#And this news source only has medium credibility and says “a Post reporter” witnessed this at random and was on scene asking questions

[antimony-ore]

Reblog to ramble in tags, if you share this from me you're fucking weird

[thisdaynews]

ALL VIDEO:Bullets, Blood & Death At Lekki Tollgate: Untold Story Of What Happened - PT

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/all-videobullets-blood-death-at-lekki-tollgate-untold-story-of-what-happened-pt/

ALL VIDEO:Bullets, Blood & Death At Lekki Tollgate: Untold Story Of What Happened - PT

INVESTIGATION: Bullets, Blood & Death: Untold Story of what happened at Lekki Toll Gate

After days of extensive reporting, PREMIUM TIMES can now paint a clearer picture of what happened at the Lekki Toll Gate on October 20.

At about 6:45 p.m. on October 20, men in military uniform arrived at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos in three Toyota Hilux vans and almost immediately began shooting into a crowd of peaceful protesters gathered there waving the Nigerian green-and-white flag and reciting the national anthem.Protesters and other witnesses at the toll gate claimed several people were injured and killed in the shooting.

A popular Disc Jockey, DJ Switch, who streamed the incident live on Instagram, claimed that the soldiers, after the shooting, took the dead away. She also claimed that a team of police officers arrived later to mop up after the soldiers.

She said the military initially prevented first responders and ambulances from reaching the injured but later allowed them through. She said she saw at least 15 corpses and claimed that security agents took the bodies away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7bT8KdxsOE Several people who watched her Instagram live broadcast claimed they saw protesters being fired upon by soldiers. They said some protesters died of bullet wounds while others were left with mild to critical injuries.

Similarly, a rights group, Amnesty International, claimed 10 people were killed during the shooting at the toll gate, and two others at the Alausa protest ground.

However, the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who described the shooting as a “dark note in the history of the state” and blamed the shooting on forces beyond the “direct control” of his government, originally said no life was lost in the shooting.He later admitted that two persons died from the incident, one of them from blunt force trauma.

On Monday, during an interview on CNN, Mr Sanwo-Olu continued to discredit the accounts of witnesses about the number of deaths and wounded from the shooting. He said no bloodstain was found at the scene of the shooting when he visited

“What has happened is that there have been so many footages that were seen, that people have shown, but we have not seen bodies,” he said. “We have not seen relatives, we have not seen anybody truly coming out to say I am a father or a mother to someone and I cannot find that person. Nobody has turned up. I have been to the ground, there is no scratch of blood anywhere there.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3Bqqpjmn4 Despite accounts by witnesses and video posted online, the Nigerian Army denied that its personnel fired upon protesters.

The army initially claimed its troops were not at Lekki that night. However, it later admitted that soldiers were deployed on the request of the Lagos State government. The army, however, insists that its personnel did not open fire on the protesters, let alone kill any.

The Lekki Shooting: Checking the facts Piecing together details of on-the-ground reporting, credible information posted online by citizens, accounts by witnesses and victims as well as information obtained from top military sources, PREMIUM TIMES can now paint a clearer picture of what happened at the Lekki Toll Gate on October 20.

The newspaper’s investigative team set out to unravel what actually happened on the evening of the shooting and the hours that followed.As this medium gathered evidence for this investigation, Sodiq Adeoye,who is an employee of research firm SBM Intelligence, informed one of our reporters after the shooting that some residents of Admiralty Way, Lekki Phase 1, a highbrow neighbourhood, about two kilometres from the Lekki Toll Gate, found a body floating in the lagoon just behind their houses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfeHL21xt-0 Mr Adeoyo said the residents suspected the floating body could be one of the protesters fired upon by soldiers and alleged by witnesses to have been carried.

On this newspaper’s request, Mr Adeoye sent a brief time-stamped video of the corpse floating in the water. A Google map coordinate he sent indicated that the body was floating close to Bay Lounge, an upscale restaurant.

At around 6 a.m on Saturday, accompanied by a friend, Deji Ashiru, this reporter drove to the Nigerian Army Post Exchange (NAPEX) Car Park Jetty in Victoria Island, where he and his team hired a boat to search for the body.

As the boat approached the bank of the lagoon, behind the imposing Oriental Hotel, the reporter saw a shanty ahead. The shanty is on the left side of the Lekki Toll Gate if one was travelling from Victoria Island. Due to its proximity to the toll gate, it immediately occurred to the reporter that residents of the community might have witnessed things that happened during the crackdown that was not yet in the public domain. His instinct was right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPzPfufOpiY He told the driver of the boat to stop his team at the shanty. It seems the residents had been waiting for someone to tell the stories of what they saw on the evening of the shooting because team members had hardly introduced themselves or even disembarked from the boat when they started recounting gruesome details about the evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGc1n29N7pM The residents, some of whom suffered bullet wounds and other injuries, during the shooting, alleged that several people were killed and injured by the soldiers. They also corroborated the story told by DJ Switch and other protesters that after the shooting soldiers took bodies of those killed away.

When asked if the protesters were killed and whether they saw soldiers carry bodies away, one of the residents said: “Of course, everyone saw it. Those that were present saw it.“Even the one that died in our presence, wey be say the ekelabe (policemen) carry am go. They shot am there,” another resident said.

“Boss, if you want to camera, you can camera,” said the second speaker who later identified himself as Ray.

“Let me tell you something. This is my country. I am not afraid of anything. Let me say what I saw on that day. I was here from the beginning to the end of everything. What the soldiers and police did was absolutely wrong. Why would soldier come and shoot on us when we were having a peaceful protest,” he said.

When asked if he saw soldiers carry bodies away, Ray responded: “Of course, I saw dead bodies. They packed bodies.They came with their vans.Their trucks.” Ray, who expressed displeasure that President Muhammadu Buhari did not mention the Lekki shooting in his broad-cast to the nation a couple of days ago, said Mr Sanwo-Olu visited the scene of the shooting in the early hours of Wednesday and saw some of the dead.

“Why is Sanwo-Olu denying? Because immediately after when that thing happened Sanwo-Olu himself came. He came. He parked at the toll gate. He saw some dead bodies on the ground. Why is he denying,” he asked.Ray’s account of the event was also corroborated by other residents of the community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUVCun_kfQo The residents also alleged that after the soldiers who initially opened fire on the protesters left the scene, police officers led by Raji Ganiyu, a chief superintendent of the police, and the Divisional Police Officer of the nearby Maroko Division, arrived the scene and continued the attack on defiant protesters who stood their ground despite the military attack.

Showing us spent bullet casings they collected at the toll gate after the shooting, they accused the team led by Mr Ganiyu, whom they described as wearing a white native attire on the day, of shooting and killing some protesters, including a mentally ill man who was often seen around the area.

“DPO of Maroko we see am face to face wey e blow one person head pull the skull off. Pistol. E wear white and white,” one of them said in Pidgin.

“Na only one him kill?” another resident interjected in Pidgin. “What of the mad boy wey he shoot for our front here. Close range. There was a guy that was abnormal, he was sat at that speaker. He just came immediately, saw the boy, the boy didn’t do anything. He didn’t run, he didn’t harass him, he just removed his pistol and blew the boy’s head,” yet another resident said.

The Maroko Police Division is directly opposite the shanty and on the right of the toll gate.When reached for comments, Mr Ganiyu declined to respond, saying all requests for comment should be directed to the Lagos Police Public Relation Department.

Also, the police public relation officer, Muyiwa Adejobi, said any question about the shooting incident at Lekki Toll Gate would be decided by the judicial panel of inquiry set up by the state government into alleged atrocities committed by law enforcement officers.“No comment on this for now,” he said.

The narratives of the residents of the event of Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning correlate with that of DJ Switch.In a video posted on Instagram three days after the shooting, DJ Switch spoke about the involvement of the police and explained that it was one aspect of the shooting many were not talking about.

The Lekki Stampede The residents explained that when the shooting started a stampede occurred. They said some of the protesters ran into the community to take cover from the bullets flying all around them and in the process injured some of the residents of the community.

This reporter spoke to a mother who showed him the bruises on the knee of her daughter, which she claimed she got during the stampede.They said some of the protesters ran into the lagoon in the panic that ensued. Agboola Kapko, a fisherman who lives in the community, explained how he rescued some protesters who ran into the lagoon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljV2lcilanQ “I dey for that side (points) before dey start to shoot. Many people run enter water. I can’t leave them like that to die so I help many people comot for inside water and they come safe. I carry many people go another way, go put dem and they follow that way go,” he said.

Mr Kakpo’s wife showed our reporter her bruised and swollen hand. She said she sustained the injury when she fell while trying to run from the shooting.

Lekki shooting and the floating corpse After speaking with several residents at the shanty, our investigative team left in search of the floating corpse. Just about 300 metres after the toll gate on the Lekki-Ikoyi Bridge and about 100 metres from Bay Lounge, they saw the corpse floating near the bank of the lagoon.

The corpse was that of a man. It was already swollen and decomposing. It was shoe-less. The dead man was wearing blue denim jeans trousers and a flimsy white singlet. It also had a rubber band on its left wrist. The man seems to be slightly bearded, but it was hard to tell as a swarm of flies was already gathered around his decomposing face.

“No scratch of blood” – Sanwo-Olu lied During the CNN interview, Mr Sanwo-Olu, in what appears an attempt to discredit witnesses’ accounts of the ugly shooting, said when he visited the toll gate, he did not find a “scratch of blood.” However, video& photo evidence verified as being from the incident as well as witnesses and victims accounts of the shooting showed the governor’s claim as inaccurate.

One of the photos showed a young man wearing a zip sweatshirt over a Versace t-shirt, with his head lying in a pool of blood. Witnesses said that the man was shot in the head by the police officers who arrived the scene after the soldiers left the scene.Photo verification tools such as Google and Bing reverse searchers and Tineye indicated that the photo had not previously appeared anywhere else online.

In one video footage, some protesters were seen tying a tourniquet to the badly bloodied leg of a victim with a belt. The unidentified man wriggled in pain. He had been shot in the leg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLb1x0CQeAQ In another footage, an elderly man whose cloth was drenched in blood was seen lying beside another person who had suffered bullet wound injuries.Footages posted on Twitter of the desolation at the Lekki toll gate the morning after the attack indicated a man showing a large patch of bloodstain on the scene of the shooting.

Victims recount ordeal When this reporter visited Nicholas Okpe at the Emergency Unit of Grandville Hospital in Ajah, he could barely sit up. He had a patch on his right chest where a bullet hit him. A tube was attached just under his right rib cage that drains blood and pus into a container placed on the floor. The bullet was still lodged in his chest while the hospital waits for a consultant to further test before deciding how to proceed.

A doctor at the hospital, who identified herself as Ikemefuna, said Mr Okpe was in a critical state when he was admitted, and said he was lucky to be alive.

“He is getting better. He is not on oxygen anymore. God so good it (the bullet) hit him on the right. It (the bullet) pushed his lung to the side. He still needs further review,” she said.

Moved by the prospect of achieving an end to police brutality, Mr Okpe did not just protest, he did more. He volunteered alongside a handful of other youth to clean the protest ground at the end of each day’s protest.He told me his case was so critical that three hospitals rejected him before Grandville accepted to treat him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdWSSQ91EMo “The first hospital they said they cannot admit me,” he said. “They poured honey where the bullet passed through and plastered and gave me some injection. They said that will sustain me until I get a hospital that can treat me.They took me to another hospital, they rejected me. They took me to another they said they were not open. This is the fourth hospital they came to. The man here said they should admit me if not I would have died.”

Mr Okpe said the blood and pus that were drained from him filled the container four times already. He said he was in severe distress.

“I’m passing through a lot of pains. I am always in pain. Anytime I cry out they will just give me painkiller and they will go. When that painkiller expires the pain will come again. My head is just too heavy for me with pains,” he said.Mr Okpe also said he saw the soldiers took aim at the CCTV cameras at the toll gate before he was hit.

Lekki Shooting Victim — Raymond Simon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQX7wLYGg0s All Raymond Simon wanted to do was help. But his large heart almost cost him his life. Mr Simon told PREMIUM TIMES he was not at the toll gate when the soldiers shot at protesters. A church instrumentalist, he was at a rehearsal that evening. As he was returning home on his motorcycle, he decided to take some of those injured during the shooting to hospitals.

He said he was returning after making the third trip from nearby Reddington Hospital when he was ambushed by police officers at the toll gate who viciously attacked and abducted him.

“After I was stabbed, they abducted me alongside a corpse. They were driving us around the area and I suspect they were looking for where to abandon the corpse. When they got to Ilasan area, they pushed me down. My hands were tied to the back,” he said.

He said the police officers drove off with the other presumably dead person. He later managed to find his way to a hospital where his wound was stitched, and he was given painkillers before being discharged.

Mr Simon said after he was attacked, one of the police officers tried to shoot him but one of his colleagues pushed him away. He said another officer with a bayonet attached to his rifle aimed to stab him in the neck, but he quickly moved his head and the blade hit his chin.He said his motorcycle was stolen during the attack.

Lekki Shooting Victim — Bassey A bullet hit Bassey in his right hand as he mingled with other protesters at the toll gate. Unable to reach first responders on time due to the blockade set up by the soldiers, he said some residents of the area close to the toll gate removed the bullet lodged in his left hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNorbu9n7Xk Bassey appeared to be in severe pain and in urgent need of medical attention. He gingerly carried the swollen hand, with a huge wound in the spot where he was hit by the bullet, close to his body, as he spoke with this reporter. He said he has not received any treatment worth mentioning since he suffered the injury.

When PREMIUM TIMES returned to the shanty to check Bassey the next day, our reporter was told members of the community had arranged for a motorcycle to take him to St. Nicholas Hospital, Lagos Island. Our reporter went to St. Nicholas Hospital to check on him but was told nobody that fits his description came there for treatment.

Bassey later returned to the shanty on Thursday. Fellow residents said his condition had worsened as he is yet to get proper treatment for his injury.

Lekki Shooting Victim — Patrick Ukala Mr Ukala was shot in his right arm. He said the bullet is still lodged in his arm and that he had only received first aid and painkillers. He was told by doctors at Grandville to do an X-ray of the arm before the bullet can be removed.

“I am still walking everywhere looking for where to do x-ray but nowhere yet. They promise that I should come back.”

Abandoned by Lagos Government His account as well as those of Messers. Okpe, Simon, and Bassey contradict the claim of the Lagos government that protesters who were injured would be treated fully free of charge.The victims said the state government has not contributed a dime to their treatments.Some of them who were originally treated are now being treated in other hospitals.

Mr Ukala said the bill for their treatment was covered by one Ideh Chukwuma, a filmmaker.On Sunday when our reporter visited Mr Okpe at Grandville Trauma Centre, he met a team from the Lagos State Ministry of Health, which came with its media crew to interview the victims. Mr Ukala said that was the last he saw of any government official. https://youtu.be/hJf_GNQMKQ Since the day you saw those people (officials of the Lagos Ministry of Health) there they have never come there neither did they speak with the doctor. Finally, the doctor has asked us to leave.” He said Mr Okpe was discharged with the bullet still lodged in his chest.He has not been operated on to remove the bullet in his arm.

When Grandville Trauma Centre was reached for comment, an employee of the hospital who gave her “professional name” as Doctor Adebayo, confirmed that the victims had all been discharged.

“Some that need extra consultations with specialists, we sent them there. We didn’t operate him (Mr Okpe) here. Probably they will operate him wherever he went to,” she said.

Hospitals owners accuse Lagos Government of intimidation Following the shooting at the Lekki Toll Gate, some hospital owners in Lagos complained to this newspaper that the Lagos State Ministry of Health was using its Health Facility Monitoring and Accreditation Agency (HEFAMAA), the organisation responsible for registering healthcare facilities in the state, to intimidate them.

They said HEFAMAA sent out an online questionnaire requesting details of injured #EndSARS protesters treated at their facilities, a move they said could be used to “arm-twist” them into providing information which might breach doctor-patient confidentiality rule……………https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/423823-investigation-bullets-blood-death-untold-story-of-what-happened-at-lekki-toll-gate.html

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[faithfulnews]

Multiple credible witnesses corroborate rape charge against Joe Biden

Democrats in the news media are covering up the Biden scandal

In this post, I want to report on the criminal charge filed by Tara Reade with the police against Joe Biden. And list out all the witnesses we have to corroborate her testimony so far. Then we’ll review the mainstream news media’s response to the scandal. Then we’ll see why Joe Biden (of all people) should have no right to legal counsel, due process, or any other basic rights as defendant.

First, a criminal complaint has been filed, according to far-left Newsweek:

Tara Reade filed a criminal complaint with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department of accusing the 2020 Democratic nomination of pushing her against the wall in a Senate corridor and penetrating her with his fingers, according to Business Insider.

This is important, because she can be held criminally responsible for making a false charge. This is not a frivolous woman making a frivolous charge to smear someone she doesn’t know. She worked for him, and she filed a criminal complaint against him.

In addition, she actually told people about the alleged sexual assault at the time it was committed.

The far-left Business Insider reports:

In March, when a former aide to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden accused the candidate of sexually assaulting her in 1993, two people came forward to say that the woman, Tara Reade, had told them of the incident shortly after it allegedly occurred — her brother, Collin Moulton, and a friend who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

Now two more sources have come forward to corroborate certain details about Reade’s claims. One of them — a former neighbor of Reade’s — has told Insider for the first time, on the record, that Reade disclosed details about the alleged assault to her in the mid-1990s.

“This happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it,” Lynda LaCasse, who lived next door to Reade in the mid-’90s, told Insider.

The other source, Lorraine Sanchez, who worked with Reade in the office of a California state senator in the mid-’90s, told Insider that she recalls Reade complaining at the time that her former boss in Washington, DC, had sexually harassed her, and that she had been fired after raising concerns.

Now, you might remember that we had a Senate trial and a media circus that lasted for months and months for SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh. But Christine Blasey Ford never made a criminal charge against Kavanaugh, nor did she have any witnesses to corroborate her story. So we have to take Reade’s charge seriously – this time, there’s an actual case.

But Biden’s allies in the media don’t want Biden or his endorsers to reply to the charges, and they don’t want to investigate or report on the charges.

The Washington Free Beacon notes:

In the two weeks after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her accusation against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, CNN published more than 400 items on its website related to the allegations. By contrast, it didn’t publish a single item on the sexual assault accusation against Biden until April 17, more than three weeks after Reade recounted her story in a podcast interview.

Since Reade’s allegation was made public, Biden has been interviewed multiple times on major media networks, including twice by CNN’s Anderson Cooper. For some reason, the former vice president has yet to be asked about the accusation. Thus far, his only public response has been to deny the allegations via a statement from a campaign official.

I want to see a Senate trial that starts tomorrow and lasts until election day so we can find out what Joe Biden really did to Tara Reade. Only Republican senators should be allowed to call witnesses. The defendant should not be allowed legal counsel or the right to call  witnesses, or see the charges, or see the evidence against him – as happens on college campuses when male students are accused by women. And every day that the news media don’t report on the trial, I will know that they think that women must be presumed to be lying when they report sexual assault at work.

This is interesting, from The Post Millennial:

Since 2011, hundreds of students accused of sexual misconduct have filed lawsuits against their universities alleging they were denied due process by campus disciplinary panels.

Thanks to the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX, a law that requires colleges to prevent sexual discrimination, harassment and assault, a student’s right to fair process has not only been significantly impaired, but in some cases, eliminated entirely. Many universities still use the Obama-era guidance to this day.

In reality, this world of unfair and false accusations that has forced hundreds of young men to sue their universities, was orchestrated and executed by none other than Joe Biden—a man who now finds himself ensnared in the same environment he helped create.

I know that a lot of Democrat women believe that sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape are common in the workplace. So it will be interesting to see how they vote in November. Many of these women will have experienced something like what Tara Reade says she experienced. Will those women come forward and vote for Joe Biden anyway? If so, what will that tell you about their allegiance to “feminism”?

Go to the article

[alternative-eyes]

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-btQNR7yXZ4Q/XP0XHOGliuI/AAAAAAAAlAQ/W7WwH4N-BH4IbKbwPdiyxIjpHMJmnZy4wCLcBGAs/s72-c/Tic-Tac%2BStill.png

In search of the hidden hand

     This History channel “Unidentified” series — ever think it really might be a government information-management project? The thought never seriously occurred to me until this week, when De Void got a load of Tyler Rogoway’s ruminations in The War Zone. Rogoway, a defense-tech reporter whose informed and welcome reporting on UFOs has lately become more aggressive, made connections that weren’t so much new as they were assembled in a way that blurred the lines between the jockey and the horse.

By Billy Cox De Void 6-7-19

OK, to whoever’s running the show, riddle me this: Why does your script resume after each commercial buzzkill with a summary of what we saw just three minutes ago? This is not a model of efficiency. Can we skip the micro-rehash, please, we’re not all ADHD or Alzheimers (yet). And if you’re using “Unidentified” as a social experiment, clue us in: How, exactly, do you want us to think? We’ll go there, just tell us. You’ve already played your Black Aces, and you’re definitely holding our attention. In less than two years, you’ve given us certified Defense Department videos of F-18s chasing UFOs, pursuit-pilot testimony, on-the-record assessments by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon, plus a couple of independent video experts struggling for analogies. You’ve spoiled us so rotten, we’re impatient and ungrateful. But guess what? You’ve had a clumsy product rollout, and you can’t control everything. What happens next is contingent upon media competence. And what’s happening journalistically lately is unprecedented, and atypical. There’s no guarantee it’ll last. And there’s plenty of erratic, lazy, formula-driven, obstructionist dreck waiting to fill the lapses. Which means we can’t stop calling that stuff out. Just for the hell of it, let’s start with space.com – clearly one of the most slammin’ domain names of all time. Something with an audacious flag like space.com should not only own news from the high frontier, that ownership should be creative and oracular. (De Void is glad De Void’s name isn’t space.com.) But just look at what space.com does when it tries to keep up with a conversation instigated by the likes of Politico, the NY Times, and the Washington Post. Space.com decides to interview – yup, yup, bingo – Seth Shostak. Good god — not again. Look, if space.com wanted to justify their headline “UFOs Are Real, But Don’t Assume They’re Alien Spaceships,” they had a much more credible path to that hypothesis. They could’ve consulted with, oh, say, Tyler Rogoway. Last week, Rogoway and co-author Joseph Trevithick took a detailed look at the operational parallels between what happened with USS Nimitz aviators in 2004 and USS Roosevelt pilots in 2014-15. Both strike groups, a decade apart, were conducting their first exercises after undergoing, by orders of magnitude, major systems upgrades, including radar and surveillance overhauls. And both training runs produced video footage of UFOs acquired through new state-of-the-art detection technology. Trevithick and Rogoway make a not-implausible argument that the UFOs might have been, in both cases, military assets deployed to give the new configurations a rigorous workout. The authors aren’t saying that’s what happened. But given The War Zone’s dispassionate track record for reporting on UFO activity using FAA records, its journalism doesn’t appear to be promoting an agenda. Anyhow, space.com could’ve used that sort of sourcing to blow off the phenomenon. Instead, space.com dusted off tired reliable old Seth Shostak again. Probably on speed dial. And it isn’t fair, not to readers or to the SETI Institute’s Most Famous Radioastronomer. It just makes him look bad at this point; Shostak knows nothing about The Great Taboo, and he isn’t interested in knowing. But space.com knows that. Maybe they’re tired, too. Shostak wouldn’t flinch or say “Ow!” if a UFO took a wet towel and popped a stinging welt on his fanny. He’d say something like “That’s a good policy. Let them do it.” No kidding, that’s what he told space.com last week when asked about the Navy’s frankly astonishing public announcement to encourage pilots to report “unexplained aerial phenomena,” without making them fret about career repercussions. Shostak didn’t say hmm, that’s interesting, wonder what’s behind all that? Just That’s a good policy. Let them do it Sorry, space.com, that kind of “reporting” won’t cut it anymore, at least not in this new competitive media environment. And for all of Tucker Carlson’s evolving tenacity on this UAP story, and despite Brian Kilmeade’s creditable interview with former DoD honcho Chris Mellon, Fox News’ apparent designs on leading the network pack on this issue won’t amount to much, either, if they keep cut ‘n’ pasting junk stories like the aforementioned space.com snoozer on their website. If only parroting sloppy work were the biggest challenge going forward. The worst will come from the dead-enders, whose clawbacks will grow increasingly desperate as whoever’s running the show lays down more cards. To wit: the most talked about piece in the aftermath of “Unidentified’s” premiere last week was published in The Intercept by freelancer Keith Kloor. OK, I’m slow, I’ll admit it, but I really hadn’t heard of Keith Kloor until April. That’s when, writing for the National Academy of Sciences’ quarterly journal “Issues in Science and Technology,” Kloor dispensed with the finesse. Working with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, Kloor had exclusive dibs on breaking the results of the first technical analysis of the ’04 Nimitz/Tic Tac incident. Lots of sound bites cluttered the airwaves on the Nimitz affair, but until SCU assembled an impressive team of volunteer investigators to work the images for math and physics, anything less was just talk. Kloor used his prestigious NAS connections to gain access, and SCU in turn timed the release of its report to coincide with the publication of Kloor’s article. Huge mistake. In an article referring to the SCU crowd as “a community of believers in extraterrestrial visitations,” Kloor never addressed the actual contents of the report; instead, he used the occasion to divert the increasingly focused UFO debate onto an exhausted trope — the latest chapter in America’s mental dysfunctionality. Perhaps because Kloor ignored his own scoop and wadded it up into something all too familiar, media competitors never bothered to look at what SCU produced. Kloor struck again last Saturday, when he went after Luis Elizondo, the controversial former intelligence operator and catalyst behind the release of the F-18 UFO vids. Kloor’s line of inquiry was reasonable enough. The To The Stars Academy, which Elizondo joined in 2017 after resigning from the military, has the sort of serious transparency issues that SCU does not. In efforts to understand Elizondo’s role in the $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program first reported by the NY Times in 2017, Kloor reached a Pentagon spokesperson who cast Elizondo as a phony. “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in (the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence), up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017,” stated DoD’s Christopher Sherwood. As Kloor pointed out, Sherwood’s disclaimer refuted Elizondo’s assertion that he ran AATIP. Thus, Kloor — nobody’s fool — was quick to charge that Elizondo, and TTSA colleague Mellon, have been manipulating “a largely passive and credulous press to generate sensational UFO headlines” over the past 18 months. Ignoring Navy veterans’ eyewitness testimony as well as 270 pages of SCU analysis that he failed to report on two months ago, Kloor dismissed the UFO imagery as “grainy footage of tiny, darting objects.” Seriously, that’s the entire sum of Kloor’s assessment of 270 pages of science. Oh, and he said the videos “made for great television.” De Void started Googling the guy and discovered a Whac-A-Mole whose UFO snark has also lately been popping up in the likes of Slate, Newsweek, and the maybe irrelevant online platform Medium. Four months ago, in yet another long-winded eulogy for common sense titled “America’s Enduring Obsession With UFOs,” Kloor lamented the MSM’s new “wide-eyed coverage” of “crusading actors” pushing “extraterrestrial enchantment” which “until recently … had largely been relegated to the tabloids and fringe outlets.” Sounding nostalgic for simpler times and suspiciously like Seth Shostak in his refusal to confront hard data, Kloor figured it all out. “I argue it’s the news media,” he proclaimed, “that keeps the specter of extraterrestrials alight in our skies and minds.” De Void would argue that inept media coverage is what kept The Great Taboo on the fringe for so long. But this is Kloor’s show, and he wants us to bundle everything we know about the Navy’s recorded UFO incidents into whether or not Elizondo misrepresented his duties. Elizondo’s credibility is not a tangential matter. But implicit in the assumption that he lied is Kloor’s own credulity. Maybe he’s getting played as well. Would a government flack ever try to bamboozle anybody? Maybe Christopher Sherwood is really Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I mean, who’s to say? One last thing about the article. Kloor wrote Elizondo had “a pug face and billy-goat beard” — and he complained that Elizondo won’t call him back. But here’s all you need to know: The genie that neither Kloor nor anyone else can jam back into the bottle is the Pentagon’s DD-1910 form vouching for the authenticity and release of the videos. So what’s really in there? We’ve all seen the footage, but what does it really show? Evidence of military stress tests? Hardware or software glitches? An Achilles heel, maybe? Ours? SCU’s team analyzed only the Tic Tac footage, and the results about velocity and g-forces were startling. Somebody not connected to the National Academy of Sciences really should put some decent journalism into what the GoFast and the Gimbal vids can tell us. Or maybe whoever’s steering the “Unidentified” project is merely planning to string us along for just five more weeks. Either way, we’ll wait. Obviously.

Continue Reading ► See Also: The Pentagon Denies Luis Elizondo’s Role in AATIP A Description of a Government UFO Info Operation – Tom DeLonge’s Origin Story For To The Stars Academy If UFO Disclosure Is Coming, Is the World Prepared? Are We Getting Closer to Disclosure? Did Luis Elizondo Really Run The Pentagon UFO Program? Conflicting Information Arises Military Pilots Had Ongoing Encounters with UFOs, Says Fmr. Commander Dave Fravor | VIDEO Multiple F/A-18 Pilots Disclose Recent UFOs Encounters, New Radar Tech Key In Detection Aliens Exist By Tom DeLonge America has Been Investigating UFOs for Years – Time for the Rest of Us To Catch Up Five UFO Traits, Seen by Navy Fighters, Defy Explanation UFOs Exist and Everyone Needs To Adjust To That Fact Navy Pilots Reported UFOs Daily Over East Coast The Pentagon Finally Admits It Investigates UFOs Why Is the Pentagon Interested in UFOs? UFOs: Why Should Congress Act? The Pentagon UFO Videos Brouhaha Explained? Deciphering the Pentagon's Release of Military UFO Videos Pentagon Release of UFO Videos Continues To Be a Bone of Contention Evidence Supporting Official Pentagon Release of UFO Videos is Disputed 'Pentagon Release' of UFO Videos Confirmed | VIDEO REPORT How The Navy Stopped Dismissing UFO Sightings Just Don’t Call Them UFOs UFOs And The Department Of Defense – What The Hell Is Going On? New Navy UFO Guidelines – What Does That Mean? New Navy Guidelines for Reporting UFOs New-Witness Angle to Nimitz Tic Tac UFO Incident Health Effects of UFO Encounters’ – The Top-Secret Government Investigation Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group's UFO Encounter The Nimitz UFO Encounters – New Military Eyewitnesses Interview The Nimitz UFO Encounters – A Short Documentary Film "UFOs Are Real," says Former DoD, Intellgence Officer Secret UFO Program Recorded Encounters with Unknown Objects | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Nevada Senator Fought To Save Secret UFO Program | VIDEO Pentagon UFO Study Examined UFO Activity at Nuclear Missile Sites Says Former U.S. Senator Harry Reid What the Government Knows About UFOs | Interview with Harry Reid New Interview with Navy Pilot Who Chased Tic-Tac UFO – Pt 2 | VIDEO New Interview with Navy Pilot Who Chased Tic-Tac UFO – Pt 1 | VIDEO Harrowing Encounter Between F/A-18s and UFO; Detailed Official Report Surfaces Executive Summary Report: UFO Encounter with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group AATIP / AAWSAP - A Tale of Two Programs UFOs are Suddenly a Serious News Story UFO Info Wars UFOs May Have Attempted Rendezvous With Giant Undersea Object | VIDEO Executive Summary Report: UFO Encounter with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group Confidential Military Report on 'Tic Tac UFO Event' | VIDEO Long-Awaited Government-Funded UFO Reports Now In The Public Domain Documents Prove Secret UFO Study | VIDEO AATIP or AAWSAP? 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'Getting the Mainstream Media to Approach the UFO Puzzle as Legitimate News OREGON UFO EVENT: Air Traffic Control Audio Tapes Released via FOIA Request What the Government Knows About UFOs | Interview with Harry Reid 3rd AATIP Video & the Pentagon UFO Study – Interview with Luis Elizondo | VIDEO Third Government UFO Video Released | VIDEO The Military Keeps Encountering UFOs – Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care? | VIDEO UFO Research Gets New Life By Way of The Pentagon's Mysterious Project BREAKING NEWS: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program Revealed | VIDEO Ex-Military Official Details Pentagon's Secret UFO Hunt | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Billionaire Robert Bigelow's Decades-Long Obsession With UFOs Navy F-18 'Gimbal UFO' Video Explained? Post Pentagon’s UFO Research Program Revelations – Skeptics Regroup Understanding the Science of UFOs and Space Time Metric Engineering | VIDEO UFO-Pentagon FOIA Request Delayed BREAKING NEWS: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program Revealed | VIDEO Ex-CIA Chief - Keep Studying UFOs Herald Tribune Reporter, Billy Cox Queries CIA On Chase Brandon's Roswell UFO Claims Luis Elizando Former Head of Secret Pentagon UFO Program Describes Five Categories of UFOs | INTERVIEW While Waiting for the Next New York Times UFO Bomb to Drop Navy Pilot, Who Chased A UFO, Says ‘We Should Take Them Seriously’ UFO Legacy: What Impact Will Revelation of Secret Government Program Have? UFO Reports at Nuclear Missile Sites and The Pentagon UFO Program Astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson Discusses The Pentagon UFO Program on Colbert | VIDEO Ex-Military Official Details Pentagon's Secret UFO Hunt | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Pentagon's Secret UFO Search, Stanton Friedman Weighs In | INTERVIEW – VIDEO What the New York Times UFO Report Actually Reveals 'Second' Navy Pilot Comes Forward Re UFO Encounter | INTERVIEW – VIDEO 'The Pentagon’s Newly Revealed UFO Research Program' – What a Week! On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program UFO-Pentagon Story Reflects Fundamental Problems Pentagon UFO Study Examined UFO Activity at Nuclear Missile Sites Says Former U.S. Senator Harry Reid UFO Study Focused on U.S. Military Encounters PENTAGON UFO PROGRAM: 'Recovered Material' From UFOs Discussed By Leslie Kean | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Senator Reid Discusses Secret UFO Program | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Navy Pilot Recounts UFO Encounter | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Aliens, UFOs, Flying Discs and Sightings -- Oh My! Secret Programs, U.S. Senators and Money, Who Wants to Talk UFOs Now? Navy Pilot Talks: The UFO Jammed Their Radar — ‘It Accelerated Beyond Any Airplane We Have’ BREAKING NEWS: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program Revealed | VIDEO Navy UFO Encounter: 'It Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’ – F/A-18F Pilot | VIDEO Secret UFO Pentagon Program Explained By Leslie Kean | INTERVIEW – VIDEO

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USS Nimitz, USS Roosevelt "... Video Footage of UFOs Acquired Through New State-Of-The-Art Detection Technology" http://www.theufochronicles.com/2019/06/uss-nimitz-uss-roosevelt-ufo-videos.html

[fapangel]

>>trump is inciting hatred against CNN / trump is seeking to shut CNN down by any means necessary || Are these fuckleheaded libs fucking serious?

Not only that - CNN has doxxed the reddit user who made the dank meme mocking them, and have openly threatened to reveal his identity if he fails to keep groveling and begging for apologies: 

CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same. CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

Naturally, this has blown up in CNN’s face, with CNN attempting damage control on Twitter, which is failing miserably because there’s no fucking way to talk around the paragraph above. That’s as blatant, direct and open a threat as you ever see. 

But this isn’t the real gem. Oh no. As usual, that dubious distinction goes to the class act, the Crown Prince of Clowns, the fucking Washington Post’s screed defending this shit, and doubling down. It’s a hilarious read, but it’s also very revealing of the mindset behind the media fucks (like the ones at CNN) that is making them think doxxing random memelourdes on the internet is an ethical use of their power and platform:

The ethical question of whether a news outlet should withhold the identity of a private citizen who posted extremely offensive things online on the apparent condition that they behave better in the future is one that resonated well beyond the bubble of the Trump Internet. 

An aside - there is no “ethical question” here. This is Journalism Ethics 101 - literally, I learned this in my senior Newspaper class before getting it again in a Journalism 100-level class at Eastern Michigan - a random internet user who made a 30 second meme clip is not a “public figure”. This is why so many news stories, i.e. on someone arrested for misdemeanors, decline to name the subject - to protect their privacy. This is run-of-the-mill journalism ethics. The President endorsing it via retweet effectively makes it “his” speech; you can gun for him all you want, but it is not ethical to actively hunt down the name of the random private citizen who made said clip, and then threaten to reveal them. You report on the stories, you do not make the fucking stories. 

But the meme that Trump supporters have picked up and spread is a mix of fact and fiction, of genuinely outraged conservatives and the gleeful meme-literate arsonists who just like to see the Internet burn with fury.

Oh, right, those fucking alt-right trolls are in the wrong here because their narrative is filled with filthy liiiieessssssss

The media has often struggled to cover Trump’s online supporters, whose skepticism of mainstream publications has evolved into a total rejection of the idea that places like CNN are even trying to report the truth. At the head of that rejection is the president himself, who regularly tweets that news outlets he doesn’t like are “fake news.” Media ethics experts who look at CNN’s article on all this might discuss it in the context of a long and tricky media discussion about outing anonymous, racist Internet trolls. On the Trump Internet, however, the subtext of the meme is that “blackmailing” sources is a normal part of mainstream journalistic practice. The difference is, they believe, that someone finally got caught.

(Emphasis added.) Again, there is no fucking “long and tricky media discussion” about this - anonymous people on the internet are by definition not public figures, and there is no news value in doxxing this person. In fact, this is outright suppression of free speech via the chilling effect. Their “racist trolling” doesn’t change this one bit. It is not CNNs, nor any other media outlets right to decide who’s speech is legitimate, nor to police it. 

Overnight, the r/The_Donald board that once hosted HanA‑‑‑‑‑‑Solo’s apology and plea for peace was filled up with even more anti-CNN memes, and posts calling for a full-on war against the network. The Trump-supporting Redditors picked up an idea from 4chan’s /pol/ board, organizing mass calls and tweet-storms to a long list of companies, demanding they stop advertising on CNN. The story soon spread to Trump-friendly publications like Gateway Pundit and Infowars. It was the front page of Drudge:

Awww, poor CNN, being bullied by all those fucking alt-right trolls, amirite? Of course, the many, many times this kind of public shaming and defaming campaign has been run against conservatives, we’re snottily told that “Freedom of Speech” just means freedom from government censorship, and that private citizens are free to tell them to fuck off, an argument neatly summarized by XKCD. 

Meanwhile, a tantalizing but extremely unconfirmed detail began to attach itself to the meme. Was HanA‑‑‑‑‑‑Solo a 15-year-old kid, as many posts on the #CNNBlackmail hashtag repeat as fact? Even though CNN, and screenshots of HanA‑‑‑‑‑‑Solo’s own Reddit history seem to contradict this, indicating that the user is significantly older, the notion that CNN had just threatened to dox a minor was extremely shareable among Trump supporters, including one of the president’s own sons:

Witness the wicked falsehoods that poison the alt-right racist’s tweetstorm narrative - they’re saying a redditor is 15 years old, but he’s actually older! This is entirely fucking immaterial to the discussion, of course, but fuck that. This justifies calling the natural and expected backlash a “mix of truth and fiction.” 

Others called for a very personal form of revenge against CNN, and Kaczynski specifically. A link to a pastebin page that appeared to contain the personal identifying information of Kaczynski, some of his family members and his colleagues circulated on 4chan Wednesday morning.

Reporters are public figures by definition - at the very least, the place where the reporters work is public information by dint of reporters putting their names on their fucking articles. It’s called a by-line. 

And the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website called for even more. A popular post called for CNN employees to quit their jobs and denounce the network, or face consequences if they didn’t:

In one breath, the twitter backlash is directly associated with a fucking neo-Nazi website. No justification, no elaboration, just straight-up, straight-faced smear-job. The Dire Threat voiced by these neo-Nazis? Threatening to "track down” reporters families. Which is all publicly available information to begin with, mind you - “doxxing” is explicitly the de-anonymization of internet speech by linking an internet username/handle with a real-life identity. So even the scary Neo-Nazis are threatening to do fucking nothing past copy-pasting the reporter’s name off his CNN article’s byline into Facebook search. Oooh scaaary 

It’s a particularly threatening version of an inversion that is common on the Internet today: keep reporting on the Trump Internet, and the Trump Internet will decide it’s “reporting” on you. And many mainstream outlets are still struggling to contend with it.

This, the last paragraph, is the crown jewel of the article. Yes, the media is the real victim! 

When I was earning my Journalism degree, discussion of the media’s failure to adapt to the new paradigm of Twitter et al was a major and ongoing discussion, as journalists scrambled to understand where their niche was in the digital age. Instead of recognizing that they had what every asshole on the streetcorner with a smartphone and a Twitter app did not - professional training, a list of Important People who’d answer the phone when they called, and credibility - they tried to compete with every asshole on Twitter vis a vis getting the “scoop” or being “timely,” and naturally, they’re failing miserably, which is why the New York Times is laying off a bunch of their employees. That they’re financially threatened by “alternative media” is so well known that Washington Post reporters are openly joking about it in interviews: 

What advice do you have for a 32-year-old stuck in a dying medium who is sent to interview 9-year-olds?

Thus nobody’s blinked in the past when the traditional media attacks alternative media - it was seen as a natural reaction to the looming threat to their very livelihoods. It’s hard to give equitable treatment to people taking food out of your kids mouths. But this is something else - this is media privilege on full display. 

The media having an arrogance problem is nothing new - former CBS News Emmy Award-winning journalist Bernard Goldberg wrote a book literally titled Arrogance about the problem back in 2004, and I myself blogged about the astounding gall the media had to think they could demonize Trump and literally call him Hitler for eight months, then waltz into his office to discuss “access” with his administration. Or CNN telling people on-air that it’s illegal for anyone but the media to see Hillary’s wiki-leaked e-mails, a claim so asinine that even the Washington Post couldn’t swallow it. 

But despite that - despite all of that - this latest debacle still shocked me. The depths of their arrogant belief in their own sacrosanct status as harbingers of truth is so deep, so pure, that they’re willing to make fools of themselves to punish some random chucklefuck on Reddit becuase he made le dank meme video. And punishment is exactly what they’re handing out, here. There’s already a term to describe this kind of mindset, when it’s so pervasive and complete that any challenge to it is met with force and fury. “Privilege.” 

It’s truly fucking incredible. Even more incredible is the WaPo’s complaining like they, the media giants with control of a massive megaphone and the worship of the far left, are the victims here, because people on Twitter disagree with the media’s blatant thuggery. I’ve covered before how deep they’ve retreated into their own fantasy worlds, their own hallucinatory version of reality, but once again, they exceeded even my expectations. A boundless confidence in their own righteousness is one thing, but they truly think they are untouchable. They didn’t judge the predicted backlash to be inconsequential, or contemptible because it’d come from the filthy conservatives - because if they had, they wouldn’t be scrambling to do damage control against fucking Twitter.  

Anyway, while we’re at it, there’s some less significant things I wanted to have a giggle at - Sargon of Akkad (who’s videos I’ve been listening to now, at long last,) does a weekly “This Week In Stupid” segment, and now I can see why - so much piles up, so fast, and all of it’s worth mocking. Again, the WaPo is our go-to source of giggles.

Trump’s Voter Fraud commission recently asked all 50 states for as much info on voter information as they could provide, including the last four digits of their Social Security number. The great majority of states replied with a simple shrug and nod - as this state-by-state breakdown details, many states already provide voter roll data publicly, and others release it for a processing/handling charge to anyone who requests it (often political campaigns looking to get demographic data.) Every state demurred on the “last-four digits of the SSN”, simply because their state laws forbid such information disclosure due to privacy concerns - but aside from that considered the request mundane as hell. 

Of course, the dissenters were most amusing, and - before you read this - I wish to stress that, as stated by other states SecStates in this very article, many states publicly post this information online for free download: 

California: "California's participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud," Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Kentucky: “As the commonwealth's secretary of state and chief election official, I do not intend to release Kentuckians' sensitive personal data to the federal government," Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes said in a statement. "The president created his election commission based on the false notion that 'voter fraud' is a widespread issue. It is not."

New York: Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Friday his decision not to comply with the commission's request for information. He said state laws include safeguards to protect sensitive voting information and that the state "refuses to perpetuate the myth voter fraud played a role in our election."

“WE HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE!” scream people hiding information most states publish publicly. 

New Mexico:  Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse-Oliver says she will never release personally identifiable information for New Mexico voters that is protected by law, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth. She also declined to provide information such as names and voting histories unless she is convinced the information is secured and will not be used for "nefarious or unlawful purposes."

Yes, the information most states literally give away free might be used for ~nefarious purposes.~ But it gets better. It gets so much fucking better: 

Mississippi:  Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said in a statement Friday that he had not received the request for information from the Trump commission, but another secretary of state had forwarded the correspondence to him. In a federal court case after a contentious U.S. Senate primary in Mississippi in 2014, a group called True the Vote sued Mississippi seeking similar information about voters, and Hosemann fought that request and won. Hosemann said if he receives a request from the Trump commission, "My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from." Hosemann also said: "Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state's right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes."

“DROWN YOURSELF.” How rational and polite. 

Vermont: Vermont's top election official, Democrat Jim Condos, said Friday he is bound by law to provide the publicly available voter file, but that does not include Social Security numbers or birth dates. Condos said he must first receive an affidavit signed by the commission chairman, as required by Vermont law. He said there is no evidence of the kind of fraud alleged by Trump. "I believe these unproven claims are an effort to set the stage to weaken our democratic process through a systematic national effort of voter suppression and intimidation," he said.

Virginia: "At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump's alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression," said Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat.

Ah, yes. Asking for this data most sates make available publicly is really part of a vast-right wing conspiracy to bully voters! Good old voter suppression. That easy, sweeping catch-all claim applied by Democrats when possible voter fraud is brought up. They claim voter fraud never ever ever happens, but that those evil rednecks go around intimidating people away from the polls just like those Jim Crow racists did in the 60s. Speaking of - isn’t it curious that Kentucky and Mississippi - very conservative southern states - would resist disclosing information? And that Mississippi’s Republican SecState - which has already fended off grassroots attempts to dig into their voter roll records - would have such a curiously vehement response? Gee, really makes you think, doesn’t it? 

Naturally, the WaPo has the best comedic value for the column-inch as they detail their foaming-mad delusions: 

It’s no secret: Under the guise of fighting “voter fraud,” they’ll use it as a tool to disenfranchise thousands, perhaps even millions of people, in order to solidify the Republican advantage in elections. 

But how, WaPo? Are they going to round them up and execute them en-masse? Shove them in concentration camps? Steal the wheels off their cars on Election Day? 

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Kansans have been blocked from registering by the 2011 law he championed that requires documentary proof of citizenship in order to register.

You can prove citizenship with your fucking ID card (Kansas, like most states, will issue “state ID cards” for people who don’t drive or otherwise have no need of a driver’s license,) a tax return, or anything else. For fucks sake, you even need to disclose your residency status (citizen or non-citizen) to enroll in welfare. So who exactly are these tens of thousands that are being excluded? Oh, do you have a single fucking cite for that breathtaking claim, oh journalist? 

We see this pattern again and again: Republicans complain that there is some huge voter fraud problem that requires sweeping new laws in order to solve, but when it’s investigated, it turns out that the problem is somewhere between microscopic and nonexistent. But in the meantime, they’ve stolen thousands of people’s voting rights — people who just happen to disproportionately be Democrats.

“Disproportionately be Democrats.” Like the illegal immigrants, amirite? 

The second apparent goal is more direct: Create lists of allegedly questionable voters that they’ll give to states in order to convince them to purge those people from the rolls, by showing that they might be registered in more than one place. 

Pure speculation based on a grand total of fucking nothing. Much of the article revolves around this assertion that Kobach just wants to blindly de-register duplicate names, instead of, you know, updating the fucking voter rolls so they’re current, or something. Which would make them actually useful for detecting fraud. Gee, why do left-wingers consistently sue to prevent voter rolls from being updated? And note the New York and Ohio cases involve purging the rolls of voters who haven’t voted - in New York’s case, since 2008. If you don’t do something, how the hell do you purge dead people from the rolls? And why would Democrats have a vested interest in keeping these records too cluttered and useless for detecting actual fraud, if there’s none going on? Really tickles the fuckin noggin, doesn’t it? 

Let’s be clear: The sole purpose of this commission on “election integrity” is to suppress votes and give the GOP a structural advantage in every election. It’s being led by Kris Kobach, whose twin missions in life are to scale back immigration and to make voting more difficult.

Are they implying that mass immigration benefits Democrats at the polls? Could that possibly explain why Democrats have done everything in their power - especially under Obama - to inhibit any attempt to enforce Federal immigration law? Gee fuckin whiz. 

These people are not trying to determine whether there are problems with our voting system and find the best solutions to those problems. They have come together to promote the myth of voter fraud and enable vote suppression in order to advantage the Republican Party. 

“The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy - evidence, MY ASS!” HEY GUYS, QUICK FACT CHECK - HOW MANY TURRETS DOES ARIZONA HAVE? 

 And last, but not least - witness this demented screed arguing that Trump’s second scoop of ice cream will make us all sick, and that Trump has a duty to the nation to be skinny and hit the gym while listening to cool music on his Ipod.

[findbeggar84-blog]

Who is Bruce Ohr, and why is Donald Trump saying nasty things about him?

Who is @aliasvaughn? There are at least two views, one very flattering, one less so, and others. For my mileage, I’ve come to regard the handle on Twitter as a gossip columnist on the Trump administration troubles with criminal law.

That’s not to dismiss the work at all. Jack Anderson took over a Washington gossip column, and became an investigative powerhouse during the Watergate years.

We could use another Jack Anderson now, to present what is known about scandals in the White House, with assured publication in 1,000 local newspapers that right now get almost none of that news.

Plus, as anyone who heard me talk to corporations, an organization’s gossip reveals information vacuums that great leaders will fill with good, accurate information, and often reveals details about events that do not appear in the official versions of a story, but which can make all the difference in the world in properly dealing with a situation. Leaders listen to gossip, and answer it.

In any case, today Ale (@aliasvaughn) offers a lengthy-for-Twitter explanation of why Donald Trump lashes out at Bruce Ohr, who you and I don’t know from Adam nor Adam’s off-ox. The explanation has a lot of hyperbole in it — but it also offers information you can’t get from the Trump echo chambers, and a lot of connections today’s newspaper doesn’t have time to explain.

Former Associate Deputy Attorney General and past champion Russian organized crime fighter Bruce Ohr.

So I saved the thread here, and offer it for your edification and entertainment, and to convince you to go vote the bums out in November.

Who is Bruce Ohr?

1. Bruce Ohr is the Justice Department lawyer who was told by Christopher Steele that Russian intelligence believed it had Trump "over a barrel". Start seeing why Trump is going after him? https://t.co/9zDD0QTBk7

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

2. These details pertain to a breakfast that happened on July 30, 2016. Ohr described the breakfast to CONGRESS this week in a private interview. And that's how the GOP Trump lackeys went to tell Trump, he found out and decided he can't have a witness at DoJ.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

4. An unnamed former Ru intelligence official said that Russian intelligence believed "they had Trump over a barrel", that's the quote that was reported. Steele and Ohr have known each other for over a decade. They shared interest in international organized crime.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

6. Attacking them publicly is meant to discredit them as witnesses. It doesn't matter that it won't work as they will testify against him anyway, it's witness tampering at a minimum. This influences public perception, on top of the previous point I made about obstruction.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

8. Ohr also told Congress that Steele said Carter Page had met with more senior Russian officials than he had acknowledged meeting with. (meantime, Page has been forced to acknowledge meeting with at least a couple of them.)

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

10. Ohr told Congress he couldn't vouch for the accuracy of Steele's information (bc duh, he wasn't there) BUT said he considers him a reliable FBI informant who delivered "credible and actionable intelligence, including his probe into corruption at FIFA".

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

12. All of the above literally DESTROYS Trump and the Trump lackey wagon conspiracy theory about the FBI being biased, or the Steele dossier being the reason why the Russia investigation started. And THIS is why Trump detests Ohr and knows he's his sworn enemy.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

14. AP truth: " If the FBI’s investigations turn toward Trump’s ties to Russian organized crime, which is entirely foreseeable, Trump may be interested in trying to delegitimize those efforts as he has attempted with other aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe."

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

16. "Over the years, no fewer than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold in all cash purchases to anonymous shell companies—the two criteria that set off alarm bells among anti-money laundering authorities." You don't say? The only thing Trump is capable of actually loving? MONEY

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

18. AP correctly notes: "little attention was paid to what may well be the most interesting item on Page's resume — her considerable experience prosecuting money laundering cases involving Russian organized crime." Page worked with FBI task force in Budapest vs? DMITRY FIRTASH.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

20. This excellent AP story goes on asking an essential question: "Why does Trump risk so much politically by even threatening to pull the security clearances of an active DoJ official without any of the ordinary procedures for doing so?"

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

22. The above from the AP is the best succinct explanation you'll find for how Russian mafia operates and WHY Trump is frantic to keep his ties to Mogilevich hidden. Bc once they surface, they're like direct ties to PUTIN, so the jig is up. That's why he went after Ohr AND Page.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

24. Trump of course (like other criminals) doesn't count on the fact that we figure out the puzzle MUCH faster than he can imagine, and he didn't count on the fact his ties to Mogilevich and Firtash would become obvious via MANAFORT as well. He's got CRS, Cornered Rat Syndrome.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

26. Manafort can't even think of lying, bc he'll go to jail, and he can't even think of NOT giving the interview, bc he can be held in contempt and put in jail until he complies with the request. So, there's no pardon coming. Not to mention: there are STATE CRIMES awating.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

28. So watch the Manafort trial VERY closely. Watch what happens there. Because this trial? Merely the beginning. Manafort WILL be indicted for NatSec crimes as well. And he holds the financial key to them, bc he's the one who dealt with oligarchs and Firtash.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

30. So this is also why Mueller's move to give the Cohen case to SDNY was GENIUS. Bc now BOTH him AND SDNY have a direct avenue to get to Firtash, and thus money laundering for Trump, with direct connection to Manafort., and thus conspiracy. Rest assured: #MuellerIsComing /END.

— Ale (@aliasvaughn) August 31, 2018

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2018 at 5:04 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2018/08/31/who-is-bruce-ohr-and-why-is-donald-trump-saying-nasty-things-about-him/

[oscopelabs]

Dallas through the Looking Glass: Post-Truth and Kennedy Assassination Movies by Chris Evangelista

Here’s an alarming statistic: a recent CBS News poll revealed 74% of Republican voters believe the conspiracy theory that the offices of Donald Trump were wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign, despite there being absolutely no evidence to support that claim. But conspiracy theories are easy to grasp onto. Another poll, this one by Fairleigh Dickinson University, says 63% percent of American voters believe in “at least one political conspiracy theory.” There’s a strange comfort in believing a conspiracy—a sense that you are in the know, while others are on the outside looking in; that you, and a select few others, have discovered the truth, while everyone else is still in the dark.

Conspiracy theories surrounding presidents are nothing new. The wiretapping conspiracy theory, however, had the unlikely distinction of being made popular by the president himself, via Mr. Trump’s serially inaccurate Twitter feed. Trump himself has made his entire political career about conspiracy theories: his current ascendance in the world of politics, for instance, owes something to his leadership of the “Birther” movement—the not-so-thinly veiled racist belief that President Barack Obama is not an American citizen. At the time, Trump and his hateful ilk were on the fringe. Now they’re running the country. Welcome to the post-truth era. Welcome to the world of “alternative facts.”

Shortly after the startling 2016 presidential election, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the international word of the year. The term is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Yet this post-truth way of thinking is nothing new—rather, it has finally gone from existing somewhere on the fringes to playing a role in the mainstream. Perhaps the most overwhelming source of post-truth logic had been in plain sight for the last 53 years, in the conspiracy buff movement that has studied and dissected the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And, as is the case with any event that shocks the world, it was only a matter of time before art attempted to make sense of reality.

In 1973, ten years after JFK’s assassination, Executive Action found its way into theaters, starring Burt Lancaster, with a script by Dalton Trumbo. Imagine if in 2011 a film about 9/11 being an inside job written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Tom Hanks had been released, and you might have some concept of how startling Executive Action likely seemed. Here was a no-nonsense thriller, inter-spliced with actual newsreel footage of Kennedy, concerning a shadowy cabal of businessmen who make up their minds to murder the president. They have their reasons: Kennedy pulling out of Vietnam will be bad; Kennedy’s support of civil rights will lead to a “black revolution”; Kennedy is taking the country in a distressingly “liberal” direction. What are a group of businessmen, oil tycoons, and ex-US intelligence members to do but put together a very intricate, somewhat convoluted plot to kill JFK and frame a hapless patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald?

Executive Action was the brainchild of attorney and conspiracy buff Mark Lane, who wrote multiple books on the assassination. (Although rumor has it that it was actor Donald Sutherland who came up with the idea first, and tasked Lane with writing a script for him to star in.) Director David Miller’s approach to the script is workmanlike: lots of medium shots, lots of by-the-numbers blocking. No frills. But there is an undeniable effectiveness to the film, mostly in how calmly everything is handled. When you contrast this film with Oliver Stone’s JFK (more on that later), which tells almost the same story, it’s night and day. Stone’s film is frantic, unhinged, to the point that you can almost see the perforations as the film shakes off the reels. Executive Action is cold, businesslike, much like the men who nonchalantly plan to kill the most powerful man in the world. Lancaster, with his clipped cadence, has never been so chilling. He has a simple job—hire men to kill JFK—and he does it the way any everyman might approach a difficult but not impossible task. There’s no drama, no wringing of hands, no moral conundrum. It makes Executive Action all the more believable. Everyone is so calm and collected here that you can’t help but think, “Well, maybe this is how it happened.” (It’s not.)

On the heels of Executive Action came Alan J. Pakula’s darkness-drenched The Parallax View. Parallax isn’t a direct take on the Kennedy assassination, but the implications are unmistakable. Once again, we have a group of shadowy captains of industry pulling the strings behind the scenes. Once again, we have an unfortunate patsy set up to take the fall for a political assassination. Notice a thread here: a lone gunman is framed and blamed. An angry lone nut takes the fall while the real killers go unnoticed, or worse—remain in power, unstoppable. So disillusioned were the American people by both JFK’s death and Watergate that it was easy to believe the forces of darkness were calling the shots.

The bulk of narrative films that address the Kennedy assassination almost all revolve around the assumption that the official story—Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone—was bunk. After all, who was Oswald? A nobody. A scrawny runt with dyslexia. How could one insignificant man alter the course of history? At the same time, why isn’t it more believable that a man with an unstable personality carried out the Kennedy assassination, rather than a multi-tiered, far-reaching conspiracy of shadowy men in smoke-filled rooms? The real Lee Harvey Oswald was a controlling abuser—a man who beat his Russian wife and insisted she never learn English so that he would be her only point of contact in America; a man who resented any and all authority; and a man who, months before the assassination, in April, actually attempted to carry out another assassination of notorious John Birch Society member Major Edwin Walker (an event most conspiracy films never even mention).

If there is one film that conspiracy lore owes the most debt to, it’s Oliver Stone’s 1991 blockbuster JFK. A meticulously crafted, downright brilliant thriller, JFK blends fact and fiction so deftly that one could be forgiven for thinking the film was more of a history lesson than a piece of pop entertainment. Stone, for his part, did very little to clarify what his intentions were. He said in an interview with the New York Times that “every point, every argument, every detail in the movie...has been researched, can be documented, and is justified.” Stone also claimed the film was a “history lesson” and that he was “trying to reshape the world through movies.” Stone also dubbed himself a “cinematic historian” during promotion for the film. Years later, in Matt Zoller Seitz’s expansive The Oliver Stone Experience, Stone had changed his tune slightly: “I don’t call myself a historian. I call myself a dramatist.” In Seitz’s book, Stone seems to downplay the “every detail can be justified” claim and fall back on his speculative fiction angle, although he’s still clearly convinced of a conspiracy.

As a work of fiction, JFK is a masterpiece. Stone, a team of editors, and cinematographer Robert Richardson create an immersive trip through the wild world of JFK conspiracy lore. Stone needed a hero to center the film’s sweaty, paranoid ramblings, and he found it in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. As played by Kevin Costner, Stone’s Garrison is a Capra-esque hero, a truth seeker committed to doing the right thing, no matter what the cost. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” Garrison trumpets to a team of reporters. JFK has Garrison cracking open the Kennedy case by first looking into the time Lee Harvey Oswald (played with eerie chameleon-like fervor by Gary Oldman) spent in New Orleans, and then cracking open the whole can of worms. Oswald, Garrison learns, is just what he said he was—a patsy. The real killers of Kennedy were the military industrial complex, or maybe the FBI, or maybe the CIA, or maybe the mafia. Or maybe…. well, the list goes on. Despite Stone’s claims at the time of the film being a history lesson, he never presents an entirely concrete connection between any of these conspirators.

The first half of JFK sets up the pieces: here is who may have been involved with the assassination and we’re not sure how all these people fit together, but one thing we know for sure is that Oswald didn’t pull the trigger. The back end of the film turns into a courtroom melodrama, with Garrison bringing local New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (played with a chilly sophistication by Tommy Lee Jones) to trial for being one of the lead instigators of the assassination plot. Eventually, Shaw is found innocent, and rightfully so—the film presents almost no real evidence to prove Shaw had anything to do with the alleged conspiracy, save for the testimony of a male prostitute, Willie O’Keefe (Kevin Bacon, having the time of his life). Here is where a moral conundrum arises: Clay Shaw was a real person, and really was brought to trial by Garrison. Willie O’Keefe is fictional, a character inspired by a man named Perry Russo. The problem: Russo was so undependable as a witness, his credibility so suspect, and his story so inconsistent, that Stone had to create a fictional character in order to get the story he wanted.

There are more problems with Stone’s approach. The real Jim Garrison was not the crusader for truth the film makes him out to be. The historical Garrison was actually a man who would’ve fit right in with the Trump administration. “Most of the time you marshal the facts, then deduce your theories,” said former First Assistant D.A. and Garrison associate Charles Ward. “But Garrison deduced a theory, then he marshaled his facts. And if the facts didn’t fit he’d say they had been altered by the CIA.” Garrison, for his part, even doubled down on this backwards logic, stating at one point, “The district attorney can make any statements he wishes,” truth be damned. Whatever evidence Garrison lacked, he seems to have fabricated. Most considered his bringing Shaw to trial a miscarriage of justice, and after Shaw was swiftly acquitted, Garrison mostly languished in obscurity. Even the conspiracy buffs distanced themselves from him. Then Stone, and Hollywood, came calling, and Garrison was back in the limelight.

If you’re able to remove the historical elements from JFK, you can easily enjoy it. But when you start to dissect the truth, or at least what’s known of the truth, the waters get murky. JFK’s Oswald is presented as an innocent bystander, unaware of the dark forces working behind the scenes to set him up for the biggest murder in American history. In one wisely deleted scene from the film, Stone even had the ghost of Oswald take the stand during the Shaw trial and flat-out proclaim, “I am innocent!” Vincent Bugliosi’s gargantuan Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy is one of the most definitive books written on the Kennedy assassination, and Mr. Bugliosi lays out page after page of evidence that points to Oswald’s guilt—evidence that’s either never touched on or outright altered in Stone’s film. Stone completely ignores the incident where Oswald, using the same gun that was proven to have killed Kennedy, attempted to kill Major Edwin Walker. The film also casually omits the fact that the morning of the assassination, Oswald received a ride to work from a coworker who claimed Oswald had a long, wrapped package with him. Oswald claimed the package was just “some curtain rods”—though why he was bringing curtain rods to work was a mystery. Also a mystery: after Oswald was arrested, he denied bringing any curtain rods. Later, the brown wrapping paper the “curtain rods” were wrapped in was found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where the shooting allegedly took place. So either Oswald really did bring curtain rods to work, unwrapped them, and then they mysterious vanished, or what he actually had was his rifle. Or perhaps the coworker was lying and in on the conspiracy.

Other casually omitted or altered facts from Stone’s film: during the assassination, a man named Howard Brennan looked up and saw Oswald in a window of the book depository, rifle in hand. Later, as Oswald fled the crime scene, he was believed to have shot and killed Officer J.D. Tippet. Stone’s film presents a scenario in which no one was able to identify Oswald as the shooter of Tippet, when in fact there were ten separate eyewitnesses who placed Oswald at the scene. The list goes on and on. The argument could be made that art has no obligation to the truth. Dramatic license is the bedrock of most biopics and “true story” films. But this is a gray area when it comes to JFK, a film with weighted dialogue like “Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth. And the truth is on your side.” On top of this, JFK has the distinction of bringing about legislative changes. So popular was Stone’s film that Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which established the collection of all U.S. records regarding the Kennedy assassination to be housed in the National Archives. All of this, coupled with the film’s newsreel opening, lends an air of legitimacy to JFK. It turns speculation into perceived truth, intentional or not.

The year following JFK saw the release of Ruby, a film so far removed from historical fact that you’d be hard pressed to find anything true within its plot. Danny Aiello gives Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby a dignity the real Ruby never had, and turns him into something of a folk hero—a man who, like Stone’s Garrison, is committed to doing the right thing. Ruby borders on spy-thriller territory, with Ruby being drafted as a mafia hitman who gets wrapped up in a conspiracy spinning out of control. It’s mostly forgotten, and for good reason. Aside from Aiello’s soulful take on the Dallas nightclub owner, the film is unremarkable. 1993 gave audiences In the Line of Fire, where the Kennedy assassination haunts an aging Secret Service agent (played by Clint Eastwood) who was there that day in Dallas and failed to save Kennedy’s life. In the Line of Fire eschews conspiracy trappings but once again delegates Oswald to a footnote, an afterthought. In the film, a lone nut (played memorably by John Malkovich as something of an inhuman trickster) taunts Eastwood’s Secret Service agent with his plot against the current president via threatening phone calls. “Call me Booth,” Malkovich instructs Eastwood. “Why not Oswald?” Eastwood asks. “Because Booth had flair, panache,” replies Malkovich. “A leap to the stage after he shot Lincoln.” Oswald just isn’t dramatic enough for this assassin to emulate—and then again, maybe he was innocent?

2002’s Interview With the Assassin is an unjustly overlooked, highly creative take on conspiracy lore. Told in faux documentary style, the film follows an amateur filmmaker (Dylan Haggerty) approached by his elderly next door neighbor (a creepy yet hilarious Raymond J. Barry). The neighbor has a story to tell: it was he, not Lee Harvey Oswald, who delivered the fatal JFK head shot. As the filmmaker follows the alleged assassin, he first comes to believe the man’s story, then begins to have his doubts, convinced that the neighbor is just a deranged nut, before coming back around to belief for the film’s conclusion, all while the specters of shadowy government agents lurk in the background. Again, just as Executive Action and JFK deployed documentary-style footage to lend an air of legitimacy to their narratives, Interview with the Assassin is deceptively plausible. In fact, if you were unfamiliar with Raymond J. Barry, a great character actor with 114 screen credits to his name, you might actually fall into the Blair Witch Project trap and believe this really is a documentary, so believable and convincing is Barry’s performance.

As the 21st century progressed, the filmic approach to the Kennedy assassination shifted. Conspiracy began to take a back seat to attempts at “setting the record straight.” Perhaps in the specter of 9/11, with its “inside job” nuts coming out of the woodwork to proclaim, “Jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams!”, or in light of the deplorable “Sandy Hook truthers,” who have the unmitigated gall to claim the murder of 20 children was a “false flag,” Hollywood has lost its taste for propping up conspiracies. 2013’s Parkland told a Short Cuts-like story of the minutes and hours following the assassination: From the team of doctors who valiantly but fruitlessly tried to save JFK’s life to a befuddled Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti) coming to terms with the fact that by filming the head shot he’s now in possession of the most important “home movie” in history to Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale), whose entire life is suddenly upended by his estranged brother Lee (Jeremy Strong). Parkland doesn’t delve into the investigation, but makes it clear it believes Oswald is the sole killer. The film is curiously flat, failing to hit any of the big emotional beats it strives for. Where it succeeds is in taking the time to show the blood and confusion inside the Parkland hospital emergency room, and it does highlight the surreal occurrence of Oswald being wheeled into the same hospital with his own fatal wound so soon after the assassination.

Oddly, the most historically accurate portrayal of the assassination, and the events leading up to it, can be found in a work of science fiction. The Hulu mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s 11.22.63 draws on King’s meticulous research into Oswald, and shows Oswald’s tumultuous, abusive marriage as well as his failed assassination attempt on Edwin Walker. It also shows him pulling the trigger. The twist in this whole narrative is that this is a time travel story, about a 21st century English teacher (James Franco) who goes back in time to try to stop Oswald. Franco’s character can only travel to 1960, and thus has to wait it out till 1963. He can’t just outright kill Oswald, though, because the doubt remains: what if Oswald really is innocent? As a result, 11.22.63 becomes a detective story, with Franco’s time traveller trying to piece together evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald really is going to kill JFK, and then stop him. Of all the JFK films, 11.22.63 is the first to truly represent how unpleasant and abusive Lee Harvey Oswald was. As played by Daniel Webber, Oswald is a cruel jerk with delusions of grandeur, convinced he’s destined for greater things if only everyone would just get out of his way. This is closest to the real Oswald, based on the testimony of those who knew him, including his wife Marina. At one point, the real Oswald even boasted that one day he’d obtain the non-existent office of “Prime Minister of America.” The Oswald in 11.22.63 is an entirely different species than the sainted black-and-white ghost who takes the stand in JFK and proclaims his innocence.

Pablo Larraín’s recent Jackie took the assassination narrative further than any film before it by dealing directly with the effect it had on both the nation and Kennedy’s widow (Natalie Portman). Jackie is obsessed with myth making, and much like the myths and conspiracies that sprung up in the years following JFK’s death, the film is awash in events that bend the truth and stagger the mind. A numbing effect sets in, as grief gives way to acceptance and some attempt at understanding. As doctors perform an autopsy on her husband at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Jackie, her pink dress stained with blood and gore, paces around the emergency room in a fury. “It had to be some silly little communist,” she spits as word of Oswald’s arrest for the murder spreads. “If [Jack had] been killed for civil rights, at least then it would have meant something, you know?” This line of dialogue from Noah Oppenheim’s script gets to the heart of the conspiracy movement: perhaps if the reasoning behind Kennedy’s murder had been some grander scheme instead of the actions of a lone gunman grasping at fame, then maybe there would be more meaning behind all of this. Maybe then life wouldn’t be so arbitrary, so random.

Jackie plans her husband’s funeral as pageantry; it’s not just a somber service, it’s a Hollywood remake of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, with a march through wintry streets as all the world is watching. Following the funeral, she tells her story to a reporter (Billy Crudup), but she dictates the direction the story goes. She wants final approval over his story, and forbids him from writing up certain elements—like the fact that she smokes. “I’m just trying to get to the truth,” Crudup’s reporter says. “The truth?” Jackie replies. “Well I’ve grown accustomed to a great divide between what people believe and what I know to be real.” “Fine,” says the reporter. “I’ll settle for a story that’s believable.”

So must we all, especially here in whatever post-truth reality we find ourselves stuck in. The problems begin when we decide to pick and choose what it is we consider “believable,” and who we believe. “People like to believe in fairytales,” Portman’s shell-shocked Jackie tells us. Before the 2016 presidential election, one could safely argue the case for eschewing truth for the sake of art. Now, things might not be so simple. A decisive lack of truth unquestionably contributed to our current situation, just as a decisive lack of truth is integral to the bulk of the films that attempt to dissect the JFK assassination. In these films, the truth is what we make of it. Some may find comfort in that, but these days, the implications are terrifying.

[kindabraveandlittlestupid]

We live in a Strange New World where society is not necessarily repressed from receiving information but perhaps saturated in it and even drowning in all the news/data. The connectivity of the internet allows us to hear stories from around the world and with it we can see the chaos that has always existed with humanity (or as long as the concept of civilization has existed). It simply feels like the world is going to hell, not because it is but because we are now more acutely aware of news overseas and across the country that we were ignorant too before.

In this tidal wave of information, we would hope and expect the media (and the government) to be honest with us about the facts. Many news organizations (typically papers) hold onto the old values of ethics, accuracy, and honesty but it struggles as a dying medium and is desperately trying to adapt to survive. News Networks inch further into the partisan newscasting to maintain their number of viewers and we see more theater among those channels of people ‘debating’ for the sake of having a fight take place before us instead of providing the viewers the best form of the argument and make us more knowledgeable citizens and voters. Then on the fringes, hundreds of Left and Right ‘news sites’ strip context away and reduce speeches to consumable sound bites to push their agenda. What is terrifying about these fringe groups is not the fact they exist but their memes and stories pick up traction so quickly now, racing to news networks within days or even hours, becoming a popular belief among people and forcing the more accurate news organizations to step in and clarify that the story coming from the fringe websites are false.

We have seen steps to try and stem this tide of progressive and conservative misinformation sites by the rise of fact-checking websites, the slow to move banning/restriction of these groups on Social Media (Twitter/Facebook) and larger reputable organizations taking a moment to sweep away the literal fake news stories and keep people focuses on the real news stories. All of this feels like an uphill battle though with Commander in Chief who is more likely to repeat one of those false news stories on twitter instead of using the comprehensive intelligent reports that come across his desk literally. Feels as though we are kind of fucked until he is out of office, yeah?

This post is a general guide to fact-checking the stories you read and the stories other people post to their walls. It is INSANELY important to have the correct information at our fingertips and build Voter Immunity to false information and be ok with admitting (for a moment) that we were tricked by fake news and correct ourselves for the betterment of ourselves and society. I have read fake news articles and heard false numbers in interviews which I took as fact but was completely wrong about. I am guilty of not fact checking and because I failed to do so for a time I had that fake information orbit my beliefs and sadly when you have one false belief it calls into suspect all other valid beliefs and also opens the door for more false beliefs to take hold. So here is my guide to fact-checking your news sources and the articles from people you might occasionally debate with online.

Fact Checking Sites

These sites are the first/best options for a quick fact check on both memes and false news stories. These organizations act much the same way cybersecurity, they are never ahead of the trend on a fake news story but after a few days, they usually have a pretty accurate answer to the story ranging from true to mixed opinions to downright false. 

On a side note, this is a wonderful way to measure someone's credibility and more importantly how entrenched they are in their views. As a pretty Liberal guy, I enjoy posting a fact checks on memes from the Right Side of the spectrum. If their reaction is Snopes, Politifact, and other sites like those are “Those are just liberal lies”. Then you are encountering man (or woman) who is tightly wrapped in a blanket of false information and is so deep in their foxhole that they may never come out. If you have the patience to coax them out with empathy and sensible arguments do so. If you encounter someone who says “Oh I didn't realize that was fake” then you are dealing with someone more open to new information and they should be respected for their honesty and willingness to admit they were wrong (not chastised for it). I am not saying don't try to pull them towards more progressive views but always do so with well-structured arguments and honest political stances. That is how you create a long time democrats... with accurate information and empathy.

Here is a short list of fact-checking websites to utilize. 

Snopes

Politifact

Fact Check

Bias Check

Bias check is much like fact checking but instead of focusing on the story specifically but the site posting it and their history of posting questionable news stories. Far too many stories now start their life from a non-authority figure (often an idiot with an opinion on Twitter) before its picked up by a fringe site and echoed through the left or right side of the political spectrum. I am not saying we should ONLY consume mainstream or long-term publications but if a site has had a repeated history of posting fake news stories you should be suspicious of anything/everything they post.

Media Bias Fact Check

See how your favorite news sources stack up for truthfulness and where they lean politically.

Following the Thread

Following the Thread is all about working a story from front to back. Taking a post from a ‘reputable’ news service and working out where a story came from and just as importantly who posted it. Take example the Migrant Caravan in Mexico. Recently Fox News claimed that they were being paid by George Soros to come up north and participate in the 2018 election. Working back from conspiracy we found that this claims while ending at a news network and the lips of various right-wing politicians started in a hoax pumping conspiracy website called FellowshipOfTheMinds before Info Wars and various Twitter trolls became involved. It’s like the grapevine if the grapevine was a vine of toxic lies...

Here are a few ways to follow a story back from its end back to its very beginning.

Look for the Timestamps - Most stories tend to have an online presence and a good way to follow the thread is to see who has the oldest version of the story. Anything posted after is either echoing the original post or echoing well... another echo. This ripple effect is why fake news stories move so fast because a news site with no credit, will pass on to a site with tiny bit of credit, to a site with some credit, to a site with fair amount of credit, and before long it comes out of the mouth of a pundit on a network news channel presented as fact.

Look for Repetition of Information - Most journalists conduct their own research and tap their own sources writing a story which is why it takes days instead of a few short hours to present a story. With most fake new stories from fringe sites, they like to basically copy/paste the story from one of the other like-minded sites basically echoing it further. If/when you read an article see if you can find other sites that is relaying the same information. As I said look for what time it was posted to get closer to the first article and the source of the misinformation.

Seek Out Citations - Good journalism usually has a fair amount of citation in their works. They add names, professions, and dates as they comb over information and seek out a story. What you might notice in these fringe sites is the fact they don’t usually have a lot of detail involved. They imply the thing they want, say they have eyes witness but do a pretty good job of leaving out who that eyewitness was and who relayed the information. Devil is in the details or their lack of, so always look for names of organization or groups making the claims so you can google them (or run them through the media bias fact check) to see how trustworthy they maybe.

Build a Trust Worthy Network

I have removed various liberal sources from my wheelhouse of political publications. I no longer watch Now This because I feel like they are posting half stories with a fair amount of context removed. I agree with them politically but they do us no favors by being so blatantly biased. Instead of posting them try using more Vice which has more complete stories Vice News, not the Buzzfeed cultural section that tries so hard to be edgy. Adopt outside looking in news sources like Canadian, British, or Australian News (if you can) to get a broader/outsider view of American Politics. I default to BBC as a fair news source but also enjoy some of the political satire beyond our borders to give a humorous view of how our allies view us as a country. Also build a list of publications that you can read New York Times, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and so on. Funny enough those are considered left of center which shows you how far conservative commentary has gone shifting the middle to the ‘left’.

It’s very important to be picky about the network of News sources you select. Not only to paint an accurate picture but also because you only have so much time in the day and nothing but news can literally lead to depression and apathy towards politics.

Killing The Political Meme Culture

If it can be put on a meme it's probably not worth saying. Not a bad rule of thumb for the internet culture and how it engages in politics online. Quite frankly I like memes; they can be fun, clever, and even epic. The meme culture in regards to politics has a pretty dark objective of being as corrosive and as reactionary as possible. It’s one of the trolls favorite toys to upset people and just about no political concept can be widdled down to a sentence and a picture. On reflection of my own posts, I occasionally throw a gif in to break my text wall and drive a point home.

It should be noted I am not saying Politics is sacred, in fact, American politics does well from comedy and satire chipping away absurdity of it all. Doubly important to make fun of Politicians on those mediums to keep them humble but memes? Most political memes objective isn't to display an absurdity but rather sell you another absurdity from a different party or side of the political question. They try to rip down the other side with the intent to bring you to their side. Most satire comedians (even the left ones you see on TV) will make fun of anyone acting like an idiot, the creators of these memes have their agendas and quite frankly they are polluting the discourse for both sides.

Other Tools

Here are some other tools to both help you find reputable news sources and fact check the fake news.

World Press Freedom Index - A great resource to measure countries ranking on journalism and factual reporting. Fun fact we are 45th in the world, how fucked up is that?

CRAAP Test -  Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. This is a quality way to vet your news sources and information you gather to help establish your political views.

The Wrap Up

As a progressive, I have a biased against the right, to say the least. I feel most of these tools of misinformation are utilized fully on the conservative side of politics. Conservatives (in the 2016 Election) ended up being about 30 times more likely to repeat a fake new story or meme posted by a Russian bots/trolls. I am writing this to nip in the bud the false equivalency that comes from writing a post like this. Undoubtedly more Conservative minded readers would say “Progressive use fake news too!” which is true yes... but sadly the American Red Blooded American Conservative devours this fake new content and even sides with a President who beyond belief seems to amplify and even create false narratives himself. 

Truth is for you my progressive readers we need to up our game and fact check better and more importantly apply the same tools that these far right ‘news’ websites do. The moment we apply the same tactics, the sooner we equip them to disprove those false news stories and then allow them to call into question any factual reporting that might have been conducted from new organizations center or left of the center. If we are going to get people to come to our side it must be done through factual reporting and clear/concise data, not fabrications and false news stories. We need to be the voice of reason and the adult in the room when the Red Team has adopted to lying through their teeth. If we play this correctly we can win the long game and they (the Modern Trumpulbicans) will have only themselves to blame by looking like liars for propagating fake news so willingly. Thanks for reading.

Regards Michael California

[thisismyblogposts-blog1]

Re-Stereotyping

Fitts, Alexis S. “Michael Brown and the Stories Journalist View as Newsworthy.” Columbia Journalism Review. August 28, 2014. https://archives.cjr.org/minority_reports/michael_brown_ferguson_media.php

In Alexis Fitts’ Columbia Journalism Review article, “Michael Brown Shooting and the Crimes Journalist Choose as Newsworthy”, Fitts explores the discrepancies between news coverage given to black Americans and other Americans for crimes. Fitts’ findings share that black Americans disproportionately are shown as suspects in ongoing police investigations on both local and national news. For some violent crimes such as assault, black suspects where shown at rates 30% higher than the actual reported number of arrested suspects for the crime. Fitts’ warns that the racialized tendencies of media outlets to cast the negative limelight of blacks has made black people, and in particular black men, easily identifiable as criminals.  

I focused primarily of Fitts’ contention that the media overrepresents black people when discussing suspects in crimes. Fitts’ research is important because it expresses how the media is a medium that constructs racist views of black criminality. By casting black involvement in violent crimes higher than the actual representation of blacks involved in those crimes, the media itself both helps to constructs and reinforces the stereotype of the dangerous black man that led to Michael Brown’s murder. When Officer Wilson stopped Michael Brown, he claims that he did so on the basis that Michael Brown, as a black male teenager, was untrustworthy. The initial stop by Darren Wilson represents the white fear of black men as a whole; a fear that is partially inspired by media overrepresentation of black people involved in crimes. However, more importantly, Fitts’ article speaks to the responses of conservative Americans who focused on Michael Brown’s robbery at a gas station drug store earlier that day (link to conservative Americans viewpoints article= https://newrepublic.com/article/119125/michael-brown-ferguson-reaction-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman ). By understanding the media’s role in creating racist stereotyping of blacks as criminals, it is evident that what Americans have been gaslit into believing Michael Brown’s earlier criminal behavior is a reasonable justification for his murder.

Limbaugh, Rush. “New Media Destroyed the Myth of the ‘Gentle Giant’”. The Rush Limbaugh Show. Podcast audio, August 23, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaF0M-UJgz8.

In the Rush Limbaugh Show podcast, Limbaugh discussed what he considers to be the myth of the “gentle giant” (referring to Michael Brown). Limbaugh focuses on the video of Brown’s store robbery prior to his murder and repeats the contention that Michael Brown may have had his hand inside of Officer Wilson’s car while reaching for Wilson’s gun.

The most important aspect of Limbaugh’s podcast was the repetition of soundbites Limbaugh takes from other news sources. Limbaugh himself credits “alternative media”, which he considers himself a part of, for acting as the “apparatus” to stop the “myth makers”, or conventional news sources. The irony here is that Limbaugh does not recognize that his “facts” are soundbites garnered from major news networks. At one point, Limbaugh claims that Michael Brown may have (italicized to represent Limbaugh’s own emphasis) reached for Officer Wilson’s gun. Despite any evidence to hang his hat on, Limbaugh hinges his contention about how dangerous Michael Brown was on the unsubstantiated claim that Brown reached for Wilson’s gun. More importantly, Limbaugh doesn’t realize that this claim comes form a widely circulated claim from Wilson himself contending that Brown reached into the car for Officer Wilson’s gun, however, a later report in March of 2017 exposes an admission from Officer Wilson that Michael Brown never tried to remove Wilson’s gun from its holster (link to article from March 2017=  https://revolt.tv/stories/2017/03/14/ferguson-officer-wilson-nword-admitted-mike-brown-grab-gun-0600b90e43 ). By reproducing unsubstantiated claims from bigger news sources, smaller conservative media outlets such as Limbaugh’s reach wider arrays of audiences, and further create the false narrative of Michael Brown as the “black thug” stereotype. Most importantly, smaller news sources like Limbaugh’s have made a career out of categorizing themselves as “outsiders” who tell the truth that big, corporate media cannot or will not deliver. By categorizing big media as untrustworthy, Limbaugh and other alternative news sources cast themselves as the only reliable sources of information, creating a situation where any opposing news source must be inaccurate. This categorization of other news sources allows Limbaugh to reproduce the narrative of the black thug in the case of Michael Brown, and reach a new audience that will readily accept anything Limbaugh says because, based on Limbaugh’s own demonization, other news sources are not to be trusted.

Shapiro, Ben. “The True Story of Ferguson and the Gentle Giant”. Reality Check. Podcast audio, October 28, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMSO0CXnYtE.

In the “Reality Check” segment on his YouTube channel, conservative talk pundit Ben Shapiro considers the “myth of the gentle giant” when considering the story of Michael Brown. Shapiro focuses primarily on the actions of Michael Brown prior to his murder, and then briefly explains the coroner’s report on Brown’s autopsy.

I focused on the “evidence” that Shapiro provided on the murder of Michael Brown. One of the things evident throughout Shapiro’s segment is his sarcasm as demonstrated when he refers to Trayvon Martin as “St. Trayvon of the blessed hoodie”. When describing Brown, and other black youth killed by police, this sarcasm acts to demonize both the victim of the shooting and the victim’s supporters. Furthermore, most of Shapiro’s evidence is repeated evidence from bigger news sources including The New York Times article by John Eligon, and the George Stephanopoulos interview with Officer Wilson. By citing other news sources, Shapiro extends a prevailing narrative in media that brown was a dangerous black man. Shapiro repeats both the gas station video of Brown’s robbery, repeats that Brown was found with THC in his system, even brings up the Times’ report that Brown had taken up rapping (a fact that the Times considered dangerous and vulgar). Shapiro smugly mentions that several black (italicized to represent Shapiro’s emphasis) witnesses have appeared who validate Wilson’s side of the story, however, as an article from The Washington Post explains in November of 2014, many eye witnesses routinely see each situation differently, which makes eye witness reports somewhat unreliable (link to Post article= https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/25/why-many-eyewitnesses-in-the-darren-wilson-investigation-were-wrong/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.607c8edda21f ). Most importantly, Shapiro’s emphasis on black witnesses does not excuse that there were also black witnesses that supported Dorian Johnson’s (Brown’s friend present at the shooting) recounting of the story. In fact, all the witnesses in the case were black, so Shapiro’s point should be void, however, the smugness with which he states this point about the witnesses helps to further his point that “leftist media” is lying. More importantly, Shapiro is categorizing these witnesses as trustworthy based on race, and is attempting to make the Brown camp less credible. Furthermore, Shapiro is creating an implicit non-sequitur, whereby the witnesses, because they are credible must be supporting Wilson’s claims that Brown was reaching for Officer Wilson’s gun, however, there have been no witnesses that came forward to validate this claim. Shapiro is trying to use already unreliable witness testimony incorrectly to paint Brown as the stereotypical black thug by using non-sequiturs and terrible information. Shapiro’s account is important in media because it reaches new audiences and reproduces inconclusive and unrelated data that was used to cast Brown as the stereotypical “black thug”.  

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Psychic detective

A psychic detective is a person who investigates crimes by using purported paranormal psychic abilities. Examples have included postcognition, psychometry, telepathy, dowsing, clairvoyance, and remote viewing. In murder cases, psychic detectives may purport to be in communication with the spirits of the murder victims. Although there are documented cases where individuals claiming psychic abilities have assisted police in solving crimes, there is considerable skepticism in regard to the general use of psychics under these circumstances. Prominent cases Many prominent police cases, often involving missing persons, have received the attention of alleged psychics. Following the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart on 5 June 2002, the police received as many 9,000 tips from self-proclaimed psychics. Responding to these tips took “many police hours,” according to Salt Lake City Police Chief Lieutenant Chris Burbank. Yet, Elizabeth Smart’s father, Ed Smart, concluded that: “the family didn’t get any valuable information from psychics.” Smart was located by observant witnesses who recognized her abductor from a police photograph. No psychic was ever credited with finding Elizabeth Smart.

In the case of the Long Island serial killer, the psychic said the body would be found in a shallow grave, near water and a sign with a G in it would be nearby. Despite the vagueness of this claim the New York Post stated that the “Psychic Nailed it!” “More surprising than the psychic’s failure is the fact that this information was described as an amazing success on over 70,000 websites without anyone realizing that she was completely wrong.” When Washington, D.C.

Intern Chandra Levy went missing on 1 May 2001, psychics from around the world provided tips suggesting that her body would be found in places such as the basement of a Smithsonian storage building, in the Potomac River, and buried in the Nevada desert among many other possible locations. Each tip led nowhere. A little more than a year after her disappearance, Levy’s body was accidentally discovered by a man walking his dog in a remote section of Rock Creek Park. The case of Shawn Hornbeck received the attention of psychics after the eleven-year-old went missing on 6 October 2002. Most notably, self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show and provided the parents of Shawn Hornbeck a detailed description of the abductor and where Hornbeck could be found.

Browne responded “No” when asked if he was still alive. When Hornbeck was found alive more than four years later, few of the details given by Browne were correct. Shawn Hornbeck’s father, Craig Akers, has stated that Browne’s declaration was “one of the hardest things that we’ve ever had to hear,” and that her misinformation diverted investigators wasting precious police time. In August, 2010, Aboriginal elder Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey claimed to have seen the location of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, in her dream. The missing child’s disappearance was being investigated by police. She took them to a location where a dead body was found, however it was of an adult woman and not the body of the child. A body was located in the US by Psychic Annette Martin. Dennis Prado, a retired US paratrooper, had gone missing from his apartment and police had been unable to locate his whereabouts. With no further leads, the chief investigating officer, Fernando Realyvasquez, a sergeant with the Pacifica Police, contacted psychic detective Annette Martin.

Prado had lived near a large forest, some 2000 square miles. Martin was given a map, she circled a small spot on the map, about the size of two city blocks. She said that Prado had struggled for breath, had died and his body would be there within the indicated area. She described the path he took, and where the body would be found. Although the area had been searched before and Prado had not been found, a search and rescue officer initiated a new search with the help of a search dog, as Martin suggested “A search dog is going to find him.” They found the body covered with dirt at the location, as Martin had indicated. While the body had deteriorated, there was no evidence that he had been attacked and it is thought likely he had died of natural causes, as she also indicated. In 2001, the body of Thomas Braun was located by Perth based Aboriginal clairvoyant Leanna Adams in Western Australia. Police had initially been unable to find the body. The family of Braun had been told to contact Adams, an Aboriginal psychic who lived in Perth. The Braun family had requested police to do a search based on Adams’ directions but they had not assisted.

Adams went to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, and took the family members directly to Braun’s remains, a spot high on a ridge west of the town, some 20 kilometres out. The remains were not immediately identifiable. Police later confirmed the remains to be his using DNA testing. In Sydney, Australia in 1996, a Belgian born Sydney psychic, Phillipe Durant was approached by the fiance of missing Paula Brown to help locate her. Durante told police the location of the body of Brown. She was found less than two kilometres of the spot he had indicated in Port Botany, New South Wales, by a lorry driver who came across the body. “Even though the body was discovered purely by chance, the speculation by a clairvoyant appears to have been uncannily accurate,” a police spokeswoman conceded. Durant had used a plumb bob and a grid map, combined with some hair from the victim.

Official police responses Many police departments around the world have released official statements saying that they do not regard psychics as credible or useful on cases. = In Australia = Australian police, officially, in general have said that they do not accept assistance from psychics. This was in response to an Australian TV show Sensing Murder in which self-professed psychics attempt to crack unsolved murders. Western Australian Police have a policy that they do not contact psychics for assistance with investigations, however they will accept information contributed by psychics.

An unnamed Australian federal police officer was suspended following his seeking the aid of a clairvoyant in regard to death threats made against Prime Minister John Howard. A federal police spokesman said they do “not condone the use of psychics in security matters.” There are still cases of psychics professing to have trained with the Australian police and failing to provide credible evidence to support qualifications or evidence of being a psychic profiler or intuitive profiler with the Australian police. While official policy for police forces in Australia does not advocate the use of psychics for investigations, one former Detective Senior Constable, Jeffrey Little, has said police do use them “even though they officially say they don’t”.

Additionally, police in NSW have used psychic Debbie Malone on a number of cases. While no evidence she has supplied has solved murders or missing investigations on their own., her evidence had been used to corroborate theories, and in one case, included in a coroner’s brief on a case. Little, in reference to one case she assisted on, felt her description of what happened was “exceptional”, other officers also had been impressed by her assistance, while yet other NSW officers felt she had not helped solve any cases. Sergeant Gae Crea and Detective Sergeant Damian Loone, state that she did not give them anything the police and the public didn’t already know. Crea recounts “I’ve dealt with a lot of psychics, but no one has ever said, ‘I can see where the body is buried and I’ll take you there'”. = In New Zealand = New Zealand police have said “spiritual communications were not considered a creditable foundation for investigation.” = In the United Kingdom = In 2006, 28 British police forces responded to a query from the Association for Rational Inquiry to say that they did not and have never used psychics, one force saying “We are unaware of any inquiries significantly progressed solely by information provided by a psychic medium.” In 2009, when the Metropolitan Police had denied the use of psychics and were then presented with emails suggesting the use of a psychic they made a press statement authorized by the senior investigating officer that was much more ambiguous: “We do not identify people we may or may not speak with in connection with inquiries.

We are not prepared to discuss this further.” = In the United States = A 1993 survey of police departments in the 50 largest cities in the United States revealed that a third of them had accepted predictions from psychic detectives in the past, although only seven departments treated such information any differently from information from an ordinary source. No police department reported any instances of a psychic investigator providing information that was more helpful than other information received during the course of a case, since any information has to be proved, only information matching other evidence could be used. A follow-up study looking at small and medium-sized cities in the United States, found that psychics were called upon by the police departments of those cities even less frequently than large cities.

A former senior investigator for the FBI has stated that psychics may be used “as a last resort [and] as an investigative tool with caution” for providing clues not directly admissible in the court of law such as a criminal’s character, or the location of dead bodies. Scientific studies A number of tests have been conducted on psychics detectives, using control groups, to try to establish any psychic ability relating to crime solving. One of the earliest was carried out by Dutch Police officer, Fillipus Brink in 1960. He conducted a year-long study of psychics, but found no evidence of any crime-solving abilities. Another study was conducted in 1982 where evidence from four crimes was given to three groups: psychic detectives, students and police detectives. The clues related to four crimes, two crimes that had been solved, and two that had not been. The study found no difference between the three groups in ability to indicate what crimes had been committed by looking at the evidence. Some flaws in the scientific method were apparent in these two tests. A further test was conducted in 1997, this test focusing on improving on the scientific methods used in the previous tests.

This study used two groups, one consisting of three students from the University of Hertfordhire, the other group consisting of three psychics. The two groups were shown three objects associated with three serious crimes. They then advocated theories, but once again, no difference was found in terms of the accuracy between the two groups. To assess the claims of psychic crime-solving, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal established a task force of investigators. The group recorded many failures by psychics to provide useful information to criminal investigators, and felt that psychics may use “retrofitting”, offering vague clues, and then trying to retroactively fit them to details that are only discovered later. In addition to cases of retrofitting, the apparent use of cold reading, exaggeration, and examples where the psychic has used non-psychic sources of information, were also reviewed. In 2008 while being interviewed for the Skeptiko podcast, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, Ben Radford challenged the host Alex Tsakiris to give him the best case for evidence of a psychic solving a crime.

Tsakiris had “repeatedly accused skeptical investigators of purposely choosing the weakest cases”. Radford agreed to investigate in depth a case from any period in history, around the world, “that presented the gold standard for evidence”. Tsakiris chose psychic Nancy Weber who in 2006 appeared on an episode of the Biography Channel Psychic Investigators. Weber claimed to have helped the New Jersey police solve the serial murders of Amie Hoffman and Dierdre O’Brien from 1982.

The police arrested James Koedatich in 1983 who was later found guilty of serial murder. Psychic Investigators interviewed Weber as well as the two police detectives she worked with, Hughes and Moore, who verified Weber had given them information she could not have known. Radford spent the next nine months reviewing the case, he and Tsakiris re-interviewed the detectives as well as the psychic on the Skeptiko podcast. Radford discovered that the detectives had not kept their notes from the case and their story had changed since the TV show aired, in fact he found that their stories now contradicted the psychic’s story.

A further discovery by Radford using a New Jersey phone book from 1982 found that if the psychic had indeed given the detectives all the evidence she claimed she had, the police could have discovered the killer with a 15-minute search through the phone book. Radford believes that the police and the psychic “simply fell prey to confirmation bias”. Critical commentary ABC’s Nightline Beyond Belief program for 17 August 2011 featured psychic detectives and their involvement with the case of Ali Lowitzer. Typical of missing person cases, families are approached by people claiming they will help bring the missing home.

“They told me, I see trees, water, dirt…but it is all very vague” according to Susan Lowitzer a mother whose daughter has been missing since 26 April 2010. Retired FBI agent and ABC consultant Brad Garrett states, “In 30 years…I have never seen a psychic solve a mystery”. JREF investigator and mentalist Banachek feels that psychic detectives take advantage of families, “…because of fame and money, [they] step in and try to act like an authority”. Banachek believes that not all psychic detectives are frauds, some are self-deluded and believe they are helping, but they “send police on wild-goose chases wasting precious time and resources”. Psychic Georgia O’Conner states that Ali is dead, she was tortured and her body dismembered. When asked by ABC’s JuJu Chang how can she tell parents this kind of information when she might be wrong, O’Conner replies “I can’t let my ego get in the way of what I see”. Despite the attention from psychic detectives Ali Lowitzer remains missing from her Spring, TX home.

No psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the FBI or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse. The Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia’s official crime research agency, advises parents of missing children not to resort to using psychics who approach them. Former FBI analyst and profiler Clint Van Zandt has criticized the use of psychic detectives and has stated that “What happens many times is that professed psychics allow themselves the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. After the case is solved, they make their previously vague predictions somehow fit the crime and the criminal.” A detailed 2010 study of Sylvia Browne predictions about 115 missing persons and murder cases has found that despite her repeated claims to be more than 85% correct, “Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case.” Belief in psychic detectives Psychologists, researchers and other authors have posited a number of possible explanations for the belief that some can provide valuable crime information from psychic abilities. The possible explanations include confirmation bias, wishful thinking, and retrofitting.

The act of reinterpreting vague and nebulous statements made by psychic detectives is also referred to as the multiple out. Taking advantage of these cognitive limitations is the practice of cold reading which creates the illusion of knowing specific information. Additionally, police detectives and other authors suggest that psychic detectives appear successful due to making common-sense or high-probability predictions such as finding bodies at dump sites or “near water.” While police departments claim they do not seek out or use psychics to solve crimes, they must follow up on all credible tips.

If police do not refute this theory then “many in the public continue to believe that psychics are secretly employed by law enforcement” If the police state they do not use psychics then psychics claim that the police do not want to “share the credit” and are just covering up. Finally, the use of psychics may simply reduce anxiety and fill the emotional needs of individuals who must be experiencing great stress. In fiction There is a long history of psychic detectives in horror and crime fiction, and in other genres as well. One of the earliest forms of the genre was the character Flaxman Low, created in 1897 by mother and son Kate and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard. Other examples include Jules de Grandin, Doctor Occult and Agent Jasi McLellan created by Cheryl Kaye Tardif. The popular TV show, Psych features a charlatan paranormal detective helping the Santa Barbara police with crimes that range from robberies to kidnappings to murders.

However, the man actually uses an acute sense of observation he acquired as a child; a eidetic memory; excellent vision; and deduction and reasoning to solve cases, making a running gag of his claim to be a psychic. In Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently novels, the titular character—a “holistic” detective—is implied to have psychic powers on occasion. One incident involved Gently attempting to scam his university classmates into paying for a set of answers to an exam, supposedly obtained using psychic powers that Gently did not think he had.

To his surprise, the answers he provided, which he thought he had produced randomly, turned out to be entirely correct. He was expelled as a result. Peter F. Hamilton wrote a series of books about the ex-military psychic Greg Mandel. In the series, Greg was a retired special forces soldier created as part of an elite spec-ops unit, the Mindstar Brigade, in the ‘English Army’, having fought a vicious war in Turkey and helped a rebellion overthrow the People’s Socialist Party at home. Having won the rebellion he then retired to Rutland, suddenly being called out of retirement by the rich heirhess Julia Evans to use his psychic talents to find the root of industrial espionage against her company, Event Horizon [an organisation that was also integral to the overthrow of the communist government]. The series not only focuses on Greg’s abilities, but also the abilities of other psychics created as part of the Mindstar Programme, the effects of social and economic change throughout the 21st century, global warming and rapid scientific advances.

Greg regularly uses his abilities both for interrogation and as an offensive weapon. The episode “Bart the Murderer” of The Simpsons depicts a psychic joining the hunt to find Principal Skinner. The episode “Cartman’s Incredible Gift” of South Park depicts a skeptical view of psychic detectives. The Japanese manga and anime series YuYu Hakusho depicts a teenage boy named Yusuke Urameshi working as a Spirit Detective, which is a human who hunts down demons using supernatural abilities. See also Occult detective Parapsychology Psychic Psychic archaeology Ganzfeld experiment Scientific investigation of telepathy Pseudoscience List of topics characterized as pseudoscience Marcello Truzzi Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Gerard Croiset Literature Richard Wiseman, Donald West & Roy Stemman: An experimental test of psychic detection.

In: Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 1996, 61(842), 34-45 References.

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How to Succeed at B2B Content Marketing with More Credible Content

Ask any B2B marketer about their top digital marketing challenges and one of the first answers you’ll likely receive is: Getting in front of the right audience at the right time. In fact, Ytel’s 2018 State of B2B Marketing Communications survey revealed that 55% of respondents agreed that they have a hard time getting their message and content in front of their target audience. Why is that? Well, there’s more content at buyers’ fingertips than ever before, search engines are getting in touch with their human sides, and organic visibility on social media is effectively extinct. But, let’s real talk for a minute, marketers—this is all old news. In today’s digital marketing landscape, creating meaningful connections with your audience on any channel really comes down to trust and credibility. Consumers are increasingly numb to advertising and marketing messages—and they’re actively trying to avoid it all. Last year, PageFair reported that adblocking usage had grown by 30% globally. In addition, Facebook’s recent decision to de-emphasize brand content was in response to users saying that posts from businesses, brands and media were crowding their News Feeds. However, buyers are increasingly looking to those they know and those they think they know for insights, answers and recommendations. Multiple reports have shown that somewhere around 90% of consumers trust influencers or individuals over straight branded content. In addition, according to a recent report from CMI and SmartBrief, 40% of B2B decision-makers say that credibility trumps the source of the information. This means B2B brands and marketers need to double-down on creating quality, credible content to drive marketing objectives and wins. But how? By infusing credible voices, perspectives and insights from influential sources—namely industry experts and thought leaders—into the content marketing game plan. [bctt tweet="#B2B brands & marketers need to double-down on creating quality, #crediblecontent to drive #marketing objectives & wins." username="toprank"] To highlight how creating more credible content with influencers can help your B2B brand get in front of interested buyers, create an engaging experience, and inspire action, take a look at these three examples from the TopRank Marketing playbook of successful client influencer content marketing programs.

Case Study #1 – Introhive: Reaching, engaging and inspiring a niche audience.

Introhive is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) solutions provider. Working across a variety of industries, Introhive aims to help their clients gain and effectively leverage customer intelligence in a way that can grow their business. The Situation: The legal sector is one of Introhive’s focus industries. However, it’s an industry that’s been reluctant to adopt CRM technologies. Why? Oftentimes business development isn’t an established department within law practices, making it hard to justify investments in a “sales” technology. But law firms large and small have growth aspirations—and Introhive wanted to empower them to realize those opportunities. Another challenge with attorneys and other legal professionals is that they often build their careers on evidence and witness testimony. Essentially, this industry is by nature hard to reach without offering credibility, authority and proof. The Solution: With two unique challenges to overcome, our team knew that engaging other legal professionals to share their expertise and insights on business development, we could not only showcase the Introhive brand, but also needed to provide their audience with unique, relevant and trustworthy insights. TopRank Marketing worked with the team at Introhive to develop an integrated influencer content program that began with a survey of legal community members. Conducting the survey helped facilitate building influencer relationships, while also collecting valuable data that could be used to further bolster campaign content. Other pieces of the integrated content marketing mix included an eBook—our anchor asset—blog posts, organic social amplification, paid social, and email. The Results: For starters, we saw 15% more eBook downloads in the first month than the benchmark asset had in its lifetime. During the same time period, the accompanying blog content garnered over 600% more views compared to benchmarks for average blog content. Finally and without specifics available, the Introhive team reports that the program has delivered “medium to huge” marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Suffice it to say, this program leveraged credible content within influencers and research to generate substantial results.  Read the full Introhive integrated influencer campaign case study.

Case Study #2 – Cherwell: Increasing brand visibility and thought leadership in a competitive space.

Cherwell Software is a leading IT service management (ITSM) company with a mission to help their customers leverage intuitive technology to enable better, faster and more affordable innovation. The Situation: Since its inception a little over a decade ago, Cherwell has been rapidly gaining traction in the competitive ITSM space—but they’re still one of the newer kids on the block with other new competitors emerging rapidly. To continue their growth and fend off competition, Cherwell wanted to expand its marketing channels, increase brand awareness, engage industry thought leaders and—of course—eventually drive leads. The Solution: Given Cherwell’s position in the competitive ITSM space, the team at TopRank Marketing worked to design an influencer content campaign that was highly-targeted to key the decision-makers they wanted to reach. How? We knew in order to stand out in news feeds and build near-instant credibility with our content, we needed to understand what influences the target audience the most. To uncover the people, publications, and content topics and types that “moved” our audience the most, as well as where they spent time on social media, we designed a new research tool—the RITHM report.  Using insights from the RITHM report to inform the content marketing approach, the resulting campaign included an eBook anchor asset, blog posts, an SEO-driven landing page, paid and organic social media. The Results: According to Alison Munn, Social Media and Digital Marketing Lead at Cherwell: “Not only did this program meet the defined goals and objectives, but the results and process exceeded my expectations!” With this campaign responsible for 22% of new revenue for Cherwell in 2017, it was a recent winner of the B2B Marketing Exchange "Killer Content Award". You can learn more about this program in the case study video below: [embed]https://youtu.be/cUf_a7RL9NY[/embed]

Case Study #3 – SAP SuccessFactors: Driving awareness and action by connecting to a specific audience pain point.

SAP SuccessFactors is a leading human capital management (HCM) suite that helps human resources (HR) professionals unleash the full potential of their workforce through transformation and engagement, and ultimately drive results across the business. The Situation: For this niche human resources audience, employee wellness programs are part of the strategy to unleash the potential of their employees. However, the pain point for many organizations is finding a holistic solution in one place that also provides understanding of the true impact their efforts can have on the workplace. SAP wanted to drive awareness around their holistic solution, while also educating and engaging their audience. The Solution: TopRank Marketing partnered with SAP SuccessFactors to craft an multi-pronged, influencer-driven content campaign that would not only raise awareness around their solution, but also provide their audience with credible, relevant, and actionable insights. This campaign was anchored with an influencer eBook that featured insights from 10 top workplace culture, wellness, and technology experts, as well as internal experts from SAP SuccessFactors. In addition, other tactics such as a well-optimized landing page, social media promotion, and customized motion graphics were part of the mix. The Results: For downloads, we saw a  272% increase over SAP’s established benchmark. In addition, the accompanying landing page boasted a 68% conversion rate. Lastly, organic social promotion of the content—from the brand and influencers—drove 86% of overall views and 69% of overall conversions. Read the full SAP SuccessFactors influencer-driven content campaign case study.

The Big B2B Takeaway for Credible Content

We’re in an era of a distrust and indifference to B2B marketing messages—which means if buyers don’t find your content credible and trustworthy, they’ll move on. From skepticism to standing out in a crowded and more seasoned field, each of the aforementioned brands were living the trends and looking for a way to capture the attention of their audiences. By cleverly leveraging influencers to create more credible and authoritative content and more trusted amplification, these brands were able to deliver their audiences with thoughtful opinions and diverse insights, bolster brand authority and make more meaningful connections with their audiences. But perhaps the most exciting campaign result was that building credibility led to audience activation—or conversions in other words. To put it simply, with the right strategy, insights and influencer infusion, credible content can help brands win over your audience at every stage of the buyer journey. [bctt tweet="With the right strategy, insights & influencer infusion, #crediblecontent can absolutely help brands win over your audience at every stage of the buyer journey. @CaitlinMBurgess" username="toprank"] Want to learn more creating more credible content? Check out our post on building credibility and authority with content marketing.

The post How to Succeed at B2B Content Marketing with More Credible Content appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Gujarat Assembly Election Results: Ahead of counting, a look back at issues which dominated high-stakes battle

The much-awaited result of the keenly fought Gujarat election is about to be announced. The state election is not only significant because it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home turf but also because BJP has been in power in the state since 1995. Losing the election in such a crucial state would be a major embarrassment not only for Modi but for party chief Amit Shah as well.

Apart from BJP, it is also turning out to be a litmus test for new Congress president Rahul Gandhi. While BJP is seeking a sixth straight term in office, Congress is attempting a come back in the state. The election saw Narendra Modi accusing Congress of colluding with Pakistan to get favourable results. Both Modi and Rahul travelled extensively, making temple stops and delivering speeches. The acrimonious campaign, where both parties indulged in no-holds-barred attacks on each others, focussed on a number of issues. While Congress managed to get the support of Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani, Patidar leader Hardik Patel and OBC leader Alpesh Thakor, BJP staked its credibility on Modi and his Gujarat Model. One major challenge for BJP was to assuage the Patels, who harboured deep resentment for the party since the Patidar agitation. Their problem was exacerbated when Hardik joined hands with Congress.

Patidar and Dalit anger One of the issues that rattled the state and even forced former state chief minister Anandiben Patel to resign in August 2016 was the protest for reservation for Patels in jobs and educational institutions. Party leaders were not allowed to hold public rallies and were barred from many Patel-dominated areas in a show of increasing irritation with the saffron party. While the effect of the agitation has waned, Hardik still enjoys a strong support base in the community. With him making a pact with Congress, the saffron party may lose its important vote base. According to the India Today-Axisopinion poll, the Patidars play a decisive role in 21 of the state's 182 seats and make up almost 16 percent of the electorate. Hardik can give a bump of two percent to whichever party he supports. However, things might change for the better for the ruling party. According to this DiscussIndia article, some Patels in Ahmedabad, where the agitation began, think Hardik has become distracted. They are also not happy with his agreement with Congress. Despite people, especially the youth, coming in huge numbers to attend Hardik Patel's rallies, it remains to be seen if this support will translate into votes or if BJP will be able to keep its vote share. Gujarat witnessed one of the biggest Dalit uprisings that ever took place in the state last year. Anandiben faced criticism after four Dalit youths were beaten up in Una on 11 July, 2016, for allegedly skinning a dead cow. Her exit was seen as BJP’s message to Dalits that the party was concerned about the growing unrest in the community. With Mevani contesting as an independent with Congress' support, BJP might lose out on Dalit votes too. According to this DiscussIndia report, some Dalits, still miffed with the Una incident, are inching towards Congress. Despite supporting BJP for 15 years, they feel injustices are being done to them.

GST and demonetisation As Hindustan Timespointed out, small and medium-scale businessmen and traders, who form the core of the BJP support base, have been hit by what they call implementation glitches in the rollout of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Textile traders in the state want a rollback of the GST on cloth. According to the Times Now-VMR opinion poll, about 40 percent respondents felt quality of life has worsened after the implementation of GST and demonetisation. Gandhi and Congress has taken every opportunity to attack BJP over these decisions. "Their GST is not GST. GST means Gabbar Singh Tax. This is causing a loss to the country. Small shopkeepers are finished. Lakhs of youths have been unemployed. But they are still not ready to listen," Gandhi said in his rallies. Modi, meanwhile, said Gandhi was propagating a 'Grand Stupid Thought'. Modi countered him by saying, "Those who have looted people throughout their life, they can only remember dacoits." According to a report in DailyO, "The trader community has been the most loyal voters of BJP since its inception. They have helped the party also when it was not in power. However, the same community has been at the receiving end of GST."

Anti-incumbency The BJP is facing anti-incumbency sentiment and Gujaratis are showing signs of fatigue from being ruled by BJP since 1995, The Indian Expressreported. With the change of chief minister in the middle of a tenure and the absence of Modi as the chief ministerial candidate, the anti-incumbency sentiment may become a crucial factor in the poll outcome. Achyut Yagnik, a leading expert on Gujarat, told Rediff that there has been a difference in administrative control since Modi was elevated to the post of prime minister. "Modi had a tight control over the bureaucracy, which was not the case with Anandiben Patel and Vijay Rupani," she said. BJP MP Sanjay Kakade claimed his party would not win enough seats to form the next government in the state and cited anti-incumbency as the reason. "The BJP has been in power in Gujarat for 22 years. Since Independence, apart from the communists in West Bengal, there is not a single party in the country which has remained in power for 25 years," he claimed. Kakade said the negative feeling against the party may cost BJP in this election.

Water woes The Congress chiefly banked on the issue of water woes and "incomplete" irrigation projects to make fresh inroads in rural Saurashtra, sensing a feeling of being "left out" among the populace. The party also attacked BJP over Modi's SAUNI project. "When Modi visited Rajkot in August for the celebration of (operationalisation of) Saurashtra Narmada Avataran Irrigation Project (SAUNI), it was an eye-wash. The project is not complete, but Modi and BJP projected as if the entire project has been completed within five years," Rajput claimed. Meanwhile, fed up with their water problems, Gajadi village in Morbi district of Gujarat boycotted the election. "Villagers announced a few months ago that they would refrain from voting. Their main grievance was water supply. Though the village is being supplied water through a pipeline, they claimed it was not enough and demanded another pipeline," said Morbi collector and district election officer IK Patel. According to a report in Hindustan Times, BJP is also battling farmers' anger over Narmada waters. Despite the Sardar Sarovar Dam, villagers complain of broken promises, flawed design and lack of accountability. "The inauguration was just a farce. Every election we were promised Narmada water. This time we have decided to vote for a new government in protest," a local told Hindustan Times. Source By : http://www.firstpost.com/politics/gujarat-assembly-election-results-2017-narendra-modi-rahul-gandhi-ahead-of-counting-a-look-back-at-issues-which-dominated-high-stakes-battle-4262873.html Read the full article

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Inaugural speech by Federal Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel on 27 January 2017

Inaugural speech by Federal Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel on 27 January 2017

Ladies and gentlemen,Esteemed colleagues,Frank‑Walter,Ms Wallat,Thank you very much for the warm reception for my family and for myself here at the Federal Foreign Office.

I’m sure that for very many of you the departure of Frank-Walter Steinmeier today from the post of German Foreign Minister is, on the one hand, a source of great regret and, on the other perhaps, a source of pride.

Regret because he really was a brilliant Foreign Minister who gave back to the Federal Foreign Office the status within the Federal Government to which this Office is entitled given its importance. And not only within the Government but also publicly and internationally.

In the oath of office, the Minister declares, “I swear that I will dedicate my efforts to the well‑being of the German people, promote their welfare, protect them from harm”.

I believe that only a few Foreign Ministers of the Federal Republic have contributed to this welfare and to our country’s international reputation in such a convincing way as Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Above all, this was due to his persistent, unwavering and tireless efforts to contain conflicts and to make peace possible.

I remember media reports in which commentators asked: What do they actually do? They just talk. The authors forgot the conclusion drawn by the book “The Sleepwalkers”, namely that not talking enough is dangerous.

When the Federal Foreign Office takes its leave today of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, it does so with great appreciation for his achievements, both political and personal.

However, that’s most likely not the only reason you’re so sorry to see him go. For he had an inimitable way of treating staff. He was people‑oriented and cooperative, never talked down to anyone and always had a sense of humour. There’s one quality in particular I’ve noticed over many years: whenever you go to him, you always have the impression that he’s been waiting for you all day and that nothing is more important to him at that moment than having a good conversation with you. And that was even true when it was absolutely clear that he was under great strain and enormous time pressure.

It’s these skills, along with his aptitude for precision work, which have gained him the support of those around him in all of his posts to date – certainly also here at the Federal Foreign Office.

As I said, however, perhaps you’re also a little proud that in all likelihood “your boss” will be the next President of the Federal Republic of Germany. For without the excellent work in two Federal Cabinets, also at the Federal Chancellery, which – after all – you as his staff made possible, he would not now be on the brink of entering Schloss Bellevue.

Calling to mind a headline from the Bildzeitung, you couldn’t now say, “We are Pope” but you could say, “We are Federal President”. I think you’re entitled to be a little proud of that.

And I’m certain that foreign policy will remain one of his passions as Federal President.

The time is very much “out of joint”, as Frank-Walter Steinmeier used to say. You can see that he knows the classics. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the quote continues with the lament, “O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!”

Being a modest man, he would never have quoted that bit. But it is indeed the case that the German Foreign Minister’s job during the last few years has been to counter the dangers of many different conflicts.

Germany’s standing as an anchor of stability and a reliable partner today is due in no small measure to Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The fact that many people are convinced he’s the ideal Federal President has a lot to do with this. I, too, would like to take this opportunity to express my respect – and to sincerely thank a man who has been a comrade-in-arms for many years.

Frank, I thank you for the time we’ve spent working together.

I don’t know if you remember. But we’ve known each other since the days back in Lower Saxony. You were the media affairs officer in Gerhard Schröder’s State Chancellery, who by the way has always maintained that he employed you and Brigitte Zypries because you were the only ones who contradicted him during your interviews.

I still remember drafting Lower Saxony’s budget under the apple tree in my garden in Goslar along with you and Brigitte Zypries. You and I were in shorts. It says a lot for Brigitte Zypries that she could cope with that.

I want to express my sincere thanks for everything we’ve managed to achieve during the last 20 years. I’ve learned much from you. But, above, all, I wish you a steady hand, stamina and good health for the great office that lies ahead. All the best!

***

Ladies and gentlemen,

I’m very much aware that you were probably expecting a lot of things, but not Sigmar Gabriel as your new boss.

In my personal experience, however, you can get used to such ideas in a relatively short space of time.

And you may rest assured that I’m not nearly as bad as they say in the papers. Except for the ban on entering Iran which the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran threatened to slap on me after I pointed out Israel’s right to exist, none of my trips to any of the difficult countries in Arabia, Asia or Russia on the one hand, or Poland on the other, resulted in diplomatic relations being broken off with Germany.

So I’m quite confident that things won’t be as bad as some sections of the media have predicted. Now some people will think: not as bad is bad enough. But, after all, you’re here to prevent that!

I think we’ll manage. Part of the reason I’m so keen to get things right is that I know the true message of your speech, Frank, was: “Don’t do anything stupid! Don’t destroy my legacy!” You can be certain that I aim to work with you here at the Federal Foreign Office to carry on tackling the challenges facing us.

No, seriously: during my stint as Economics Minister I benefited greatly from the assistance and guidance of the Federal Foreign Office. Representing Germany’s economic interests and, at the same time, not sidelining human rights issues isn’t always easy, but it was necessary. It was thanks to the unwavering support of the Federal Foreign Office that I found the right way and was also able to strike the right tone.

Our Ministries also worked well together on other difficult issues. And given the new protectionism, not only in the US, it was certainly especially important that Europe set a very different example and that it has laid down modern standards in world trade with the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between the EU and Canada. That, too, is the result of good cooperation.

In the weeks following the election of Donald Trump, I asked myself what the world would have said about Germany and Europe if we hadn’t managed to conclude this agreement with Canada. And how little credibility our calls for an end to protectionism would have today if we Europeans hadn’t even been able to conclude an agreement with Canada – a country which is more European than some EU member states.

I’m therefore aware of this Ministry’s outstanding quality and I know that I can rely on it. I would be very grateful if I could count on your expertise and dedication so that we can steer our country through troubled waters in what are certainly not easy times.

We should concern ourselves as little as possible with the fact that this is a federal election year. For the times as so rough that it’s essential that foreign policy is not focused on the election evening of 24 September but, rather, on our country’s medium and long‑term interests.

I’m therefore especially dependent on your expertise and advice. I’m counting on it and I’m grateful for it. And I firmly believe that you will give it to me.

As you know, I will continue to act as the Federal Chancellor’s number two – as Deputy Chancellor. My remit includes political coordination with the Federal Chancellery, a task which is now coming here from the Federal Economics Ministry. In the forthcoming budget negotiations, that won’t necessarily be a bad thing for the Federal Foreign Office. State Secretary Dr Sontowski and his team will be transferring to the Federal Foreign Office to deal with this task. He certainly earned his reputation at the Federal Ministry of Finance. And that should not change.

***

Ladies and gentlemen,

Despite this being an election year, much is expected of our foreign policy. For a world which is so much in flux poses a challenge for us.

I believe we’re witnessing a recalibration of the world at this moment. What stands out in my own mind is the rise of the new economic powers in Asia, which don’t feel the need to ask us what share of world trade belongs to them.

And when we host the Digital Affairs Ministers for the first time in April as part of Germany’s G20 Presidency, we do so in the awareness that the era of digital technology is changing our industrial model of prosperity and has thrown up new questions about common rules for fair competition and cyber security.

I’m saying this because alongside the well‑known changes which are unsettling us there are very different changes taking place. We in Europe are diminishing in terms of numbers, while Africa, Asia and Latin America are growing. In economic terms, the balance is shifting, the technological balance is changing and, of course, we’re also – unfortunately – witnessing a recalibration in the question of liberal and social democracy around the world. Authoritarian answers are on the rise and liberal and social democracies are, at the very least, on the defensive. Domestic and external affairs can no longer be separated in our interconnected world. This world offers a great many opportunities, but there are also many conflicts, sources of friction and threats.

Refugee issues and migration, terrorism, wars and conflicts, as well as climate change, environmental disasters, cyber attacks – the international challenges are growing.

So is the resistance of the embattled middle classes, who see these trends as unacceptable. There are calls for isolation, for countries to go it alone, for them to withdraw into their national shells. People fear losing control over their lives and they are attracted by movements which have reverted to nationalist answers and want to create the impression that these answers would enable ordinary citizens to take back control. As we know, this is a big mistake and that’s why it’s so important that we combine domestic and external affairs.

At any rate, the cornerstones of Germany’s foreign policy are more important today than ever before: Europe – and, no matter how difficult this may be for some – the transatlantic partnership, multilateralism.

Foreign policy today means conducting international politics aimed at creating more equitable and stable globalisation with more winners and fewer losers. We will only generate more security if we strengthen global justice on a durable basis. I’ll never forget that just a few days after the devastating attacks of 9/11, I took part in an ecumenical service where a Catholic bishop, Josef Homeyer, said: “Those who want to contain the situation once more must remember that globalisation must mean justice for all and not wealth for the few.”

Global justice and international security are two sides of the same coin. My work in this office will continue to be guided by the idea that both must grow in importance at an equal pace.

We have an answer for this: Europe. Even though it’s in a difficult state today, Europe remains the biggest civilisation project of the 20th century. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to preserve a project built by people who suffered great hardship. Listening to some of the moaning about the difficulties facing Europe, I’ve asked myself time and again how it must have been for the French President, for the Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers and Italians to invite Germany to join them at the European table just a few years after a horrendous genocide. How much courage these men and women must have had, for this decision can’t have been especially popular among ordinary citizens. I believe we need this courage again today and there’s every reason to have it. For in no other part of the world do people – despite all our tribulations – enjoy more democracy or live in greater security than they do on the European continent.

So much is at stake in Europe this year. Indeed, the future of European integration as a whole is at stake in the presidential elections in France. We can’t remain neutral here, for this will affect us all! We will have to fight for this Europe. That is one of the reasons why my first trip as Foreign Minister will take me to Paris tomorrow.

And I’m certain that Europe will be a main focus of my work in the coming months.

The close transatlantic partnership is another fundamental principle of German foreign policy. Regardless of the tone of the comments we are hearing from the US: we must remain oriented towards maintaining this principle!

That’s why I’m looking forward to meeting Rex Tillerson as soon as possible. I’m keen to hear his views on the challenges we face on both sides of the Atlantic.

Our hand should remain outstretched. We have to offer cooperation in a spirit of respect based on the values which have shaped transatlantic relations during the last few decades: openness, honesty and defence of the ideas on which our constitutions are founded: democracy, freedom and the rule of law. And always responsibility for one another.

However, we will have to show self‑confidence and fill the space which may be created if the United States turns away from international cooperation and in international trade. We will have to place the partnership with China on a new and fair footing, offer Europe and Germany as an alternative to the ASEAN states following the termination of the TPP trade agreement and use the Indo-German intergovernmental consultations and the G20 summit to present our country and Europe as a still fair but self‑assured partner. All of this will open up ground which we have to enter and use with determination and resolve.

***

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let’s enter into this new chapter in a constructive spirit!

You, my colleagues, demonstrate in your day‑to‑day work the effectiveness and diversity of the instruments which Germany uses in foreign policy and which we can employ to move things forward.

– Germany is one of the world’s biggest donors of humanitarian aid today.

– Germany is leading the way when it comes to fostering stability and post‑conflict peacebuilding.

– Where political communication is lacking, Germany builds bridges through an active cultural relations and education policy.

– Germany is therefore a respected and constructive mediator in conflict management.

In all of these fields we know that we cannot resolve anything by going it alone. By contrast, we can achieve a lot if we work together.

That was illustrated not least by the work of my predecessor. Let us build on that.

Thank you very much for your warm welcome.

from UK & Germany http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoservice/Presse/Reden/2017/170127-Antrittsrede-BM_Gabriel.html?nn=479796

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In light of subsequent events change my mind and decided to post my tag rant about this.

Fact checked, everything said here is verifiable. IDK if there's enough information to link that Vance is taking plays straight from the Nazi party, but he did say this. It seems too on the nose to be a coincidence, but I have some thoughts on that.

I don't know who this Joel Swanson is that he would know all this off the cuff either. The woman hit also very much doesn't like Haitians which is suspicious AF.

Final thoughts: the President has the power to try to pass some kind of measures now to protect immigrants but is not going to.

The fact that this is happening around the election at all is definitely suspicious, but I can't definitively say if this is evidence of Republican Nazi ideology especially with how beneficial this is to Kamala that it appears that way.

If there is foul play involved here which party is reponsible? I think either party is more than capable of framing the other. The Democrats have motive to create a false story as well which is worth acknowledging, especially to make their opponents seem dangerous.

I don't know that the Democratic party didn't hear what Vance said and fabricate ALL this as some kind set up/framing attempt because they saw the opportunity and I still don't think they have the pull they need.

This Joel immediately crawled outta the woodwork to make accusations that linked into something Vance JUST said like he was at the ready. And this news source only has medium credibility and says "a Post reporter" witnessed this at random and was on scene asking questions. Jack Morphet and Patrick Reilly cowrote the article, but with how much attention this has now, I'd love to hear more about the witness and again why this Joel knew all this trivia off-hand.

I'm just having a really hard time figuring out which party is the fascists this election because it's starting to look like both of them.

I'm leaning towards the Democrats are reponsible for this given just the timing and that there is one solitary suspicious article, and how much this all benefits Kamala.

(Written right before Trump's 2nd attempted assassination)