in Iraq are now fighting exclusively along sectarian lines?

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Well, [Nermeen], one of the biggest, you know, things we know about ISIS is what ISIS is telling us about themselves. We don’t know anything about ISIS from the inside. Everything we seem to know about ISIS is what ISIS is reflecting about itself. So, the whole issue of the Baathists joining ISIS is—you know, it’s a valid point. But also I would like to—you know, if I answer Jeremy’s point, it’s—ISIS is not one monolithic organization. The insurgency, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, as Patrick knows very well, is not one dominated by ISIS. I went to Ramadi a few times before the fall of Mosul, and let’s remember that the whole Sunni war against the central government had started back in December 2013. So, in 2014, I went to Ramadi, and Ramadi had already fell out of the control of central government. The government had a few bases inside the city, but the streets were controlled by the insurgents. Who were the insurgents? They were a coalition of Baath army officers, former generals, different groups of the insurgency, all having their grievances with the Shia-dominated government in Iraq. So, the war that ISIS is waging on—at least in Iraq, on the Iraqi government, is a coalition of many different tiny, little wars. The Sunni insurgents in Ramadi are different from the Sunni insurgents in Diyala. The Sunni insurgents in Mosul are different from the guys in South Baghdad. So, everyone has his own grievances against the central government of Iraq, yet ISIS have managed to include them all and under a single one umbrella. So that is one, you know, very important point.

If we decide, if you decide, if America decides to fight ISIS as this monolithic organization, it’s bound to fail. You know, fragmented into its own components, what are the people of Ramadi fighting for? When I was in Ramadi in April, it wasn’t a Sunni-Shia war. It was a Sunni-Sunni war—Sunnis allied with the government of Iraq, Sunnis allied with the insurgents. Why these people of Ramadi are fighting against the central government of Iraq? Because the unequal distribution of wealth and economy, you know, amongst the tribes of Ramadi. The people of Diyala and the people of South Baghdad are fighting for a different cause. They’re fighting because they see their area dominated by the Shia, while in Ramadi you don’t see any Shia. So, that’s the main point that I would like to make, is this is not one monolithic war that stretches from the borders of Iran all the way to Lebanon, to Balbec. This is a combination of many different local wars.

AMY GOODMAN: And—

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: And if I want to go back—sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Ghaith, do you think there’s a military solution here?

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: To be honest with you, I don’t think so. I mean, F-16s are the easy solution. You can, you know, march the planes into the air, bomb the cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, and I can assure you, you will come back in the next two, three, four, five years, and you will bomb us again. I was bombed the first time when I was six years old by the Iranians, and I was bombed by the Americans again and again. This is the same cycle—I mean, unless you have a grand solution, a redistribution of wealth, a social solution, a solution that shows the Sunnis of Iraq, you know, this is—you’re part of this entity; you like it, you don’t like it, you’re part of it. Otherwise, we will continue this cycle.

You know, the Sunnis of Iraq made this—I mean, what I call what’s happening in Iraq at the moment, I call it the tragedy of the Sunnis. The Shia managed to consolidate their lines, and they’re secure in Baghdad. The Kurds are pushing down on. But tell me how the Sunnis of Mosul and Ramadi will manage to get rid of ISIS without destroying their own cities. So you need to assure the Sunnis. You need to bring the Sunnis to the table, and hold a loya jirga or whatever, and tell them there is another solution. They did this mistake in 2003, 2004, allied themselves with al-Qaeda. They did the same mistake in Syria in 2011. And now we’re back in 2014.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, can you say—do you hold out much hope for the new government of Haider al-Abadi and his ability to integrate the Sunnis more successfully than Nouri al-Maliki did?

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Well, [Nermeen], you know, Haider’s been making all the right noises. You know, he disbanded all these authoritarian practices of Maliki. He’s disbanding the supreme military command post that he was holding, that Maliki was holding. So he’s doing all the right noises. But the problem in Iraq—and Patrick knows this probably more than I do—is it’s not a problem of a person. It’s not Abadi versus Maliki. The whole institution, the whole system, is so rotten to the core. Every single soldier is appointed after paying a bribe. Every military officer is appointed after paying a bribe. And the bribes are still being paid. If we go to the—you know, so the system of Iraq is a rotten system based on corruption.

If we go back to the militias, in June 2014, Iraq had four main Shia militias. At the moment, as we speak, Iraq has in the vicinity of 20 to 30 militias. So the same fragmentation that happened on the Sunni side in Syria amongst the rebels is happening in Iraq now. Why? Because people are pumping money in to go fight ISIS. So businessmen, tribal sheikhs will just create their own militias to go fight ISIS, because it’s a source of money. The Americans now, in Istanbul, in Amman, are shopping amongst former Iraqi generals, tribal sheikhs: "Who is willing to come and fight ISIS?" By pumping money, you’re just creating another layer of warlords to be added to the zillions of warlords who already exist in the Middle East. I know what I say kind of sounds kind of too romantic, but at the moment, by sending more weapons, sending more money, you’re just adding to the fuel of the war. You need a social contract with the Sunnis of Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking at Harvard University last week, Vice President Joe Biden accused Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies of funding Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq. He went on a kind of apology tour this week, talking to Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia. Let’s go to a clip of his speech.

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Our biggest problem is our allies. Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends, and I have a great relationship with Erdogan, which I’ve just spent a lot of time with. The Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Vice President Joe Biden. He’s apologized for these comments. And I wanted to get both of your responses. Patrick Cockburn, you wrote a piece, "Isis militants: Twitter provides one of the few forums in which Saudis can discuss what they really feel—and it says they blame the clergy for Isis." And I wanted to get Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s response, as well. But Patrick first.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, yes, the ideology of ISIS is very similar to Wahhabism, the variant of Islam which is prevalent in Saudi Arabia, which is hostile to Shia, is hostile to Muslims who do not have the same tenets as Wahhabism, is hostile to Christians and Jews. And in many ways, whatISIS believes is the same as Wahhabism carried to its logical conclusion, that Shia are just not non-Muslims, but they’re apostates and polytheists who should be killed, which is what ISIS does. So, there is a very strong connection in the ideology of Saudi Arabia and that of ISIS.

Of course, there are other connections, too, as Biden pointed out. And although his apology has not been quite full, what he says, you know, is obviously true. And for a long time, American officials, off the record, would say exactly the same thing. And this, of course, creates enormous problems for the moment, because their allies aren’t quite allies, that for the Turks and the Saudis, yes, they’re a bit frightened of ISIS, but they quite like the idea that the ISIS is creating more problems for the Shia and the Kurds than it is for the Sunni. So, this very strange, ambivalent coalition is of people who don’t really want to wipe out ISIS and then keeping at arm’s length those that really are prepared to fight them.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, your response, and Saudi Arabia now saying they’re arming and financing the so-called moderate Syrian rebels?

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Well, I hate to say this, that I find myself agreeing with an American vice president, but I think I do agree with him. I mean, at one point—

AMY GOODMAN: Before or after apology?

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Oh, before apology. I mean, I don’t know why he’s apologizing. It’s so quite true. I mean, we’ve seen this. We’ve seen money poured into Syria. Everyone was so focused on, you know, destroying the Assad regime, without paying any attention to the consequences of this, even arming the Syrian rebels at the moment. This is a pure civil war. Just point to me this one brigade of Syrian rebels that is so-called moderate or something. This is a pure civil war. This is no different from the Somalia civil war. So imagine yourself kind of saying, "Oh, let’s arm this Somali kind of militia, because they are moderate." This is what’s the problem with Erdogan at the moment. He was so keen on toppling Bashar that, for whatever reason—you know, Bashar is a criminal, Bashar is not a criminal, this is something else—but at the moment, there is an absurdity of having the Saudis flying airplanes to bomb ISIS, that is not, to be honest, that different from the ideology of the Saudis themselves. So, it’s a pure hypocrisy at the moment.

And I think the Americans—and again, I find myself kind of in total sympathy with Obama and Biden—is finding themselves in a situation where they have to look, to shop for allies amongst the people who are not that interested in finding a solution—unless we break the cycle, unless we break the cycle, we disengage ourselves from toppling Bashar al-Assad. And let’s focus on ISIS and then continue the cycle. This is the brilliance of ISIS, by the way. ISIS is fighting seven enemies, and each of those seven enemies is the enemy of someone else. And that’s why they’re winning.

It's all so fucked up, of course, in normal human terms. But to a large extent, for the PTB (Israel being an important component), this was the plan-- keep Iraq and the Middle East in constant turmoil, fighting among themselves, subjugated, keep the terror threat alive, maintain the military spending, keep the killing going. ISIS is the perfect force to roil up the region, due to all the different enemies they have. We know ISIS is supported at some level by US and Israel, certainly it is by our "allies" as pointed out even by Joe Biden.

I tend to think there are two components to ISIS-- the effective military and political force taking over territory, and the psyop wing, likely infiltrated by US/Israel intel, whose job it is to stir up public opinion and get people freaked out.

The main problem is it's basically impossible to see how we don't get committed to another hugely expensive, wasteful war in Iraq.

Fuck war. Stop the madness in whatever way you can.

The WTC Was Nuked

Three firefighters who responded to Ground Zero died on the same day. They all suffered from cancer.

Three former members of the New York City fire department who had responded to the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks died on the same day this week.
Daniel Heglund, Howard Bischoff and Robert Leaver died Monday, according to NY1, which reported that each of the men suffered from cancer.

"Even after he was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2003, he never wanted to be called a 9/11 victim," Leaver's widow, Rosaria, told the New York Daily News. "He would say, 'The innocent people in the towers were the victims. Don't ever call me a victim. I was a first responder.' "

Some types of cancers are among the illnesses covered by the Sept. 11 compensation fund, but it's unclear whether there's a link between the disease and the wreckage and debris left after the attacks.

"About 99.9 percent of us wouldn't change anything that happened. Even after 9/11 and what went on afterwards, we were firemen," Heglund's brother, FDNY Capt. Paul Heglund, told the Daily News. "That's what we do."

Just to be clear, these men likely got cancer from the radioactive debris at Ground Zero.

Hmmm... but why 99.9%???

Well, 99.9 divided by 3 = (wait for it).... 33.3

Flight 93 Evidence Destroyed in Fire

Psyop AND coverup?

Investigators have found no signs of foul play or arson in a fire at a 9/11 memorial complex in Pennsylvania which destroyed a U.S. flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 11, 2001, authorities said on Sunday. Also lost in Friday afternoon’s blaze were personal items belonging to the passengers and crew members who were on United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed as one of four hijackings by al Qaeda militants on Sept. 11, 2001. National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst said in a statement that an investigation by members of the agency and the Pennsylvania State Police is ongoing. “Definitive findings, including the cause of the fire, are not expected for a matter of weeks,” he said. “With the on-site investigation complete, the scene of the fire has been turned back over to park officials, who have begun the process of salvaging materials from the site.” The park service has said that about 100 “tribute” items left by visitors to honor United 93′s passengers and crew were also destroyed in the blaze. In all, authorities have said the Flight 93 National Memorial’s headquarters complex, about two miles from where the plane went down, was “a complete loss.”

Here's an old post with some interesting "funny business" regarding flight 93. The whole shoot-down idea is likely misinformation, but the fact that debris was found so far away from the official crash site has always been odd. Not to mention the Ed Felt call from the plane's bathroom, with the report of an explosion.

Of course, the official plane crash site was a hoax, and I've posted lots more info on that here at the Flight 93 hoax blog.

33 of the Day: Flight 93 Edition

'Major' Fire Reported At 9/11 Memorial Site In Pennsylvania

A fire was reported Friday at the Flight 93 National Memorial, the location commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh station KDKA described the fire as "major" and reported it has burned three administrative buildings. A spokesperson for the National Park Service, the site of the memorial, said no injuries had been reported. The cause of the fire was unknown. Pennsylvania news station WJAC reported the fire at about 3:30 p.m. ET. Little information remains available, though the station reported that all National Park Service staff have been evacuated.

9/11, three buildings, 3:30. Classic.

Even better, the second link says nothing about 3:30, it only links to a tweet with a picture.