Is the Trump Administration Running a Child-Trafficking Ring?

Given the way Trumpsters went after Hillary for Pizzagate, and the way the Trumpsters love to project, it would be irresponsible not to speculate:

Donald Trump has been the conspiracy whisperer throughout his entire public life. Even before he was president, he was convinced that the Central Park Five were guilty (they weren’t).

He spent years claiming that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn’t).

He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death may have been Democratic foul play (it wasn’t).

Those are just the theories he was spouting before he got into office.

This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed the half-dozen unfounded or disproven conspiracy theories that Trump and his administration have spewed since getting into the White House.

These include everything from Obama using transformer microwaves to spy on the Trump White House (Optimus Hot Pockets?); Black Lives Matter being a terrorist organization; and the Democrats running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza place in Washington, D.C. (also known as “pizzagate”).

Of course, all of these theories are unfounded or disproven, but they still rile up the base and keep Reddit full of traffic, so why should khaki-wearing “alt-righters” have all the fun?

Now it turns out that the Trump administration may have an equally implausible conspiracy on its hands: Is the administration involved in child sex trafficking or just white nationalism?

Follow me down the rabbit hole and see for yourself.

August 2017: Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks permission from the Trump administration to start destroying old files and documents relating to 11 subjects. These include reports of violence, solitary confinement, death and sexual abuse inflicted on those detained by ICE agents while still in their custody. It is still being determined how long these reports would be held before being destroyed. Two years? Twenty years? Six weeks? ICE isn’t saying. Some congressional candidates have found this policy so disturbing, they’ve begun to campaign on it.

April 26, 2018: During a Senate hearing, Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, says that the department has lost nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors who had been placed in homes or facilities since being picked up at the border. Over a thousand human beings lost, like luggage, a cellphone or a fancy hat. Our government can track what porn sites ISIS, or the Islamic State, is clicking on in the mountains of Afghanistan, but can’t find 1,500 kids in America? What’s worse, nobody seems to know what to do about it. This is despite reports that children have been placed in homes where they were sexually assaulted, abused or possibly trafficked.

May 8, 2018: Attorney General Jeff Sessions announces that if you are caught sneaking across the border as a family, you will be prosecuted and separated from your children. Which will lead to more children being taken from the safety of their parents and then suspiciously “lost” in the system somewhere in America.

May 11, 2018: White House Chief of Staff John Kelly doubles down on the new Trump white nationalist and human-rights-violating policy of separating parents from minor children. When asked what will happen to separated kids, Kelly states: “The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever." Obviously, “whatever” includes everything from being placed in a nice, loving home and adopted by Daddy Warbucks, or Mitt Romney, to falling off the grid and being abused, sold or worse by any random stranger who shows up at Homeland Security offering to “help” these displaced kids

We’ve seen this before with “good samaritans” from the United States attempting to snatch Haitian children temporarily separated from their families and take them who knows where.

Now Trump and Sessions—with the help of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen—are putting even more children at risk, breaking up families and contemplating throwing kids into internment camps or sending them off into homes with unvetted or unmonitored adults, and losing kids right and left.

If someone did want to traffic a bunch of barely literate, frightened, lost brown children fleeing poverty and violence in South America, Trump and Sessions just made it a lot easier. Now, of course, none of this means that Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are part of some vast conspiracy to sell minority children to the highest bidder like some scene out of Taken 4: Bad Hombres. This could all just be a series of unfortunate policies and events. It could just be white nationalism at work, destroying black and brown families seeking a better life, and demonstrating a careless disregard for nonwhite children.

However, why be hamstrung by the facts, as bad as they are? Trump has shown America that you can get away with whatever salacious, ridiculous and unfounded conspiracy you want as long as you say it loudly enough and find enough other people to repeat it.

Which story sounds better: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions continue their white nationalist policies by destroying refugee and undocumented immigrant families, or Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions let missing children fall prey to sex traffickers?

If you can’t figure out which is the better conspiracy, imagine any of this happening at this level—the missing children, the separation of families and lack of concern for finding them—under the Obama administration. Which story do you think Trump would actually tweet?

He’s never been one to let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy.

Tales of Our Continuing Kakistocracy

A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it.

We already had the coup. It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention.

Any time is the right time to pour into the streets and demand that it all grinds to a halt and the country change direction. The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.

Take the recent revelations about the president’s personal errand boy, Michael Cohen. He ran a shell company from which money was used to pay Stormy Daniels to remain silent in what was quite likely an illegal campaign contribution. Money came in, along with major corporations, from a Russian oligarch close to Putin, Viktor Vekselberg, or rather from a corporation called Columbus Nova, run by a cousin of his apparently appointed to mask Vekselberg’s own role.

The New Yorker reports, “It is a company technically owned by others but which looks after money owned and controlled in large part—if not entirely—by Vekselberg and his family.” Or as Frank Rich put it at New York Magazine, it’s “an example of collusion so flagrant that it made Trump and Rudy Giuliani suddenly go mute: a Putin crony’s cash turns out to be an essential component of the racketeering scheme used to silence Stormy Daniels and thus clear Trump’s path to the White House in the final stretch of the 2016 election.”

The Washington Post reports that Columbus Nova “is listed as the organization behind a string of websites targeted toward white nationalists and other members of the alt-right.” That is, this Russian oligarch’s company was illegally attempting to influence the election, and they were giving money to the bagboy of the election’s winner.

Pro Publica reports that another personal lawyer of the president’s, Marc Kasowitz, also worked on behalf of Columbus Nova. There are a thousand other details like that of financial dealings—real estate sales, investments, odd transfers of wealth, social connections, meetings—that tie the Trump mob to the Russian mob—because most of the oligarchs are, in that autocratic regime, in one way or another mobsters, because Putin himself runs that vast country as though he was a mob boss intent on exerting control through fear, and profit through extortion.

The Trump family aspires to mafia status, a thuggocracy, but they are manipulable and bumbling where Putin and company are disciplined and Machiavellian. They hire fools and egomaniacs and compromised figures—Scaramucci, Giuliani, Bannon, Flynn, Nunberg, the wifebeating Rob Porter—and then fire them, with a soap opera’s worth of drama; the competent ones quit, as have many lawyers hired to help Trump navigate his scandals.

The Trumps don’t hide things well or keep their mouths shut or manage the plunder they grab successfully, and they keep committing crimes in public. Remember when Trump revealed highly classified data to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister when they visited him in the Oval Office, not long after he fired FBI director James Comey (but before he admitted it was to obstruct Comey’s investigation of his ties to Russia?). There’s a picture of that visit in which the Russians are laughing at him and he looks befuddled.

Remember when Donald Jr. met with the Russian agent in Trump Tower in June of 2016 to get purloined data on Clinton and tried to cover it up by saying it was about adoptions? Remember when the Trump team was forced out of the Panama hotel that Trump still profited from, and how his lawyers appealed directly to the president of Panama? How he profits from that business and others despite the emoluments clause of the Constitution? Or the various lawsuits for violating that clause, including one pending from the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia? Or the women suing Trump for defamation? Perhaps not, as so many scandals have piled up on those ones.

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Bluffers bluff, and President Trump just tried to bluff his way through one of the worst weeks of his administration.It's not working. Donald Trump is a terrible poker player.

His tells are so clumsily obvious and that we mistakenly give him credit for guile where none exists, and for some cinematic, supervillain cunning where there is only a howling, feral mass of insecurity and need.

The delta between reality and spin with Trump is always broad, and last week it was unspinnably vast. It's also been a stunning illustration of just how powerful the division between reality and fantasy has become in the two hermetic media silos that now exist in America.

For some Americans — a minority, I pray — Trump is a pied piper luring the credulous and the uninformed into accepting lies over truth, comfort over reality and conspiracy over fact. In Trump's world and that of his angry minions, the winning doesn't stop, the vast left-wing conspiracy's witch-hunt against him is both broad and insidious, and the truth is what he wants it to be on any given day.

Maintaining the Trump illusion requires an endless suspension of disbelief; denying facts, logic, reason, the law and the utterly evident cluster-you-know-what that this administration represents. The pinnacle of that illusion-at-all-costs philosophy came after the revelation that an FBI informant followed up on leads that Trump campaign foreign policy aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos had been playing footsie with the Russians. On Fox News, talk radio and in the Trump-right online media armies, the innocent Trump campaign was the victim of FBI spying against them, ordered by notorious Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent Barack Obama, evil sorceress Hillary Clinton and their army of Deep State apparatchiks.

The President wants you to call the FBI's Russian counterintelligence program Spygate, but rational people have declined to indulge him. Stupidgate is instead just a ludicrous new chapter in the long chronicle of Trump dumbassery. It's only one of the many examples of Trump's behavior of which historians in the far future will look upon with the same stunned disbelief and discomfort as we now consider tulip manias, Beanie Baby investment schemes, Milli Vanilli and acid-washed jeans. There might have been a moment where those ideas were intriguing, but in the hard light of history, they're grim reminders that fads and passions are fleeting.

For the FBI actions Trump calls Spygate to be a real concern, it would require malice. Instead, we've seen justification after justification for a robust counterintelligence response to Russian malfeasance. Drawn to the Trump campaign like flies to the biggest manure pile in the universe, the FBI wasn't after him, but rather — quite properly — the Russians who sought to (and may have succeeded) in subverting American democracy and corrupting our elections.

There's a line in the 1990s film "Grosse Point Blank" where John Cusack's assassin character defends his line of work. He says, "If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there." It couldn't have been that an FBI counterintelligence investigation against the Russians kept finding lead after lead headed straight back to Trump associates, family members, friends, business partners and his senior campaign officials, could it? It couldn't have been because Trump advisers were boasting they had the Russian goods on Hillary Clinton, that his sons were taking meetings in Trump Tower with platoons of Russians tied to Vladimir Putin, or that his attorney Michael Cohen was signing letters of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, right? And there's no way it was the opinion of every American intelligence agency that the Russians were all in with a program of information warfare in support of Donald Trump. No way? Way.

The central unspinnable story of the past week is the one over which Trump feels the most pressing anxiety. Three new stories reported on Michael Cohen's latest avenues of legal jeopardy, all of which increase the risk Cohen flips on Trump to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. First, Cohen's longtime business associate Evgeny "The Taxi King" Freidman copped a plea deal and agreed to cooperate with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York against Cohen. This development is bad news from every angle for both Cohen and Trump. There's not a chance in hell Freidman would have been given an easy plea deal unless he had something to provide prosecutors on Cohen, and by extension, Trump. Freidman comes from the same Russian circles as Cohen and Trump partner Felix Sater.

I know you're asking the same question I do all the time: for a President who claims to have never had anything to do with Russia, Russian business interests or Russian money, why are there so many Russians and so much Russian money tied to him?

As if that wasn't bad enough, the BBC's Paul Wood delivered another hard blow. In an impeccably sourced piece, Wood revealed this week that Cohen (along with the aforementioned Sater) worked illegally on behalf of Ukraine, adding "lobbyist" to his usual roles as the fixer for and conduit to Trump. The BBC reports that Cohen took a $400,000 to $600,000 payoff from Ukrainian interests without bothering the register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Oh, that Foreign Agents Registration Act. You know, the law that requires anyone doing paid work on behalf of a foreign government to register with the United States Department of Justice.

On Friday, one more piece of bad news ratcheted Cohen's stress level even higher when it was revealed that he met with Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch deeply tied to Putin, in January of 2017, just before Trump's inauguration. The denials from Team Trump that they have anything to do with Russia, their assertions that they have no business in Russia, didn't collude with Russia, didn't coordinate with Russia, never borrowed money from Russians, didn't accept dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia, don't know any Russians, have never met any Russians and have never heard of the country of Russia ring more hollow with every revelation. The vise squeezing Cohen is tightening, and every day that passes increases the chances he'll turn Judas on his friend and boss. Trump knows what Cohen knows, and what Cohen knows about Trump's business dealings, finances, taxes, serial infidelities, hush money to adult film stars (and Lord knows who else) isn't pretty.  

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If you dabble at all in the odd world of far-right conspiracy theories, or happen to be a nazi-sympathizing, jew-hating, 4chan user who frequents the /pol/ thread on that site, then you have undoubtedly stumbled upon the person or people known as QAnon.

For the rest of you who believe in reality and don’t frequent message boards where hate groups congregate, QAnon first emerged on October 28, 2017 in a /pol/ thread on 4chan, titled “Calm Before the Storm,” clearly in reference to an odd quote by Trump in early October where he stood with military leaders and stated “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. Could be, the calm. The calm before the storm.”

While it’s pretty clear he was talking about the military’s possible use of force, this individual, or group of individuals who have been posting cryptic images and messages on what amounts to an internet hate-group message board, believes that Trump was referring to something else entirely. They believe that Trump has been pretending to be influenced by Russia in order to force the FBI, DOJ and Special Counsel to investigate what really amounts to Russian ties on the part of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and others.

They also argue that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is not really investigating Trump, but instead is investigating Obama, Clinton, and their associates. Since October, QAnon has been suggesting that a “Storm is coming” any day now. It’s been 7 months now and as Trump associates continue to plead guilty, get indicted, or flip, not a single individual within the Obama administration or Clinton campaign has even been interviewed by Mueller, as far as we are aware.

Despite the lack of any evidence, what-so-ever, to verify any of these clearly baseless claims, QAnon continues to promise that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Huma Abedin, and even John McCain will soon all be arrested, or are already under house arrest.

Besides the general “Trump is a superhero” rhetoric coming from the anonymous QAnon, the lost souls who follow every word of this account, almost as if it’s god himself coming to speak to them, also believe that Clinton and Obama were covering up child sex rings, and that the Las Vegas massacre was an inside job connected to a cabal led by the Saudis and Hillary Clinton.

There are always conspiracy theorists out there, but the group congregating around this QAnon pseudonym are incredibly vile, disguise themselves on 4chan with anonymity, and seem to be lost in a fantasy world where their hero is someone so heroic that he/she will only post on a known Nazi-sympathizing message board, anonymously. It’s one thing to question authority. It’s something entirely different when you unquestionably follow an anonymous user on an anonymous message board, posting theories which don’t remotely add up. This group is dangerous, not because they will influence the Mueller probe in any way, but because they are convincing an incredibly large number of internet users that reality is not reality and that hate, bigotry and lies are the norm.

Trump Cancels North Korea Summit

We often discuss how President Trump seems to see diplomacy in highly personal terms. Things depend on how he and the other man or woman get along personally. There’s his military, his diplomats, his cabinet secretaries. He has little sense that the US and other states may have foundational interests that trump any personal chemistry between the leaders.

This letters suggests (unsurprisingly) that this feeling of personal investment is quite real, not only on the ‘positive’ side but on the negative side as well. He seems truly hurt and angry. “A wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me” … “that was a beautiful gesture” … “please do not hesitate to call me or write” … “We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant.”

It’s not good to have a President who is this emotionally needy or one that conducts dangerous foreign policy on whims and ignorance. The entire thing is a ridiculous and embarrassing chapter in our history.

Seriously, the entire fucking Trump presidency is a ridiculous and embarrassing chapter in our history.

Trump Totally Raw-Dogged that Playboy Bunny, Got Her Pregnant and Made Her Get an Abortion

Hey, Look: More Evidence That Broidy May Have Been Covering for Trump in That Playmate Affair

(snip)

Four days after after the raid on Cohen’s office, on April 13, The Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that this David Dennison, in the NDA signed by Shera Bechard, was none other than Elliott Broidy — despite its being precisely the same pseudonym Trump had used in the Stormy Daniels NDA.

The paper’s basis for its scoop was this: Whoever leaked the existence of the Bechard NDA to the Journal also asserted that the agreement was between Bechard and Broidy. The Journal’s reporters confronted Broidy, and Broidy immediately confessed to having had a long-running affair with Bechard, and subsequently agreeing to pay her $1.6 million to buy her silence about it.

The first payment of the agreement was supposed to be due on December 1, 2017. That is the story Broidy told the Journal, and that story has, remarkably enough, become accepted as simple fact. Indeed, the AP concludes its bombshell exposé of Broidy’s machinations by observing that Broidy had gotten Shera Bechard pregnant, and had “agreed to pay her $1.6 million to help her out, as long as she never spoke about it.”

But as I argued at length and in detail in this space two weeks ago, Broidy’s account raises a lot of questions — and I believe a more plausible explanation of all the facts at hand is that he agreed to pay Bechard seven figures as a favor to Donald Trump, who actually impregnated Bechard, and then needed to hush her up about their affair and her subsequent abortion.

Trump, I pointed out, is exactly the kind of man who has affairs with women like Shera Bechard, while Broidy has a history of bribing public officials to further his business interests — indeed, he had even made payments to the mistress of a politician he was bribing. And it was clear Broidy had spent much of 2017 touting his connections to Trump to various foreign officials.

The AP exposé only strengthens the evidence for my hypothesis: The first payment from Broidy came two days before the meeting that apparently helped him ink a nine-figure deal with a foreign country — a deal based in no small part on his access to, and influence on, Trump. If it’s difficult to imagine Broidy being willing to take the fall for Trump’s affair with Bechard and then paying her a seven-figure sum, it’s much simpler to imagine it simply as a perfectly timed and fantastically profitable bribe.

The Pentagon Black Money Hole

This is nuts and it would seem to defy the laws of finance and maybe even physical laws:

The July 2016 report is not the only such report of unsubstantiated adjustments. Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

While government budgets can be complex, our government, like any business, can track receipts and payments and share this information in ways that can be understood by the public. The ongoing occurrence and gargantuan nature of unsupported, i.e., undocumented, U.S. federal government expenditures as well as sources of funding for these expenditures should be a great concern to all tax payers. Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic Constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure. We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment. (snip)

The OIG link to the most report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”, which indicates $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, can now be found here....

Though some of the unaccounted $$$ is attributed to HUD, the article focuses on the unaccounted DOD spending/adjustments, which seems to be much bigger overall.

Corrupt As Fuck

The ZTE phone scandal is where Trump's corruption impedes national security. This should be a huge scandal, also impeachable.

Trump Orders Help For Chinese Phone-Maker After China Approves Money For Trump Project

Trump will profit from Indonesian resort project that will get $500 million in Chinese loans in a deal sealed days before before his tweet ordering help for ZTE.

WASHINGTON – A mere 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put a half-billion dollars into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich Donald Trump, the president ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker. “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” Trump announced on Twitter Sunday morning. “Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

Trump did not mention in that tweet or its follow-ups that on Thursday, the developer of a theme park resort outside of Jakarta had signed a deal to receive as much as $500 million in Chinese government loans, as well as another $500 million from Chinese banks, according to Agence France-Presse.

Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, has a deal to license the Trump name to the resort, which includes a golf course and hotels.

Trump, despite his campaign promises to turn over his businesses and have no involvement with them, has still not fully divested himself of his businesses, and continues to profit from them. “You do a good deal for him, he does a good deal for you. Quid pro quo,” said Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush and now a Democratic candidate for Senate in Minnesota.

“This appears to be yet another violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution,” Painter said, referring to the prohibition against the president receiving payments from foreign governments.

The White House did not respond to HuffPost queries asking if there was a connection between the “MNC Lido City” project and Trump’s directive regarding ZTE.

The ZTE Phone is a known security risk:

"Our intelligence agencies have warned that ZTE technology and phones pose a major cyber security threat," Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted at Trump yesterday. "You should care more about our national security than Chinese jobs."

The head of the FBI and other intelligence chiefs in congressional testimony this year urged American citizens to steer clear of products from ZTE and its Chinese rival Huawei. And just two weeks ago, the Pentagon banned the companies' phones from being sold on military bases, saying they "may pose an unacceptable risk to Department's personnel, information and mission."

As the Post reported, the Commerce Department last month said it would bar U.S. firms for seven years from exporting critical microchips and other parts to ZTE, as punishment for violating a sanctions settlement over illegal shipments to Iran and North Korea.

What Exactly Happened in the Cockpits of the 9/11 Hijacked Flights?

                          767 cockpit. The 757 cockpit is very similar.

                           On the 9/11 flights there was no crew in the navigator seat.

What exactly happened in any of the 9/11 hijacked cockpits is an almost complete mystery. Officially we have some radio excerpts from the cockpit of flight 93 which indicate a struggle but it really doesn't answer many questions. There is some speculation that the pilot of flight 11 left the radio on so ground control could hear the hijackers, but that's just a guess. The cockpits of flights 77 and 175 were taken over silently, with no clues to what happened (officially).

For each of the 4 flights, we do have calls from flight attendants and passengers describing that a hijacking has taken place, some hints about the hijackers and about the pilots being dead. Flight 93 has the most extensive number of calls, for reasons not entrely clear.

The big question is how exactly did a couple of boxcutter-armed hijackers take over the controls of 4 jumbo-jets?

The official story is that boxcutter-armed hijackers DID take over the controls of 4 jumbo-jets, of course, but like so many other parts of 9/11, it makes almost no sense. The calls from flight attendants and passengers don't really explain HOW the hijacking took place in terms of how the hijackers gained access to the cockpit without the pilots being aware of the hijacking, and how the hijackers got control of the plane.

Thus, there are 3 huge unanswered questions about the hijackings:

1) Why didn't any of the flight crew in the cockpits know a hijacking was taking place and signal via radio or the transponder what was going on to ground control?
--Some flight attendants should have warned the cockpit of the hijacking before the hijackers got to the cockpit.
--It seems impossible that all flight crew in the main cabin would be neutralized early on so they couldn't warn the cabin.
-- The official story says that pilots and crew were completely unsuspecting of hijacking so got caught totally off guard.

2) How did the hijackers gain entry into the cockpits? Possibilities are that:
--The cockpit door wasn't locked and the hijackers just walked after overpowering the flight attendants
--The hijackers rammed their way in by force without the pilots being alerted to a hijacking
--The hijackers coerced one of the flight attendants to open the door for them without the pilots being alerted to a hijacking by noise outside or a call from another flight attendant.
--All of these scenarios seem unlikely

3) what did the hijackers do with the pilots to get control?
--Plane cockpits are quite cramped and it's not clear how the hijackers engaged in murder or fighting effectively in that small space
--Some people have said that the pilots are quite vulnerable to attack from behind and could be killed easily while still in their seats by stabbing or throat slashing. Assuming this is true, it's very hard to see how the pilots would have been taken completely by surprise, and wouldn't their blood have gotten all over the controls, especially if the throats were slashed (which would have been the easiest way to kill) given how the pilots were sitting? Blood on the controls would have made using them difficult, to say the least, and the hijackers already had a difficult time flying.
--Also, how would the hijackers have gotten two large dead men out of their seats? Lifting them out seems very difficult given the configuration of the cockpit seats and the weight of large grown men.
--The pilots would have fought tooth and nail to give up control and many of them were combat veterans.

So this all still makes no sense.


So what's going on here?

Like most aspects of 9/11, we have 4 possibilities:

1) the public information is true and all that is known, the official story is basically true, no matter how unlikely or weird it seems

2) the official story is a pure fabrication, meant to cover up a huge false-flag operation by the government

3) the official story is true, and there is a large amount of information being withheld from us that helps explain the official story, but it is kept secret for "national security" reasons or for reasons that are embarrassing to the government.

4) the official "facts" are true, but the official story is wrong, and there is a large amount of information being withheld from us that is kept secret for "national security" reasons or for reasons that are embarrassing to the government.


The other conundrum we always face with 9/11 is:

1) the official story is ludicrous and flawed and not feasible

2) the idea that "9/11 was a false-flag hoax operation and the official facts are all fabricated" is too elaborate and complicated to be feasible


So options 3 and 4, seem more likely: there is a lot being hidden from us.  Given everything else we know about 9/11, I lean towards option 4. This would mean that the phone calls and radio data from the planes are real and there were some sort of real hijackings of real planes. But much is being hidden from us.

It's impossible to know what exactly happened, but I do like the idea of the 9/11 planes being involved in live-fly wargames that day, and that there was a mirror hoax plane for each flight (for reasons not quite clear). There may have also been an electronic spy plane that helped mimic the hijacked planes, since an oddity of the 4 flights is that one plane could have been in all 4 places within the sequence of the morning's attacks.

Anyway, it seems reason able to hypothesize that there were
1) live-fly hijacking drills
2) real hijackers
3) real planes
4) real passengers

and that somehow these got put together such that the passengers wittingly or unwittingly became part of the hijack drill, which went "wrong". The hijack drill explains how the hijackers took over the planes readily-- it was part of the drill. Maybe the hijackers thought they were really hijacking and the crew and passengers thought it was a drill.

The real rub comes in with what happened then with the planes and passengers.

For reasons I've gone over here for over 10 years now, it seems extremely unlikely that the official 9/11 planes hit the official crash sites, so the planes were either grounded at a secret military base and everyone killed, or the planes taken elsewhere and crashed, maybe over the ocean. What other options are there? 

I don't believe everyone really survived and was given a secret identity.

The only other explanation is some mystical supernatural force made the planes and passengers disappear.

The Continuing Adventures of President Moron

This story is just un-fucking-believable:

President Trump pledged on Sunday to help Chinese telecom giant ZTE return to business, days after the company said it would cease “major operating activities” because of the U.S. government’s recent trade restrictions, a dramatic shift in tone for a president who has long accused China of stealing U.S. jobs.

“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” Trump tweeted. “Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

The comment could presage a reversal of one of the Trump administration’s toughest actions to date against a Chinese company. Last month, the Commerce Department penalized ZTE for violating a settlement with the U.S. government over illegal shipments to Iran and North Korea.

As a result, the Trump administration barred U.S. firms for seven years from exporting critical microchips and other parts to ZTE, the world's fourth-largest smartphone manufacturer. ZTE then halted major operations, stressing in a statement Wednesday that it is “actively communicating with the relevant U.S. government departments in order to facilitate the modification or reversal” of the Commerce Department’s order. Now the crisis for ZTE may be nearing an end, a development that stunned trade and national security experts.

The Treasury Department and the Commerce Department had been strongly aligned against ZTE as recently as several days ago.

It’s highly unusual for a president to personally intervene in a regulatory matter and could undercut the leverage of Treasury and Commerce officials seeking to enforce sanctions and trade rules.

It could send the signal to foreign leaders that anything can be put on the bargaining table as Trump seeks to cut trade deals, trade analysts said.

"It seems to cut across the concern about tech competition with China, supplying Iran, and jobs in China, so it all seems pretty confusing," Adam Segal, the director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said of Trump's tweet. "That’s why everybody’s so flabbergasted by it. We’ve had from the beginning of this administration an increased drumbeat of warnings about ZTE and Huawei and the threat to U.S. security by having any of their products in the United States or U.S. supply chains. We’ve seen that from the FBI, the intelligence community and DOD that this is just too much of a threat, and that these companies are a threat to U.S. technological leadership going forward." ZTE's business in the United States has long raised concerns among national security officials.

Shortly after Trump's tweet, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said, "Our intelligence agencies have warned that ZTE technology and phones pose a major cyber security threat. You should care more about our national security than Chinese jobs."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A ZTE spokesman also did not respond to an email seeking comment. Trump is trying to broker a historic agreement with North Korea in an attempt to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

The president has said that his economic approach to China is linked to his national security strategy, and China plays an integral part in any decision made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump's tweet on Sunday comes just days before U.S. officials are planning to meet with Liu He, one of Chinese President Xi Jinping's closest advisers, to discuss the strained trade ties. That meeting is expected to be held in Washington this week or next.

Nevertheless, trade tensions between the United States and China remain sky high. Trump has proposed tariffs on as much as $60 billion in Chinese goods, and Beijing has responded in kind, prompting only continued threats from the president, who repeatedly lamented the trade deficit between the two countries during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Recently, the Trump administration also has sought to limit the encroachment of Chinese telecommunications firms in the United States. The U.S. government initially penalized ZTE in 2017, requiring it to pay $1.19 billion to settle charges that it violated U.S. sanctions in selling equipment to Iran and North Korea. As part of the settlement, ZTE also was required to punish employees involved in the matter and tighten its internal monitoring. But U.S. officials said this year that ZTE didn’t discipline all the employees involved in the violations. “This egregious behavior cannot be ignored,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said last month, as the U.S. announced its punishment to ban U.S. firms from supplying ZTE. The company, which is the fourth largest smartphone maker behind Apple, Samsung and LG, relies on microchip, glass and other parts from U.S. firms such as Qualcomm, Intel and Corning.

ZTE generally makes inexpensive smartphones, which have grown in popularity in recent years. “It was clear to me that there was a range of options between a handslap and ‘I destroy you as a company’ and Secretary Ross decided to go with ‘I destroy you as a company,’” said Chris Johnson, a former CIA analyst and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In addition, the Defense Department in April ordered military exchanges to cease selling ZTE phones on U.S. bases. And the Federal Communications Commission recently moved toward prohibiting U.S. Internet providers that receive federal funds from spending them on equipment made by companies such as Huawei, another major Chinese telecom player.

It was difficult to pinpoint what led to Trump's tweet on Sunday.

ZTE has been active in seeking to change the president's mind. It has been working with the law firm Hogan Lovells, among others, who sought advice from people close to the administration, according to a person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the matter.

In 2017, ZTE paid the Podesta Group $250,000 for lobbying as well as $200,000 to a firm called Appo-G LLC. This year it has continued to pay Appo-G and its lobbyist Jon Christensen $50,000. The counsel the company received was that it should alter its board of directors, change corporate governance, and make sure that Chinese President Xi Jinping was informed in case Trump brought the issue up in a phone call with the Chinese leader, the person said.

It was not clear if Commerce officials were consulted on the President's tweet.

A spokesman for the Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. "This whiplash-like approach to the Commerce Department's exercise of such far-reaching authority is unusual and unwise, particularly if it wasn’t the product of careful interagency discussion and analysis weighing all the pros and cons," said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official responsible for the criminal enforcement of U.S. export control and sanctions laws.

Trump’s international economic policies have been marked by ultimatums and threats that are frequently followed by exemptions and reversals. Foreign leaders often do not know whether he will follow through on something he vows to do or whether he will back down.

This is not normal.

These are the actions of an insane and/or senile and/or idiotic man in the presidency.

Just the thought of a US president trying to save Chinese jobs BLOWS MY FUCKING MIND.

"Married to the Mob" and the Trump Crime Family

This is just perfect:

Trump's Treason and Corruption Is Coming Into Sharper Focus

This weekend, the New York Times and the Washington Post published detailed investigations into the financial history Mueller is investigating. While carefully couching the findings within the bounds of the facts they were able to prove based on publicly available data, these reports made it perfectly clear that Trump’s business empire is not only dirty, but dirty in a way that leads directly into the national-security threat that produced Mueller’s investigation in the first place.

And, the case for collusion just got even stronger:

But the big revelation is Vekselberg’s money. Remember, we heard recently that he was the one who Mueller’s investigators stopped and questioned when he transited through a US airport. This is money, more or less directly from a top Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin, putting money directly into a shell company controlled by Donald Trump’s bag man and fixer. The collusion is real and high level. We’re finding the money trail.

The bottom line is, as I have said since right after the election, Trump is a crook on a global scale. Trump illegally laundered Russian cash in the mid-2000s to fund his real estate deals, and Russia is blackmailing him over this. They helped him get elected and he has to do their bidding. He’s a traitor, pure and simple.

Trump Backs Out Of Iran Nuclear War Clearing a Path for War

Bogus charges have been flying from Israel against Iran. Just watch for it. The rhetoric is heating up.


The other thing breaking the Iran deal does is piss off our NATO allies, which is exactly what Putin would want. What a coincidence....

Nat. Sec. Advisor Bolton of course wants war with Iran, as well as Trump's butt buddy Netanyahu.  And of course, Trump would love a war to distract from his legal troubles and the Mueller investigation.