Dedicated to fighting authoritarianism, bigotry, greed, corruption, climate change denial, white supremacy, racism, stupidity and general evil, as well as the exploration of interesting ideas and conspiracy theories including 9/11, UFOs, ET's, the paranormal and the general unknown.
One day, I'd like to learn what Russia has paid Alex Jones over the years.
I've been watching him a very long time (almost 25 years) and I noticed a weird shift in 2008.
(snip)
"Russia is the new America" has been on going theme in Jones' rants since at least 2012. Here' a more recent example."...
Jones visited Russia in 2018 and joked (?) about getting talking points from Putin.
I've noted for a long time how Jones went from somewhat of a reasonable 9/11 conspiracy theorist in the early 2000s to a racist, Islamphobic demagogue when Obama was elected... and has become more of an outright rightwing lunatic in recent years.
Barbara F. Walter, 57, is a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” which was released in January. (snip)
So we actually know a lot about civil wars — how they start, how long they last, why they’re so hard to resolve, how you end them. And we know a lot because since 1946, there have been over 200 major armed conflicts. And for the last 30 years, people have been collecting a lot of data, analyzing the data, looking at patterns. I’ve been one of those people.
We went from thinking, even as late as the 1980s, that every one of these was unique. And the way people studied it is they would be a Somalia expert, a Yugoslavia expert, a Tajikistan expert. And everybody thought their case was unique and that you could draw no parallels. Then methods and computers got better, and people like me came and could collect data and analyze it. And what we saw is that there are lots of patterns at the macro level.
In 1994, the U.S. government put together this Political Instability Task Force. They were interested in trying to predict what countries around the world were going to become unstable, potentially fall apart, experience political violence and civil war.
Was that out of the State Department?
That was done through the CIA. And the task force was a mix of academics, experts on conflict, and data analysts. And basically what they wanted was: In all of your research, tell us what you think seems to be important.
What should we be considering when we’re thinking about the lead-up to civil wars?
Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy.
There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada.
The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.
And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge.
Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.
And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity.
The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.
So for you, personally, what was the moment the ideas began to connect, and you thought: Wait a minute, I see these patterns in my country right now?
My dad is from Germany. He was born in 1932 and lived through the war there, and he emigrated here in 1958. He had been a Republican his whole life, you know; we had the Reagan calendar in the kitchen every year.
And starting in early 2016, I would go home to visit, and my dad — he doesn’t agitate easily, but he was so agitated. All he wanted to do was talk about Trump and what he was seeing happening. He was really nervous. It was almost visceral — like, he was reliving the past. Every time I’d go home, he was just, like, “Please tell me Trump’s not going to win.” And I would tell him, “Dad, Trump is not going to win.” And he’s just, like, “I don’t believe you; I saw this once before. And I’m seeing it again, and the Republicans, they’re just falling in lockstep behind him.” He was so nervous.
I remember saying: “Dad, what’s really different about America today from Germany in the 1930s is that our democracy is really strong. Our institutions are strong. So, even if you had a Trump come into power, the institutions would hold strong.” Of course, then Trump won. We would have these conversations where my dad would draw all these parallels. The brownshirts and the attacks on the media and the attacks on education and on books. And he’s just, like, I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it all again here. And that’s really what shook me out of my complacency, that here was this man who is very well educated and astute, and he was shaking with fear.
And I was like, Am I being naive to think that we’re different?
That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy.
So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries.
And, as an American citizen I’m like, These two factors are emerging here, and people don’t know.
So I gave a talk at UCSD about this — and it was a complete bomb. Not only did it fall flat, but people were hostile. You know, How dare you say this? This is not going to happen. This is fearmongering.
I remember leaving just really despondent, thinking: Wow, I was so naive to think that, if it’s true, and if it’s based on hard evidence, people will be receptive to it. You know, how do you get the message across if people don’t want to hear it? If they’re not ready for it.
I didn’t do a great job framing it initially, that when people think about civil war, they think about the first civil war. And in their mind, that’s what a second one would look like. And, of course, that’s not the case at all.
So part of it was just helping people conceptualize what a 21st-century civil war against a really powerful government might look like.
After January 6th of last year, people were asking me, “Aren’t you horrified?” “Isn’t this terrible?” “What do you think?” And, first of all, I wasn’t surprised, right?
People who study this, we’ve been seeing these groups have been around now for over 10 years. They’ve been growing. I know that they’re training. They’ve been in the shadows, but we know about them. I wasn’t surprised.
The biggest emotion was just relief, actually. It was just, Oh my gosh, this is a gift. Because it’s bringing it out into the public eye in the most obvious way. And the result has to be that we can’t deny or ignore that we have a problem. Because it’s right there before us.
And what has been surprising, actually, is how hard the Republican Party has worked to continue to deny it and to create this smokescreen — and in many respects, how effective that’s been, at least among their supporters.
Wow: Even the most public act of insurrection, probably a treasonous act that 10, 20 years ago would have just cut to the heart of every American, there are still real attempts to deny it.
But it was a gift because it brought this cancer that those of us who have been studying it, have been watching it growing, it brought it out into the open.
Does it make you at all nervous when you think about the percentage of people who were at, say, January 6th who have some military or law enforcement connection?
Yes. The CIA also has a manual on insurgency. You can Google it and find it online. Most of it is not redacted. And it’s absolutely fascinating to read. It’s not a big manual. And it was written, I’m sure, to help the U.S. government identify very, very early stages of insurgency. So if something’s happening in the Philippines, or something’s happening in Indonesia.
You know, what are signs that we should be looking out for?
And the manual talks about three stages. And the first stage is pre-insurgency. And that’s when you start to have groups beginning to mobilize around a particular grievance. And it’s oftentimes just a handful of individuals who are just deeply unhappy about something. And they begin to articulate those grievances. And they begin to try to grow their membership.
The second stage is called the incipient conflict stage. And that’s when these groups begin to build a military arm. Usually a militia. And they’d start to obtain weapons, and they’d start to get training. And they’ll start to recruit from the ex-military or military and from law enforcement. Or they’ll actually — if there’s a volunteer army, they’ll have members of theirs join the military in order to get not just the training, but also to gather intelligence.
And, again, when the CIA put together this manual, it’s about what they have observed in their experience in the field in other countries. And as you’re reading this, it’s just shocking the parallels. And the second stage, you start to have a few isolated attacks.
And in the manual, it says, really the danger in this stage is that governments and citizens aren’t aware that this is happening. And so when an attack occurs, it’s usually just dismissed as an isolated incident, and people are not connecting the dots yet. And because they’re not connecting the dots, the movement is allowed to grow until you have open insurgency, when you start to have a series of consistent attacks, and it becomes impossible to ignore.
And so, again, this is part of the process you see across the board, where the organizers of insurgencies understand that they need to gain experienced soldiers relatively quickly. And one way to do that is to recruit.
Here in the United States, because we had a series of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, and now that we’ve withdrawn from them, we’ve had more than 20 years of returning soldiers with experience. And so this creates a ready-made subset of the population that you can recruit from.
What do you say to people who charge that this is all overblown, that civil war could never happen here in the United States — or that you’re being inflammatory and making things worse by putting corrosive ideas out there?
Oh, there’s so many things to say. One thing is that groups — we’ll call them violence entrepreneurs, the violent extremists who want to tear everything down and want to institute their own radical vision of society — they benefit from the element of surprise, right? They want people to be confused when violence starts happening. They want people to not understand what’s going on, to think that nobody’s in charge. Because then they can send their goons into the streets and convince people that they’re the ones in charge.
Which is why when I would talk to people who lived through the start of the violence in Sarajevo or Baghdad or Kyiv, they all say that they were surprised. And they were surprised in part because they didn’t know what the warning signs were.
But also because people had a vested interest in distracting them or denying it so that when an attack happened, or when you had paramilitary troops sleeping in the hills outside of Sarajevo, they would make up stories. You know, “We’re just doing training missions.” Or “We’re just here to protect you. There’s nothing going on here. Don’t worry about this.”
I wish it were the case that by not talking about it we could prevent anything from happening. But the reality is, if we don’t talk about it, [violent extremists] are going to continue to organize, and they’re going to continue to train.
There are definitely lots of groups on the far right who want war. They are preparing for war. And not talking about it does not make us safer.
What we’re heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is.
And it makes sense. An insurgency tends to be much more decentralized, often fought by multiple groups. Sometimes they’re actually competing with each other. Sometimes they coordinate their behavior. They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs. We’ve already seen this in other countries with powerful militaries, right?
The IRA took on the British government. Hamas has taken on the Israeli government. These are two of the most powerful militaries in the world. And they fought for decades. And in the case of Hamas I think we could see a third intifada. And they pursue a similar strategy.
Here it’s called leaderless resistance.
And that method of how to defeat a powerful government like the United States is outlined in what people are calling the bible of the far right: “The Turner Diaries,” which is this fictitious account of a civil war against the U.S. government. It lays out how you do this. And one of the things it says is, Do not engage the U.S. military. You know, avoid it at all costs.
Go directly to targets around the country that are difficult to defend and disperse yourselves so it’s hard for the government to identify you and infiltrate you and eliminate you entirely.
So, like with the [Charles Dickens’s] ghost of Christmas future, are these the things that will be or just that may be?
I can’t say when it’s going to happen.
I think it’s really important for people to understand that countries that have these two factors, who get put on this watch list, have a little bit less than a 4 percent annual risk of civil war. That seems really small, but it’s not. It means that, every year that those two factors continue, the risk increases.
The analogy is smoking. If I started smoking today, my risk of dying of lung cancer or some smoking-related disease is very small. If I continue to smoke for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my risk eventually of dying of something related to smoking is going to be very high if I don’t change my behavior.
And so I think that’s one of the actually optimistic things: We know the warning signs. And we know that if we strengthen our democracy, and if the Republican Party decides it’s no longer going to be an ethnic faction that’s trying to exclude everybody else, then our risk of civil war will disappear. We know that. And we have time to do it. But you have to know those warning signs in order to feel an impetus to change them.
The United States has identified at least 18 sites set up by Russia to detain and forcibly deport Ukrainian civilians to Russia, an American diplomat said this week, adding that Moscow appeared to have made preparations for the so-called filtration camps even before its forces invaded the country.
Courtney Austrian, the deputy head of the U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that Russian officials — with the help of proxy groups — had set up “filtration camps” in schools, sports centers and cultural institutions in parts of Ukraine recently seized by their forces.
“At least 18 filtration locations along both sides of the Ukraine-Russia border have been identified thus far,” she said in a speech on Thursday to members of the organization, an international security monitoring group in Vienna.
Testimonies given to The New York Times and other news outlets by people who have escaped Russia after their “filtration” have included accounts of interrogations, of beatings and torture of people deemed to have ties to Ukraine’s armed forces, and of disappearances.
After the filtration camps, Ukrainians have been sent on to cities across Russia — often to regions near China or Japan, according to the testimonies.
Ms. Austrian said U.S. assessments indicated that Russian officials were preparing for filtration procedures even before starting their invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
“Russian officials likely created lists of Ukrainian civilians deemed threatening to Russia’s control of Ukraine, including anyone with pro-Ukraine views, such as political figures and activists, as well as security personnel, for detention and filtration,” she said.
She called the filtrations a “Stalinistic process,” adding that they were “the latest in a long Russian history of using mass deportation and depopulation to try to subjugate and control people.”
Ukraine’s government has said that about 1.6 million people have been forcibly relocated to Russia — including about 250,000 children. Those numbers are impossible to independently verify.
“There is no public register; there are no hotlines that can be called; there is no accountability,” Ms. Austrian said.
She cited interviews that escapees from filtration camps have given to the news media describing how their passports had been confiscated and how some of those fleeing had been encouraged to apply for Russian citizenship.
Pushing for an international effort to help document these cases, Ms. Austrian suggested that Washington would seek prosecution of those involved. “Let me be clear: All those responsible for forced transfers of Ukrainian civilians to Russia will be identified and held to account for violations of international law,” she said.
— Erika Solomon
Kubrick's "The Shining" About the Faked Apollo Moon Landing
I had a post here about the hints Kubrick gave us in "The Shining" but I 'm having trouble finding it! They also changed the interface for the blog controls, and it's way harder to find old posts. Annoying. Did find it, see after next bit.
While looking, I found this old post:
A rare speech by Neil Armstrong on the 25th anniversary of the moon landing, where he refers to astronauts as NASA's Parrots and talks about breaking through truth's protective layers. Pretty freaking weird.
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OK, found this post from 2017 (I think I posted about this connection more than once) --
The audience watching the film literally sees the launch of Apollo 11, right before their eyes, as Danny rises from the floor. It isn't the real launch of Apollo 11, it is, of course, the symbolic launching of Apollo 11. In other words - it isn't real.
What happens next is crucial to understanding everything else that happens in the film.
Danny, bewildered, walks down the hallway. He sees that Room 237 - the room that Halorann warned him about - has a key in the lock and the door is wide open.
It is important to note that the room in question was numbered 217 in the Stephen King version of The Shining. For unknown reason's Kubrick changed it to 237.
Those unknown reasons are about to be come known.
Danny is literally carrying a symbolic Apollo 11, on his body, via the sweater, to the Moon as he walks over to room 237.
Why do I think this? Because the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 237,000 miles.
The real truth is that this movie is really about the deal that Stanley Kubrick made with the Manager of the Overlook Hotel (America). This deal was to get Kubrick to re-create, in other words, to fake, the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
Danny represents the artistic side of Kubrick. Because of the complexity of the artistic realization of the manner in which the lunar landings needed to appear, Kubrick needed to trust his artistic side.
Room 237 represents the fake lunar set that Stanley had to create to make the lunar landings appear factual. But really, on this set, and in this room, nothing is real.
As the film will soon reveal, Room 237 has to be lied about. It cannot be understood at all… ever. Nothing real ever happens in room 237. For a moment, in the film, it looks like Danny is actually going to enter Room 237. But we are never sure.
In the next scene Jack has a bad dream while he is working. He tells Wendy that in his dream he has killed Wendy and Danny. Meanwhile Danny enters the scene and it is obvious that some mysterious force has physically hurt Danny.
This mysterious force has also torn his Apollo 11 sweater.
Without knowing this, you would never guess, the symbolism is very subtle. But once you know it, it's hard to deny. There is a lot more to the argument in the essay, there are a lot of images from the movie, and the essay is a great read, but this is the crux.
I also noticed something else not mentioned in the essay-- how Danny rides his big wheel around the hotel in a circuit, almost like an orbit. So his little bike is symbolic of the Apollo craft orbiting the moon.
The author of this essay is Jay Weidner, who subscribes to the secret space program theory, that I do not believe. It seems like disinfo to me and doesn't make a lot of sense. It seems silly to fake the moon landings if we are actually going there anyway.
I blog about politics, interesting ideas and conspiracy theories. Many or most of the official stories for key events are lies. For instance, the 9/11 plane hijackings and crashes appear to be clever hoaxes. The WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 towers were brought down by demolition, and there is evidence for the use of small nuclear bombs in the demolition of WTC1 and 2. It seems that 9/11 was an evil hoax foisted upon the world, done in order to spark the obscene "war on terror", to cover up financial fraud and to further the ends of the global elite. However, 9/11 was only part of the fraud and evil committed by the evil powers that be (PTB).
9/11 was a conspiracy, as it involved several people conspiring to commit a crime. The official 9/11 narrative, as codified by the 9/11 Commission Report, is NOT proven as the most likely explanation for the events of 9/11/01. The official 9/11 story is therefore a theory. This means that the OFFICIAL 9/11 Story is really a "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!
Statement of Principles
I have no fondness for any religion, as I think it makes people do extreme and violent things. Islamic terrorists do exist and I detest them as much as I detest the true perpetrators of 9/11. Most likely Islamic terrorists were used as patsies in 9/11, as part of a highly organized covert operation by a group affiliated with the US goverment and US military.
