#ive been thinking about this since i made it and i saw that tweet yesterday pslkjhgfhj like why is he doing the exact same pose

[manchesterau]

[leafybfdia]

ii2 ep 16 act 1 spoilers

um so this act has utterly decimated me. i had work to do yesterday and i found myself completely unable to do any of it. i woke up this morning and my first thought was about this episode. i went out today and all i could think about was this episode. i came home and ate and had to take a nap because my head hurt from thinking about this episode. i slept for 3 hours and dreamt of ii. ive done nothing today except think about ii2 ep 16 act 1. i didnt even act like this when firey revived leafy and i literally go insane over any leafy crumbs. point is i think i need to talk about it to release me. this is just gonna be my speculation for some things. ok? ok

the contestants

ive seen people debating about whether cobs is lying about mephone making the contestants but i think hes genuinely telling the truth considering the fact that 1. they glitch at the end and 2. the foreshadowing and 3. brian and co have been laughing it up over at animationepic hq or wherever LOL. but one thing i do think is worth discussing is whether or not mephone was even like consciously aware of what he was doing. i thought it was heavily heavily implied that he didnt realize (considering that when cobs asks “why did you do it?” hes like huh whuh) but then brian tweeted this

but then again he could be fucking with us. like you never know. and also i mean the question WAS pretty vague.

PERSONALLY im team subconscious. i think the writers are trying to hurt us and subconscious would hurt more.

another thing to mention is that the settings of inanimate insanity are very likely made up considering that the s2 location has literally prime shimmer planet eggs or whatever as hills in the background, and the island in iii is called “inanimate island” iirc. the same alliteration cobs mentions. and of course it could just be some pre-existing island that he renamed himself for the show but at this point i feel like anything is possible

whos real and who isnt

so that leads to this. who the hell is made up then??

i genuinely wanted to argue that bow could be real considering the fact that she came into the show on her own against mephones own wishes and also cant be revived but if team subconscious is right then it would have been possible for mephone to just have made her up too so like… i dont know. I dont know… it’s scary….

oh and that leads to another thing i kept seeing

the “bow is a prime shimmer” theory or whatever that i keep seeing

… guys im going to be honest i think we’ve reached the point of delirium. on one hand i vaguely understand where these ppl are coming from since bow made a prime shimmer sound and the egg that 3gs gave to cobs was pink (and i saw someone say it had a bow symbol on it but i just couldnt see it????) but i otherwise… dont see it? she doesnt look like a prime shimmer guys. sorry. anyways

mephone x

good goddamn lord. so get a load of this guy.

one thing i havent really seen people talk about is how only the specific targets can see mephone x and no one else. of course this is like WTF! before it’s revealed that everyones “not real” but like. i mean it’s assumed that cobs is the one controlling this thing. idk if this thing has agency and is just following cobs orders or if its just a vessel for cobs to control or what but it really begs the question as to like. how can he make mephone x be invisible to everyone else? are the contestants “made up” in the sense that theyre just code, and hes entering the mainframe or whatever? like. im assuming thats what it is but like Oh My God? and what the fuck is going on with his targets?

everyone keeps saying that like ohhh hes targetting those who were in the middle of talking with others but i dont think thats necessarily the case. i think thats just for the drama. even though it’s been said that it’s up for interpretation if guava and soap were killed too i at the very least think guava is dead dead since his disappearance was mentioned before even pickle died. starfruit says that guava just “ditched” so he wasnt talking to anyone. i genuinely think anyones fucked. speaking of which:

is the death thing permanent

honestly? im scared to answer this. on one hand im like well no these characters have important arcs they need to fulfill but on the other hand i feel like we genuinely may be hit with the madoka magica treatment here where death is sudden, unexpected, permanent, and terrifying.

my biggest fear is the ending being like everyone coming to terms with the fact that theyre not real and just fading away like they got thanos snapped or something. but i think soap and mics interaction is foreshadowing. soap deletes a picture of them together and opens the recently deleted pictures album and goes “oops, missed a spot!”. i think toilet, oj, pickle, nickel, and potentially soap and guava are in some kind of digital trash can right now and can still be saved. chat i have to believe

box

so. rememebr box you guys.

… i dont think hes “the first victim” or whatever. although it is an interesting theory

people seem to be able to communicate with box? which makes sense since theyre all made up and if box is made up too then well theyre like all the same guys. but like… his whole not reacting thing is mentioned too so. i mean. huh?

i dont remember if bot ever interacted with box before he got injured too. and im too tired to rewatch the first parts of season 3. but them interacting with box would have implications since they were like the only confirmed contestant so far that mephone hasnt made himself

toilet

oh yeah hes fucked. he has been fucked for YEARS!!!!!!!!!!!!! we just finally got confirmation that like yep no that man is DIED. although it confirms that toilet too isnt real which makes my whole “is bow real” thing kind of a stretch since he didnt like bow or toilet and yet they were still there

of course his carcass wasnt shown so it’s like ohh maybe he just got kidnapped or whatever.

and also adam was being controlled by cobs, and adam DID hire toilet… IS toilet real? if he isnt then did another mephone make toilet for cobs so he could send him out?? im in so much pain

honorable mentions and misc

- test tube and fan making bot is made slightly better because they didnt realize both bow and marshmallow were still. “alive”. bows not really alive though but you know what i mean. STILL DOESNT EXCUSE IT THOUGH

- do you think mephone made santa because of his childish whimsy and joy. like he wanted santa to be real so bad. Guys im sorry im not rewatching that episode i dont remember what even happens

- the season 3 contestants being at the hotel is… it’s not IMPOSSIBLE i guess since oj knows them. still frightening. they like literally spawned in it was the scariest shit ever. i remember when i was at the meetup i noticed that candles asset used in the theater etiquette video was season 2ified and i was like LOL thats a little unnecessary. like the face and limbs sure but the asset itself? Anyways yeah no that was completely necessary.

- according to brian the plot twist was planned since 2015 at the latest, so around the episode “theft and battery” when cobs is first shown. do with that what you will.

- ballpoint pens resemblance to cobs was not a funny coincidence.

- i genuinely got scared that mephone was confirmed to be a babys or something but as im rewatching it like 20 times yeah no i think cobs is just infantilizing him. Can i be honest mephone has always had old man voice to me

- do you think mephone made springy so he could feel like he had a normal childhood. sniffle

- bot, the one contestant he didnt make, was his favorite. Do with that what you will.

- no i dont think suitcases psychosis was her just “seeing reality as how it is”. i feel so bad for suitcase especially btw. im team suitcase i always have been they could never make me hate her.

- walkie talkie. FUCK

my predictions

- lightbulbs a goner im so sorry. lightbulb was literally trending on twitter earlier idk if it still is but shes FUCKED. she has the X on her face in the thumbnail and shes a fan favorite. someones gonna argue with her like ohh you cant make this positive lightbulb and then shes gonna be like Chat whats that sound… (she would say 100% say chat. to me)

- the rest of the season 3 contestants HAVE to be shown. theyre involved in this too man. clover fluttering away on her butterflies to whereever she went after she got eliminated and im like THIS INVOLVES YOU TOO. GET BACK HERE

- mephone will deny that he made everyone up but as he begins to doubt himself everyone will start glitching out

- i think bot will be called in here. cobs cant do shit to them mephone x wise

- no one wins here. even if they do get physical with cobs and suitcase idk beats him to death with hammers. idk if theyd show deatj and dying on screen but it’s like. ok but then what. youre still made up by mephone. take those million dollars if mephone even has the fucking money. what then. literally what then

- i wanted to say maybe mephones realization of his creation skills lets him create something or someone powerful enough to defeat cobs but like. you know. mephone x. then again though like you never know. thats the one thing here. if you know something no you dont

- 40 min fantube makeout scene thats unskippable because the entire time cheesy is in the background with a blank expression stating important plot related facts with no hint of emotion whatsoever

tldr

[gaysexunfortunately]

something confessional 01.rtf

It’s been. I don’t know. Like two months sinc e I stopped taking wellbtrin. At one point this spring I just noticed my pill minder had like a 4 day backlog and I still felt fine as opposed to every other time I forgot my meds two days in a row and immediately wanted to kill myself. So I said fuck it and stopped taking wellbutrin. I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t tell anyone for two weeks because I have a tendency to tell a bunch of people when I first start a project and then enver fllow through and it makes me feel like total shit and a fucking retard for ever saying anything. 

So like 5 days in I told Shannon that I had gone off the pills after consulting my psychiatrist and I couched it in that lie so she woulndt worry about me like she always does and I fucking hate it more than anything else when people WORRY about me. sinc e she thought I did it like a normal person would she was supportive which was nice and after that I don’t think I really said anything about it to anyone else for a while.

eventually I told my therapist who I don’t really like but I still keep seeing because I think people would be concerned if i stopped seeing her that I had gone off the m unsupervised or maybe I told the same lie because I just repeat the fucking lies I tell otherwise I know I’ll slip up and reveal the truth that’s behind all these small facades and diversins I maintain i n my everyday life for some fuckng reason so now she knows and the last person who doesn’t whwo “should” know is my actual psychiatrist who is some kind of hog from fenway health who prescribes me adderall which is the only drug other than estrogen I’m still taking.

I fucking hated taking the wellbutrin. and the hydroxyzine. and the folic acid. and my multivitamin. so many fucking pills just to make me function normal instead of lying in my bed all day thinking of creative ways I could paint my brains on a wall as a copiing mechanism for never being able to live up to the expectations I set for myself which is a problem costar predicted I had when I signed up for it recently. but I’d miss two doses in a row, or even one day’s dose, and 48 horus later I’d be horizontal, eyes fixed upwards, thinking about how it is not worth it at all to live a life where i have to take like six pills a day and inject shit into my thigh muscles once a week just to remain barely fucntional in the long run (adderall doesn’t count because it makes me feel like a god) and how I was going to have to do this routine for the rest of my life and every time i missed one pill I was going to have a day of feeling like this for the resto f my life.

im so fucking sick of seeing my therapist. i feel like ive done most of the work myself to get anything out of therapy which is probably to be expected because other people cant fix you but I feel like she hasnt even offered any ideas she just kind of mm-hmms me and sometimes tells me i forgot to zelle a copay and once every three months or so she brings up the time she was late to an appointment in 2019 and I tweeted “my therapist is 15 minutes late which is already making me feel a lot bnetter about myself” and I really wish she shouldn’t but much like flat out not going to therapy any more I don’t know how to tell her I don’t want to hear about that any more.

and im on cypionate so therapy days are injection days which keep my internal clock pretty steady all things considered.

I don’t think you’re supposted to stop taking 300mg of wellbutrin cold turkey because your seasonal affective wore off but it’s worked out well for me so far. im alot more tired lately and find myself sleeping a lot but that’s sort of eased up in the last couple months but I find myself constantly fighting the urge to sort of slip back into the depressed sorry state I was in from before I started taking antidepressants. I had a really good day yesterday where I saw like four different friends over the course of the day and I felt really good and today I felt like shit and now I’m in bed drinking johnny walker and writing this. 

I think I maintain a facade of white lies to keep everyone around me from asking if I’m ok. I hate it when people ask if I’m ok. I feel guilty if I express how I really feel and they get concerned for me so I just tell them I’m fine and I”m plugging along doing what a normal human being should be doing like filing job applications and practicing bass guitar but ost of my free time I”m jsut fucking sitting in my room killing time because I”m scared of trying something and failing. And I was cool with that feeling on wellbutrin because I didn’t really get depressed about ityou know. But now I’m off it and I am fucking terrified. maube it’s because I stopped taking the anti anxiety pills too but I have been holding back the urge to cry and fantazise aboutall the cool ways I could kill myself like I used to from like 2010-2022.

I’ve never cried in therapy or in front of anyone really. I don’t like to show that weakness because when I did in childhood my parents would blame it on each other look what you did, you made him cry so I just tell my therapist “I want to get my money’s worth haha” like I’ll tear up or stay quiet for a while but I’ve never really broken down and sobbed infront of anyone. when my boyfriend would stay for the night in like 2019 and I had to cry I’d go to the bathroom and weep into a folded towel so I wouldnt make any or too much noise. 

I really don’t want to start taking antidepressants again. it’s like a compressor and it flattens out all the highs as well as the lows. I’ve had some good moments in the time since I stopped taking them and I think now that Im not smoking a ton of weed any more I actually have perspective on when things are good and bad and how much time has passed between those points. but I think I’m going to cointinue to make not a lot of noise. I don’t want anyone to ask me if I’m ok. 

[renlimotroll]

Everything’s alright (when you’re with me)

Warnings: Personification/ Imagination/ Out of Character

Summary: Five times Siruko-san took care of others, and one time they took care of him

AU where Bintroll are living together! Siruko SickFic since our lovely Bintroll leader tweeted yesterday that he was sick :(

A/N: Hello, Ren here! 🌻 I’ve been stressed again, and at this point I think people are purposely pissing me off so I could produce something good out of it. Sigh. Just a warning, there might be a Mintosu-Siruko moment there, but it really is platonic, I swear. Enjoy!

This story is dedicated to Rin-chan. Rin-chan, I hope you feel better!

(Story continues below)

I

“For goodness' sake Minben-san! Just get in the car! We have a dentist appointment in 15 minutes!” Siruko shouted. “No way! I told you I don’t need it! I”m f—-” “See! You can barely even speak! If it was hard to understand you before, now I have ZERO idea of what you’re saying! Get in the car!” “I want to play!” Mintosu whined. “Get in--” Siruko’s eyes narrowed threateningly, his tone taking a dangerous note.  “--the car.” Mintosu gulped and obeyed. Siruko-san rarely got angry, but when he did, no one won against him. It was a rule in the house never to make him really angry... The guy’s patience was very long and he was so kind, so making him angry means you’ve really pushed all his buttons. It was an impressive feat to make Siruko angry, but unless you want people hating you and shoving pointy things at your throat, no one made Siruko angry. Everyone loves Siruko-san and would die for him. You’d have to be a really horrible person to make Siruko-san angry.

After the dentist appointment, Siruko was driving them home. Mintosu was clutching his swollen cheeks, rambling meaninglessly again. He was high on anaesthesia. “I’m cooking rice porridge for you, then you’re sleeping. Does it still hurt?” “Yadaaa, it tassstesss wike cawvvoard, A dun wanna eat Hakowtarow…” Mintosu complained. Siruko rolled his eyes and sighed.

Later, as he was cooking, he found out that Minben-san was trying to turn on his PC. “What are you doing?! Are you nuts?! You are not streaming! What if you get an infection??” “But I wanna APEX..” “And I wanna play Lost Ark but here I am taking care of you!” If Minben-san was already a pain-in-the-ass when he was healthy, he was ten times more difficult when he’s in pain or sick. Siruko prayed to all gods to give him more patience, and pulled out the plug of Min-san’s PC. The berseker streamer sulked.

Much later, Minben-san comes down with a fever as expected. Siruko stayed up all night, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth, making sure he rested well. He gave him his pain medicine and water. He felt sorry for the guy, knowing how wisdom tooth extractions are painful. “Siruko-san…” “Nani?” “Thank you…” A small smile formed at the purple head’s lips. “You’re welcome.” “Are you gonna leave?”  Even though this man is stubborn as heck, he can be quite clingy when sick. Siruko-san thought it was cute. “Of course not. Sleep, Minben-san, I’ll be here.” He brushed the man’s sweaty hair and kissed it innocently, small smile staying on his face.

II

When Siruko-san passed by Jiraichan’s door, he heard some groaning. He dashed inside and didn’t even knock. “Jiraichan, are you okay?!” He saw the man in a fetal position, curled up on his bed, clutching his stomach in pain. Siruko-san hurried to his side, worriedly checking. “You have a stomachache?” “Un..” “What did you eat?” “I... I think I ate too much oysters yesterday.” Siruko shook his head disapprovingly. He warned the pink guy to be careful last night, when he went out with Quartetchi and Ichihachi-kun. Jiraichan likes eating out, and despite being the smallest in Bintroll, he might have the biggest appetite among them.  “Hang on, I’ll get some medicine.”  “Siruko-saaan… I feel…” Immediately Siruko grabbed the trash bin, barely making it as Jiraichan puked his guts out. He rubbed the guy’s back soothingly, holding back his hair as the guy heaved his insides out. “I’ll get some water.”

When he came back, he found Jiraichan listless on the bed, clutching weakly the big teddy bear Quartet gave him. Siruko helped him sit up, forcing him to drink water and the medicine. He also tried to make him eat the broth he warmed. "Yada Siruko-san… I’ll just vomit it…” “You have to Jiraichan, it’s better to have something to puke, plus you haven’t eaten anything all day. Please?” Siruko used his pien eyes, which was effective every time. Soon, after 6 spoonfuls, he let Jiraichan go to sleep, running his fingers through Jiraichan’s hair the way he knew Jiraichan liked. “Get well soon,” He whispered, kissing Jiraichan’s hair, not minding that Jiraichan hadn’t showered and probably smelled like puke. “Love you Siruko-san,” Jiraichan replied sleepily, surprising Siruko-san, because he thought the pink guy was asleep. That earned a soft smile on his lips, humming a lullaby so the pink fairy can rest.

III

Ichihachi was in-charge of dinner tonight, and he felt like making mapo tofu. He already went to the grocery to buy the ingredients and was now in the kitchen preparing everything. Siruko-chan dropped by with a grin, “Need any help?” “Sure! Thanks!” Siruko went to grate the ginger as Ichihachi got the knife to slice the leeks.

“AH!” Siruko looked up instantly, startled at the sound of pain. Blood was dripping from Ichihachi’s finger as the man stood there in shock. Siruko quickly grabbed a towel and Ichihachi’s hand, placing it under the running water in the sink. Ichihachi grimaced and whimpered in pain. The purple head tried squeezing the blood out a little, making Ichihachi wince.

After a few seconds, Siruko washed it with soap and dried it gently. He fetched the first-aid kit and took out the bandage, wrapping the finger with as much care as he can. “Thank goodness it wasn’t deep enough that you’d need stitches.” Siruko commented, making Ichihachi a little pale. After he was done, Siruko placed a soft peck on the wound, making Ichihachi’s face red. “Thanks Siruko-chan,” he mumbled, clearing his throat out of embarrassment. “No problem! Why don’t you let me handle the slicing part and you can just make the sauce.” Ichihachi nodded in agreement, his ears still red from what Siruko did for him. Siruko continued slicing the leeks, a playful smile on his lips.

IV

A knock on his door was heard, and Quartet groaned. With heavy footsteps, he trudged his way over, opening it to find Siruko-san. “Hey, are you okay? You haven’t been out there for a while, and usually it’s me or Minben-san you guys have to drag out of the room.” “I’m fine, just busy working.” Quartet answered, massaging his temples. Siruko didn’t fail to notice that. “Hmm… well, don’t forget to eat, okay?” “Sure.”

Hours passed, and Quartet didn’t notice his stomach complaining. He had a deadline to finish, and he needed to meet it so that he can finally play with the guys and shoot for a video. Someone knocked on his door again, and Quartet sighed, hoping he didn’t look that annoyed. “Tada!” Siruko-san was there, holding a tray of what looks like pasta. It did smell delicious, and his stomach rumbled on sight. Quartet rubbed his neck sheepishly. “Thanks, Siruko-san,” he mumbled, taking the tray from him. Siruko followed him inside his room, picking up the pieces of clothes Quartetchi had always meant to put to the hamper. “Once you’re done with work, you should totally rest. You’re having a bad migraine, Quartetchi.” He did? Quartet-san didn’t notice. He gobbled up the food quickly in his hunger. Siruko scolded him to slow down. “Here, I grabbed some medicine. Drink it and rest, okay?” “But–” “The video can wait, Quartetchi.” Siruko pointedly remarked. “Rest, or you’ll make Ichihachi-kun and Jiraichan worry. Do you really want them coming over here and fussing over you?” Quartet made a face. Nope, he loves them, but the two combined would make his migraine worse. Siruko-san was good at blackmailing. “Fine. I promise.” “Yeah, like I’ll believe you. Take the medicine, I’ll stay here until you finish working.” Siruko pulled out his Switch from his pocket and settled on the yankee’s futon. Quartet sighed, he’s too tired to argue and just let him be. He took the pill and washed it down with the juice, then started typing again.

A few hours later, he felt himself being gently shook. “Quartetchi, Quartetchi,” Only one person called him that. The gray head blinked a few times to clear his vision to see Siruko-san standing over him. “You fell asleep for a couple hours, actually. Sorry, I wanted to let you sleep in more but I know you need to finish that deadline.” Eh? He fell asleep? Oh, there was a blanket on his shoulders. “Thanks, Siruko-san,” he smiled gratefully, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He did feel better, and his head didn’t feel like it was being chainsaw-ed open anymore. Siruko-san was right, he needed rest. But Quartet’s still thankful he woke him up to finish his work. The man really thinks of everything. “I’ll sleep too. Good luck with your project.” Siruko returned Quartet’s smile and dropped a small kiss on the top of his head. Quartet blushed, but he immediately felt loads better. Yosh, he was going to kill this presentation. Siruko left the room and closed the door silently, the gentle smile still on his lips.

V

“You don’t need to do this Niisan, I can take care of myself.” Siruko fluffed the pillow while his younger brother stood behind him. Hakotaro's arm was in a cast; he fell down the stairs and his arm received the consequence. Thankfully it wasn’t the arm he used to draw, but it was still an inconvenience. Siruko himself rushed to the hospital after learning the news, worried sick about his brother.

Thankfully, it didn’t need surgery. Hakotaro had to be in a cast for a couple of weeks though, and his Niisan was, of course, fussing over him more than usual. Hakotaro was usually the one mother-henning his older brother, so he wasn’t used to this. Being a worrywart apparently runs in the family, as Siruko was perfectly capable of displaying at the moment. “I know you can, but once in a while, let your Niisan take care of you.” Hakotaro flustered, but let him be. When Niisan sets his mind on something, he’s unstoppable. Siruko may be bad at taking care of himself, but his Niisan is really good at taking care of others.

Hakotaro let himself be tucked into bed and took the pain relievers his Niisan gave him. Siruko sat down beside him, lips turned up wistfully. “Remember when we were kids and you got sick that one time? You never get sick so we all got worried.” Hakotaro snorted playfully. “I do. You cried that time.” “I didn’t!” Siruko mock-scowled. He then started to brush Hakotaro’s hair, humming softly. Hakotaro closed his eyes, feeling like a child again, safe and comfortable with his Niisan promising to protect him. “Thanks Niisan.” “Hmmmm. Get well soon, my baby brother.” He felt a warm kiss on his forehead, and Hakotaro sighed contentedly. “Love you.” ”Love you too.” Siruko continued humming and stroking his brother’s blonde hair until he was sure he was asleep. The smile on his face was fond.

+1

“Dakara… I’m not… ACHOOO!” Siruko sneezed like his soul left his body. His brother handed him a handkerchief to wipe his nose. “-- sick. I'm not sick." The rest of the Bintroll members around the dining table looked at each other in concern, then everyone stood up and moved. Siruko whipped his head back and forth wondering what they were doing all of a sudden, but that movement made him dizzier and he felt like throwing up. “Hai hai, get up Siruko-san.” Mintosu gently but firmly lifted him out of his chair, hands on his shoulder steering him towards his room. “Minben-san,” Siruko sniffled. “I’m not sick.” “Of course you’re not, who told you you’re sick…” Mintosu opened the door then fluffed his pillows and bed. He successfully manhandled Siruko towards the bed, Siruko’s protests and struggles too weak to be even considered as protests and struggles. "You totally don’t look like you’ve been run over by a truck, your eyes aren’t bloodshot red, you’re not sniffing every second, and you don’t feel as if you’re burning in hell right now.” Mintosu tucked him in perfectly. He took a quick peck on the purple head’s forehead, and yep, he didn’t need a thermometer to know that the purple head was burning up real bad. “You’re totally not sick.” “I need to… check the replies and comments…” “I can totally do that, you know,” Quartet came in with a thermometer discreetly tucked in his pockets. He roamed around the room, secretly pocketing Siruko-san’s Switch and cellphone. He would have to look around later for other gadgets Siruko might possess, because if Siruko-san finds those, he’s never gonna rest. “Want me to write you a report?” He snickered. A few moments later, Jiraichan and Ichihachi came in, the latter carrying a bowl of what seems like soup. “Here Siruko-chan, eat this. It’ll make you feel better.”  “But I’m not—” “Yep, you’re not sick.” Ichihachi nodded seriously. “But I made this, won’t you eat it?” No one can really say no to Ichihachi’s persuasion, and Siruko is helpless. He can’t really taste the soup, but the warmth is making his stomach settle. “Siruko-san.” “Nani?” He turned to Jiraichan. “Gomen, can you open your mouth?” “Wh-aaaaii!!” Jiraichan quickly shoved a pill in, covering Siruko’s mouth until the poor guy was forced to swallow the pill. When Jiraichan let him go, he was coughing and hacking his lungs out. “Sorrryyy,” Jiraichan smiled cutely, turning on his charm. Siruko glared at him weakly, choking from the pill. “I told you guys, I’m not…” “Hai hai, you’re not sick, we get it.” Hakotaro came in, Mintosu opening the door for him. He was carrying a small wash basin with a damp cloth on it. “You’re not sick, and we’re not taking care of you.” Hakotaro placed the damp cloth on his brother’s sweaty forehead. “You guys don’t have to do this.” Siruko whispered weakly. “Yeah, and you totally didn’t have to take care of me when I broke my arm, but you did.” Hakotaro placed a kiss on his arm shyly. “You didn’t have to stay as I worked just to make sure my migraine doesn’t get worse.” Quartet kissed his temple. “You didn’t have to bandage my sliced finger. Really, it wasn’t even that bad.” Ichihachi kissed the back of his hand. “You didn’t have to watch me throw up but you rubbed my back and I really liked that.” Jiraichan was about to kiss his stomach, but Quartet stopped him. Jiraichan sighed and kissed Siruko’s cheek. “And you didn’t have to take me to the dentist, force-feed me my pain meds, and put up with my stubborn, difficult ass, but you did.” Mintosu smirked, then suddenly he swooped in and kissed Siruko’s lips chastely in a second. “So no, we don’t have to take care of you, but we want to.” Hakotaro declared. “Because you always take care of us.” Siruko felt like crying, and maybe a few tears did escape. He never realized it, but now he feels so loved and appreciated. He chuckled softly, a warm smile on his lips. “Thanks minna. Love you all.” “We love you too,” they replied softly. Siruko closed his eyes, feeling warm and safe with his family beside him.

Owari!

A/N: Hope you guys like it! This is unedited, so there might be errors, gomen. Please take care of yourselves minna, and make sure to not overwork yourselves like me and Siruko-san! Siruko-san please get well soon T^T Have a nice day! 🌻

[5sosbitchfest]

Alrighty, Nonsters.  We currently have 290 Asks in our box!  As much as we might try, I know there is NO WAY we’re going to be able to get through all of them.  Everything exploded this weekend when MessyGate went down!   I don’t want to ignore any asks just because I already answered a similar one.  So, I’ve tried to gather as many similar Asks as possible to let your your voices be heard.  Y’all are definitely NOT alone in your feelings.  Get ready for a lot of opinions on Messy’s Twitter Drama.  

Also, if you sent in an Ask and we haven’t answered it yet, please feel free to resubmit it!  I do try to scroll through all of them but it is a daunting task and personal stuff and work make it difficult for me to get through everything in a timely manner!

********************************

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I’m really disappointed in Luke and this band in general, the way they deal with things. “honest policy” with messy? So he knew all of this and it was okay? Or he confronted her on this and he is okay with what she has done? I’m not sure this whole thing would be a deal breaker for me, but it certainly would make me real mad at my SO and some whiny excuses wouldn’t be enough to make things alright. Radio silence would’ve been much better than that story he posted, made himself look like a fool.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: These girls will sooner or later become their downfall if their management or them does not realise they should rely on other things than bringing relationship up front to sell their music. I find it extremely bad that they are behaving as if nothing happened, I hope there will be changes once touring will be possible again and we won’t see these girls tagging along everywhere or being brought up in interviews all the time but somehow I’m not counting too much on that.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I wonder if Luke knows everything that Messy got exposed for or just the parts Messy wanted to show him. Bc Luke said in his Story that he wasn't online lately so maybe he wasn't on Twitter too and Messy just showed him the parts that make her look good and he still doesn't know that she spoke bad about Ashton or how she stalked the fans also after she knew that they didn't hack his email adress cause he wasn't on Twitter so he couldn't see the screenshots.🤷‍♀️

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I'm just waiting for the day one of them date someone who isn't a part of their circle. tired of them passing around the same toxic girls.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: These girls are just digging a whole for these guys and they want be able to get out of it soon

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: It was a chicken move for Sierra to do it as a reply and no one has talked on twitter that she deleted it because they probably think her deleting it is saying it wasn’t true

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: Am I the only one who thinks that guys really only heavily interact with us when they want to promote something or say something about the music? I do understand they have lives so being on Twitter isn't number one priority and with all the drama that surrounds this fandom its very easy to not want to be online a lot, I just can't help but feel that way

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I'm talking about this messy situation (no pun intended) with my friend and she said to me that Messy should consider changing her career if she can't handle that not all people are going to like her. (that ofc doesn't include any form of harassment bc that's not cool)

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I really don't know how to feel about the Luke situation. At first I was upset and disappointed of Luke but now I almost pity him bc real or not either the management would want Luke to defend her or Messy. And I think Luke isn't the kind of person who would stand up against the management or Messy (even though it would probably be better for him if he would). And most people don't realise when they're in a toxic relationship so I can't really blame him. I just hope this ends asap.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I literally was so angry and frustrated with Luke and this whole situation yesterday that I couldn’t even look at him on my home screen, I had to change it. It’s really a disappointing thing to witness. Whether management put him up to this or he genuinely believes this toxicity is okay, I’m just very grumpy with him at the moment. He deserves better and WE (the fans) deserve better.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I think Luke really needs to be in a relationship with sb who either isn't famous and doesn't want to be or with someone who is famous bc they have a successful career too and who doesn't need Like to be famous.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I’ve only seen a few accounts on Twitter who are attacking Messy and Crusty to the core and exposing every bad thing they’ve done with receipts for the sossies defending them! I’m happy that karma is finally getting to those con artist who think they can get away with anything

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: that recent lierra picture is photoshoped lmao. if you look at Sierra's hand you can see color coming off from it and her arm looks hella weird.her forehead looks hella weird and look couldn't have taken the picture because I doubt that he could stretch his arm that far and make a perfect picture. also we haven't even seen Sierra's face so I still don't believe they're together

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: The Lemon pic was like a punch in the face (even though Petunia and Luke are looking cute there). But I've been asking myself lately if Luke has seen the whole drama going around on Twitter or just the posts Messy wanted him to know so the ones who make her look like the victim (and not the ones where she insulted Ashton or she made it clear that she stalked his fans). Cause Luke said he hasn't been online lately.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I mean we dont know how much of the story he truly is aware of and how much s changed to fit her narrative and get L to feel bad for her. Plus he was under pressure from management to do damage control and not standing up for his gf is a very bad look for outsiders who dont understand why she's at fault. It was a pretty neutral statement and he was obviously told to make the post so I dont blame him and just blame her more for putting him in the situation in the 1st place

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I wonder how much toxicity happens behind the scenes, we know S is very manipulative and L is very much a people pleaser so.. and with how much they have to sell their "love" and "happiness" in the relationship. Minipulation is a powerful thing and it could explain why hes out of touch with reality, especially lately since he's isolated with her and doesnt have the voices of the band to raise any concerns and he's been getting skinny again and seems very "meh" rather than happy, idk

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I feel so disconnected with this fandom rn. I feel like no one is streaming CALM and that makes me sad bc it's such an amazing album. The boys aren't even online anymore, everyone is mad at each other and now Luke comes up with this shit... tbh I wish I would wake up tomorrow and see him tweeting something like yeah I'm sorry about my ig story I still love y'all lmao

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: Wait wait wait wait ive been gone from the fandom for a little while now and what the fuck is going on with Luke and S? What did S do that she made a fake ass apology for?? I’m so lost please help me! 😂

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I'm seeing a lot of my mutuals unstanning and I'm just so mad bc Sierra started this drama and got Luke into it and I'm sad that people are leaving bc of this, it's just too much toxicity and it shouldn't affect the band and their connection with the fans but with Luke saying this he makes it seem like he supports the ugly things she does

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I am a Luke stan and I've always loved him bc he has inspired me so much through the years but when he does this things it's like...damn. I feel like he's invalidating the fans' feelings by being like "if you don't like my girlfriend, ur fake" like he has never noticed me on Twitter or anything but my biggest fear is to be blocked by him or just ignored bc I don't like her (although I never expressed it publicly) n yeah anyways :// It feels weird

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: Going back and re-reading the DM’s messy literally confirms that she accesses Luke’s account by saying “we couldn’t get in” or some shit like that

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I hate being a luke stan, sometimes it just seems like he doesn't care? he always puts these toxic gfs before the ones who adore him and pay his bills. might just move into Cashton's lane. unproblematic kings.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: He literally posted a picture of him cuddling her and petunia within the hour

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: The saddest part of this situation is it’s like a repeat of Arzaylea. Luke has no idea what a respectful, mature relationship is. We saw it with Arz and were seeing it again it’s just a little bit different. He stays being controlled and manipulated by toxic partners. I really think homeboy needs to be single for a WHILE and focus on himself. He needs to unlearn the things his past and current relationships have taught him about love because if I know anything, it’s that this ain’t real love.

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: Is it bad that I just want the larzaylea drama back?? Like everyone could at least agree on their feelings then...

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: Just checked messy’s insta and of course, everyone that still supports her filled her tagged with just the single picture

Anonymous said to 5sosbitchfest: I feel like the reason Sierra is getting away with what she’s done is because she isn’t that known. Like yeah she’s associated with 5sos, but they’re also like not that big which is probably why it’s getting swept under the rug. I’ve only seen the 5SOS fandom calling her out for her actions. If this had happened with a well known celebrity, they probably would’ve been dragged and been trending on Twitter. I might be wrong but I feel like this is what’s happening which is just unfair.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on http://techcrunchapp.com/could-the-2011-lockout-give-us-one-hint-why-the-patriots-wanted-cam-newton-sports-illustrated/

Could the 2011 Lockout Give Us One Hint Why The Patriots Wanted Cam Newton? - Sports Illustrated

Camp opens for most teams a month from yesterday. Or at least it’s supposed to. Here’s what we’ve got for you this afternoon. …

Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports; George Walker IV / Tennessean.com via Imagn Content Services, LLC; Bob Leverone-AP

• Someone who has worked in New England made a pretty interesting point to me about the Cam Newton signing, as it relates to Bill Belichick’s brand of logic. He told me that in 2011, Belichick told everyone that the one thing that would kill the team early on, post-lockout, was being out of shape, and giving up big plays as a result of it. This guy then said, regarding Newton, “So what better way to pressure on a tired defense than have Cam back there?” And then there’s this—if the Patriots feel like they needed to be a little simpler to play fast on offense, Newton can facilitate that in allowing New England to build more off its run game. Now, I think the primary reason to sign here is giving yourself multiple shots at getting the quarterback position right, post-Tom Brady, and the signing absolutely fits Belichick’s pattern of buying low on prodigious talents (Randy Moss, Corey Dillon, Chad Ochocinco, Albert Haynesworth, etc., etc.) But the stuff specific to 2011 sure is a nice side benefit.

• I also think the contract terms Newton agreed to say more about this offseason than anything else. Spending is always craziest over the first wave of free agency. After that, there were a pretty high number of high-profile quarterbacks available—Andy Dalton, Joe Flacco and Jameis Winston among them—who were waiting for a market out that never heated back up for them. Guys like Teddy Bridgewater, Nick Foles and even Chase Daniel benefitted from coming off the market early on, while the market was hot. After that, the reality became clear, and that’s that for the first time in forever quarterback supply overwhelmed quarterback demand.

• One addendum to my MMQB take on the Patriots’ penalties for their media crew videotaping the Bengals’ sideline—that third-round pick they lost is significant, and because of more than just the blown draft capital. New England was cooperative and apologetic about the violation, but had hoped it would be assessed as a non-football misstep. The inclusion of the draft-pick penalty is the NFL implicitly holding Patriots football ops accountable.

• With the NFL football ops tweeting out July 28 as the start date for training camp, it’s worth noting that the Chiefs and Texans open earlier—the rule under the new CBA is teams can start 47 days before their opener. Since Houston and Kansas City are playing in the kickoff game, both will start camp on July 25. The Texans are welcoming in their rookies on July 18, and have the quarterbacks coming in on July 20. Chiefs QBs and rookies report on the 22nd.

• I’d love more from Colin Kaepernick on 2015-17 in his new Netflix doc, but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to be a part of it. He’s got an executive producer credit in the announcement, which means if he wants to keep that stuff out of there, that stuff will be kept out of there.

• Johnny Manziel told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that, for him, he views football as “in the past.” And that’s too bad. It’s been lost in the mess his life became, but Manziel was electric as a player and competitor, and he’s still just 27 years old. Because he was such a unique player, I always thought Doug Flutie was a good comp for him. It’s a shame we never really saw what he might’ve become over time.

• Bucs LB Shaq Barrett told SiriusXM radio Monday that he plans to sign his franchise tender if he doesn’t get a long-term deal by the July 15 deadline, and that raised an interesting X-factor for the others tagged but still unsigned—Bengals WR A.J. Green, Chiefs DT Chris Jones, Jaguars DE Yannick Ngaukoe and Broncos S Justin Simmons. Given all of the COVID-related issues, would it make sense for those guys to stay away until Week 1 to avoid getting infected, or being around those who come in with the virus? I think it’s a sort of interesting question, given the likelihood that some teams will have a significant number of cases through training.

• While we’re there, I thought Eagles OT Lane Johnson explained what players will be facing next month well: “Ultimately, it’s a risk that we’re all willing to take to go outside your house or whatever you’re doing, going shopping. I’ve been doing a pretty good job of staying in the house, doing my social distancing protocols. Yeah, with everybody it’s going to be a risk that we’re going to have to take and see what happens.” Really, it’s not unlike what many in America are facing (without the risk of having to physically run into your co-workers over and over again, of course).

• Just to update something we’ve been keeping an eye on, five of the NFL’s 32 first-round picks have signed. Last year at this juncture, 26 had signed. And there are veterans who still haven’t actually signed their deals either, because they can’t take physicals yet. Which, as you might imagine, has led some to be very careful about how they’re working out ahead of camp.

• All the best to long-time agent Paul Sheehy and his family. Per long-time Broncos beat man Mike Klis, Sheehy is battling COVID-19 and has been on a ventilator on Friday, which is another reminder of the seriousness of the virus, and the fact that we’re not nearly out of the woods with it yet as a country.

• Question or comment? Email us.

[luisneer]

selected tweets 2016-17

These are tweets from my first @luisneer twitter account. Recently I made a new twitter account with the same username, after having deleted my account and having been without twitter for several months. These tweets are from August 2016 to March 2017, which was most of my first year of college at Shepherd University, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I don't go to Shepherd anymore; I transferred to West Virginia University, in Morgantown, WV, after my second semester. My tweets from late March 2017 to [July or August] 2017, when I deleted my twitter, were not archived. 

I'm creating this blog post so the world will have access to some of my tweets from the deleted @luisneer, in case they have any merit as literature. I'm still not sure if I will continue to use twitter in 2018/the future. Usually when I use twitter I feel like I'm actually wanting to be doing something else, but I don't know what; or wanting to be using "another app" that doesn't exist. Twitter generally seems bad for me. Questions about my tweets August 2016-March 2017 can be directed at luisneer@gmail.com. Thank you

    2016

   morgantown has ~48 vape shops

 **morgantown has ~480 vape shops

 siri has werner herzog-like inflections

 considering changing outfits when i take several walks in one day (so nobody thinks im a serial killer, stalker, spy, alien)

 think i remember ~5% of things i said today

 imagined vague connection btwn 'vitamin d' and 'reptar'

 felt distinctly that i was a monkey or chimpanzee while crouching in the corner of my dorm room eating peanuts out of a jar

 just thought (as a request to my mom) 'fax me my skateboard...'

 looked at toilet in bathroom stall with expression of 'utter terror' for what felt like ~15 seconds while it flushed

 listening to bright eyes with headphones at house show

 feel that the toothpaste i use is advancing decay of my teeth

 feel 100% certain that i could train myself to use telepathy to operate my phone during classes

 enjoying the sensation of my right leg 'falling asleep' during psychology class (left foot is also 'asleep')

 felt 'sociopathic' after eye contact w library worker who watched me pick up & pocket a pair of apple headphones someone had left on a chair

 left stolen apple headphones on gray bench across the street from my dorm

 repeatedly placed/removed sunglasses while walking in hallway

 strong desire to remove all positive patterns from my life and perpetuate/embrace all negative ones

 feel that my laptop 'knows' which parts of its screen im looking at

 in winchester, VA

 thought of my own music as having 'no compelling audible elements'

 thought of myself as being legally named 'the fuck up', then couldnt remember my actual name

 successfully, i feel, duplicated 'sociopath facial expression' during eye contact with arch-nemesis in stairwell

 ive taken 13800mg ibuprofen since i got to college

 feel compelled to ask my 9 yr old brother for advice re 'college-level' personal issues

 feel smart after sitting on couch in painting studio + reading art magazines for 2 hours

 persistent notion that 100% of students at my college personally hate me

 psychology professor muttered something like 'scary snake... endocrine system...'

 feeling heavily drugged/sedated in psych class

 psych professor seems obsessed with/terrified by snakes

 imagined kanye smoking crystal meth and tweeting something like 'please help me... cant feel mouth... need help'

 saw a moth at open mic, thought about god

 experiencing difficulty trying to smile

 enjoying using numerous cliches ('the case is closed', 'taking a step back', 'harsh realities') in an essay

 intrigued by conversation i had 9 hrs ago w/ 2 boys who countered my tone (calm, eloquent) exactly by being loud and rude in a friendly way

 felt simultaneously really cute and really lonely while giggling with my mouth closed in french class

 imagined kanye inventing the word 'compactualize' and using it in a sentence during a televised interview

 enjoyed 8-sentence john updike bio in norton lit anthology

 perceived person standing outside bathroom stall occupied by me could 'sense', via something like echolocation, that i was/am depressed

 spoke to french professor in what felt like a distinct persona/alternate luis neer called 'marge simpson voice' luis neer

 feel confidently that the public debut of 'marge simpson voice' luis neer was a success

 feel that 'marge simpson voice' luis neer is the culmination of an unconscious process that initiated in my mind maybe 3-5 years ago

 i want to identify/analyze additional alternate luis neers

 i dont like videos

 i came to college and got weirder, better at writing, more arrogant, more defeated, more sensible

 simultaneously feel that i should run 3 miles and that, at this moment, i would be incapable of running any distance

 feel urged to draw new attention to my 'marge simpson voice' tweets

 huge power outage at shepherd lol

 realized theres no such thing as a 'nation'

 remembered ive blown off obligations to several people, not just one person, so my irresponsibility doesnt 'have a focus', felt comforted

 feel that my follower count is 'crystallized' / will never increase or decrease ever again

 struggled to convert 'stick-and-poke' to past tense during conversation in line at sheetz

 feel it would be pleasurable to take a donut + bottle of coca-cola from this sheetz via armed robbery

 crossed busy road, felt really surprised i didnt get hit by a car, also i wasnt wearing glasses, was walking to sheetz, bought an icee

 laughed alone in my dorm thinking that i should print out a picture of barack obama to put on my wall

 drank from separate glasses containing soymilk, coffee, iced coffee, apple juice, cranberry juice, water, sprite for dinner/breakfas

 just thought 'from adorno to zizek' sans context while shitting

 opened gmail, emailed my father, closed gmail, opened gmail again, viewed email to my father, forwarded it to myself

 'camcorder' would be a good band name

 i thought arnold palmer had already died

 willem dafoe doesnt make me uncomfortable

 i want to stop being mean

 i hate bfs but i want to be someones bf

 wishing i was in a car with friends and no cellular service

 tangled up in myself and others

 twin peaks is depicted as a small town but its population is greater than that of every city in west virginia including the state capital

 eating shark

 thought of my own intelligence as 'frightening'

 thought while walking to class that ginger ale should be made public domain

 had the stitches on my chin removed today, touched the scar tissue for the first time

 i miss being in therapy

 i love carpet

 i love carpet !!

 just thought about my own tweets and lol'd

 mood lately very fragile

 this is what i get for staying up til 5 am

 all night i've felt a wave of dread swelling up, now it's really hitting me

 sound of laughter in public still frightening + unnerving

 my instinct for when to unfriend people on facebook has adapted so that i unfriend people over statuses that make me feel no emotions at all

 fuck, im feeling so much terror

 gucci mane was born 3 days before conor oberst

 the other day i mentioned that i was a poet and this vape guy interrupted me to say "and you didnt know it" and i went fucking nuclear

 interacted with mailman who was picking up mail as i was trying to mail chapbooks, he didnt notice at first that i was talking to him

 what if old people have secrets

 my dad is making me root for a football team but im in pain emotionally

 i feel guilty in general

 thought of my poem "portrait of a nation without any people" as the "lead single" for my full length; it appeared in potluck 14 months ago

 im close friends with satan rn

 feel like travis scott never intended for people to spell his name with a $

 from now on every time i get honey on something ill list the thing in this thread

 finger

 desk

 coffee cup exterior

 pajama pants

 knee

 carpet

 chin

 phone

 shirt

 shoe

 thought that my elderly geography prof. moves by "shuffling"

 feeling shorter, broader

 the only part of the new bright eyes box set i want is the booklet

 is there a booklet? i know there are nvr b4 sn photos

 the song "lime tree" came to conor oberst in a dream

 i like citing things in MLA

 i write essays by pretending im werner herzog

 doesnt seem to be getting later

 lit professor gave my project (sequence of 6 sonnets) a C, i wish she would have gotten me expelled, shelley + ginsberg both were expelled

 heard someone in another room ask "where's wal-mart?" as if wal-mart were a person whose location could change

 i think i just swallowed a filling while eating popcorn, i am very scared, please help

 crazy how things get worse

 there are people on my floor having tons of fun and im upset

 bit my mattress while sitting in the chair next to my bed

 weird that chance the rapper only has 2.4 million followers when he's sort of one of the most famous artists in the world rn

 also weird that donald trump has made 34,000 tweets, seems like an incredibly large number

 the strangeness of yesterday was, for me, augmented by people on the internet talking about a tv show that ive never seen or heard about

 the sunlight is obscene

 im so upset about the sun being so bright im afraid to go outside

 im glad im the only poet who likes trailer park boys

 i slept in a blanket fort under my bed and havent left it all day

 yr = your ur = you're

 my favorite things are pdfs

 now that ive adapted my living space to allow me to never leave my blanket fort i feel like my roommate, omar, exists in a parallel universe

 i hear him but i never see him

 i love latte art, i drink many lattes

 thought that twitter "isn't worth it" in an upset tone while drinking mtn dew

 felt pleasant considering uniqueness of all parent-offspring relationships

 went through my closet + made sure all shirts and jackets were zipped/buttoned

 my blanket is generating flashes of light from static electricity

 record store guy became visibly sick of me several months ago; feel a little guilty every time i enter his store to spend money

 i prefer EPs

 felt "out of control" walking downhill listening to dead kennedys with headphones

 writing an essay is difficult because idk how much relevant information other people have already considered / moved on from

 have been wanting to write at least one poem inside my blanket fort but i don't think it's going to happen, i don't know why

 the internet isn't big enough

 usually when i think "i dont understand the uproar about [event]" i realize there is no "uproar"

 "uproar" is media's way of manipulating the public spotlight and distracting people from important tasks

 feeling helpless + melancholy after dying 15 times and killing 2 stormtroopers in star wars battlefront

 the only way to attain conor oberst-level emo hair is to lay in bed and sob for hours

 i'm sad

 my mom was confused when i told her my first book comes out today

 was luis neer in odd future

 thought "sometimes i just want to end it and start all over" in an exasperated tone re my goodreads account

 becoming increasingly convinced it would be best for me personally to take myself extremely seriously/never joke about myself

 thinking that my tweets would seem terrible if i were a senator/governor/other politician

 imagined doomsday device for future @starwars movies: the "death train," a normal train that exists in space and destroys planets

 how does anyone do it

 in science fiction movies, spacecraft usually look like shopping malls

 everyone in the world is high except me

 feel like i want to have poems published immediately

 having delusions of grandeur

 im sitting on my record player

 my most-used word in 2016 was "bleak"

 prepared and ate garbanzo beans w a lot of rosemart at 2:00 AM

 my brother has a friend over and is being mean to the friend

 all i want for christmas is to never cheer up, ever

 watching eyes wide shut and hugging duckuc

 my nose feels like it's going to bleed

 im sad because every bf looks like me

 getting better at eating ice cream by punching it with my tongue

 the internet is too freaky...

 i think 2017 will be a year of realizing things

 im watching the angry birds movie

 the angry birds movie is so shitty... why was it made...

 ive never had a new years kiss

   2017

   im weird

 eating medicinal ice cream

 im not going to do any drugs in 2017

 made a medicinal phone call

 i want to drink some blood

 i dreamed that roger ebert wrote a negative review of life after ppl and called it "liner notes"

 years dont kill people

 feel inexplicably/explicably really scared about the future of my poetry career

 i've felt stoned since i was a baby

 downloading google earth

 made eye contact in starbucks with possible luis neer incarnation from ~50 years in future; bon jovi "dead or alive" played through speakers

 realised that at some point in the future i will become extremely interested in watching football

 i recommend reading poems extremely slowly while touching the text with your middle finger/index finger

 experiencing cognitive dissonance

 used phonetic clues to correctly predict meaning of & use the word "tandem" while discoursing with myself internally

 i miss steel pedal guitar sounds on conor oberst songs

 my previous incarnation "college luis neer" has evolved to become "high school luis neer-like luis neer in college setting"

 thought "man, i got to stop caring what people think about me" in an emphatic tone that seemed confusing/interesting

 mediocore

 beyonce is cool i think

 i want to re-read "v for vendetta" and to not tweet about it

 remembered that i own a pinata

 i will be at awp

 how could i make twitter a better place

 i saw 4 people wearing yeezys in dc this weekend

 feeling increasingly self-conscious about how much i use the phrase "in the world" or refer to "the world" in poems

 felt robot-like while attaching detachable headphones cord to my headphones while wearing the headphones

 watching shepherd univ lacrosse team practice from "safety of" student center

 i invented releasing two chapbooks in one day

 im dumber than me

 reasoned mentally that im more likely to produce accurate drawings of myself because "i basically look like a bird, so i just draw a bird"

 i want to have a "fake tweet" (e.g. a simple phrase) to tweet repeatedly every time i feel urged to tweet an uninformed/unimportant opinion

 my fake tweet for the foreseeable future will be "i dropped my textbook in the stairwell". when i tweet this it means i have an opinion

 i dropped my textbook in the stairwell

 does anyone remember the chapter of "the hobbit" where bilbo avoids starvation by ingesting peanut butter, honey, cherry nyquil, and water

 sensed that all my college friends just simultaneously shifted from having vague/non-serious negative feelings about me to hating me

 resulting from continuous building of irrepressible/inevitable conjecture in the friends' conscious thoughts

 eating chicken and squash

 i click on 100% of poetry links tweeted by poets i follow

 when i was writing Waves i was obsessed with waves (e.g. energy waves, frequencies) and used the word "waves" at least ~10 times every day

 i dropped my textbook in the stairwell

 white nike swooshes on shoes of boy in library look vibrant/magical

 terrified of being cool

 walked to library really slowly while listening to noise music through big headphones

 i was really, really yung when i started publishing and i'm still really yung

 2 chainz always looks like he's walking in an airport

 i have 5 twitters

 i didnt know what bill paxton looked like, i was thinking RIP gene hackman

 why doesnt anyone blog about me

 thesis statements arent real

 thinking about my book

 i deleted both my tumblrs by accident

 sad about my tumblr

 my name is all over the internet

 im a lizard

 someday there'll be no more ppl

 a lot of conor oberst song titles have parentheses

 feeling sad about the actions of my clone, who passed away

 idk how to use venmo or what it is

 present-day tumblr is like the end of the never ending story where atreyu is talking with the rock biter and the nothing is swirling around

 when someone, anyone, is upset with me im afraid im going to be assassinated

 the views-era apple music ads that depict drake working hard in the studio have really affected and inspired me

 on tumblr i have 4 followers

 almost all of my tweets seem unimportant

 feel that if someone told me that one of my tweets made them upset i would just apologize and delete it

 ground control to commander venus

 i like my new tumblr

 i would be wearing a cardigan rn but i dont have one

 feel that i will continue to generate bright eyes-related content throughout my life

 is everything ok

 i look like michael moore

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2019, Part IV

Part III, Part II, Part I PRETTY PRETTY GOOD MOVIES

62. Shazam! (David F. Sandberg)- One of the most comic-booky movies to come around in a while in the sense that it seems to be in fast forward for the first third, using shorthands because it has too much story to tell. I am sad to report that Shazam! has no Movie Stars in it, and I didn't realize how essential those were to the superhero genre. There is a cagey standalone quality to its modest bets though. I like that it's anchored in a real place and isn't afraid to be a little too scary for kids. I would see it mostly as a product of potential though, for a funny Jack Dylan Grazer, for the filmmakers, and for the studio. As a student of weird billing, I have so many questions about Adam Brody getting awarded fifth lead for a bit part.

61. Fighting with My Family (Stephen Merchant)- Dwayne Johnson as producer feels like the auteur here, since the formulaic story has more to do with his combed-over, please-everyone persona than with Stephen Merchant's more messy, improvisatory style. I couldn't care less about the time spent on Jack Lowden's brother character, but I was impressed with the physical part of Florence Pugh's performance. This is a movie you've seen a hundred times, but it hits most of its marks skillfully. 60. Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts)- This is a movie in which a spurned tech innovator uses drone projectors to stage a battle in which he defeats an elemental water monster to save Venice. The best sequence is one in which a boy tries to trick his friends into letting him sit next to the girl he likes on a flight.  59. John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum (Chad Stahelski)- What a criticism it is to claim that the filmmakers give in too much to fanservice, especially since I don't know what that word means anymore if something like this is the monoculture. So they gave us, the audience, what we wanted, and I was upset that it was two hours and ten minutes? Seriously though, have you ever eaten too much ice cream? 58. Fyre (Chris Smith)- An interesting yarn that gets at the foolishness of Internet influencing better than anything else that I've seen. I was surprised by how distant many of the subjects seemed, as if only the Big Bad Billy was responsible for any misleading. And I was grateful that, despite the level of criminality on display, it was still as funny as the tweets were at the time. The film lacks shape though, and it would be nice to have somebody smart on hand to answer questions. Can someone explain to me why it's so important that the island used to be Pablo Escobar's? Why should I want to be like Pablo Escobar? 57. Leaving Neverland (Dan Reed)- Part 1 works because of the striking similarities in the parallel stories, as well as the subjects' perspicacious understanding of their own emotions and childhood psychology. So Part 2 gets extremely frustrating when these men, who have already proven how articulate they are, seem puzzled by the obvious psychological problems they have as adults. 56. Diane (Kent Jones)- This movie is kind of good when it's purely slice-of-life, before it declares what it is. It's very good once it declares itself as a routine of self-flagellation, a sort of Raging Bull for women with multiple recipes for tater tot hotdish. It's a little less good when it speeds up and goes back on that thesis near the end. For the record, I think Mary Kay Place is fine. I don't get the critical adoration.

55. Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher)- If the choice is Bohemian Rhapsody or this, then I'll take this every time. Unlike the former, Elton John's life doesn't present an obvious high point in the second half or easy conflict for the first half. As a result, the relationships within John's family seem broad with manufactured conflict. (His birth father's hardness isn't that far off from Walk Hard's "wrong kid died.") But there's an authenticity here that's refreshing, a respect to the unique friendship between Elton and Bernie and a respect for the transformative power of the music. That sincerity extends to Egerton's generous performance, which nails the self-effacing Elton John smile. So there are some biopic structural problems that can't be helped, but if only to admire the '80s fits that Elton gets off, attention must be paid. 54. Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor)- A useful example for differentiating between tropes and cliches of the action drama genre. For someone who gets less amped than I do for dudes meeting in a shipping container to have a conversation about how "now is the time to get out," it's probably full of cliches. For fans of hyper-masculine parables about getting a team together (that are also sort of meta-commentaries on their lead actor's fallen star), it's full of tropes. 53. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (Mike Mitchell)- The plot is nearly incoherent, and the sequel isn't really satirizing anything like the first one was. But the jokes come at a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker clip. A character in a car chase saying, "It's like she knows my every move" before a cut reveals he's been using turn signals? That's some Frank Drebin stuff. 52. Long Shot (Jonathan Levine)- Jonathan Levine has carved out an interesting directorial space for himself, with a career far different from what I imagined when I saw and loved The Wackness, a film to which I'm a little afraid to return. Levine is making, at the highest level possible ($40 million budget?), the types of movies that we claim don't get made anymore. A one-crazy-night Christmas comedy, an adventure comedy, and now a political romantic comedy, all with top flight Movie Stars. Long Shot seems like a rare opportunity to put Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron together and do something special, and what we come out with is...cute. For every good decision the film makes--what a supporting cast, all playing rounded characters--it makes a bad one--leaning too heavily into Rogen's patented "I don't really know what we're yelling about" delivery. The music is uninspired, but the presidential satire is pretty clever. The rhythm of the film is jagged and doesn't really cut together, but the script is very fair to the Theron character. Even in the general tone of the film's politics, it declares a few ideals, but those positions are still too neutral and obvious. I had a good time, but in a more capable director's hands, this experience wouldn't feel like math. 51. Isn’t It Romantic (Todd Strauss-Schulson)- So frothy that it almost doesn't believe in itself, especially near the end, but I found myself laughing a lot. Regarding the gay best friend, I'm very interested in the space of politically incorrect humor that is acceptable only because the work has built up self-awareness in other areas. That's a difficult negotiation, but this movie balances it. 50. Yesterday (Danny Boyle)- There's one twist that stretches the moral center of the film, and two minutes later there's a twist that's probably just a bridge too far in good taste. Other than that, this is a really cute Richard Curtis script, and it's nice to hear "Hey Jude" on movie speakers. 49. Ready or Not (Radio Silence)- Short and spicy, despite one or two too many twists. I'm in the front row of the Adam Brody Revival, but I appreciated the movie more as an exercise in the paranoid misery built into wealth. I wish I could have written the line down, but Alex says something like, "I didn't realize how much you could do just because your family said that it was okay," and that's the whole film. If you can, see it without watching the trailer first.

48. The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh)- Mary Ann Bernard is a Steven Soderbergh pseudonym, but what if he did hire an outside editor? What if someone saved him from himself? It's hard to believe that Meryl Streep is the heart of the film--if the film's thesis is "The meek will inherit the Earth?"--if we go on a twenty-minute detour to an African family and a ten-minute detour to China. I laughed quite a bit, and I admire the audacity of the ending. But this is a movie that knows what it's about without knowing how to be about it.

47. High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh)- As a person who can cite most NBA players' cap figures off the top of my head, I should love High Flying Bird, a movie about a sports agent who tries to topple the system during an NBA lockout. Instead I liked it okay. It takes an hour to kick into high gear, but once it does, some self-contained scenes are powerhouses, and the writer of Moonlight was always going to provide an emotional kick that is sometimes absent from Soderbergh's work. Like Soderbergh's Unsane from last year, High Flying Bird is shot on an iPhone, an appropriate form given that the execution is a do-it-yourself parable that takes place mostly inside. Soderbergh is a man who has always tried to trade the ossified system of moviemaking for experimentation, so most reviews have pointed toward the meta quality of capturing a character doing that same thing in another medium. Like most of his post-retirement work, however, I find myself asking one question: "Would anyone care if this were made by another director?" 46. Piercing (Nicolas Pesce)- Good sick fun with a taste for the theatrical. I saw twist one and twist three coming, but twist two was ingenious. It ends the only way it can, which is okay. 45. Booksmart (Olivia Wilde)- At first the film is hard to acclimate to, stylized as it is into a very specific but absurd setting, counteracted by a very specific and realistic relationship. The music cues are all awful until the Perfume Genius one, which is so perfect that it erases the half-dozen clunkers.But it's smartly funny, funnily warm, and warmly smart. The screenplay does some clever things with swapping the protagonists' wants and needs at crucial times. Molly will have an obvious drive that overrides Amy's fear, and then a few scenes later, there will be an organic reversal. 44. Joker (Todd Phillips)- Joker presents more ideas than it cogently lands. I don't disagree with Amanda Dobbins's burn that it feels more like a vision board than a coherent story. Still, its success kind of fascinates me. This dark provocation, shot on real locations, has way more in common with Phoenix entries like You Were Never Really Here than it does with the DCEU. In fact, the comic book shoehorns feel like intrusions into a story about a guy who likes to Jame Gumb skinny-dance. Dunk on me if you want, but I think it's most eerie and affecting as a portrait of mental illness. Whereas Joker is a criminal mastermind in Batman lore, this is a guy helpless enough to scrawl into a notebook, "The worst part about having a mental illness is pretending to people that you don't." And that idea gets borne out in a scene in which he's pausing and rewinding a tape to study how a talk show guest sits and waves like a regular person. It's rare enough to see a person this mentally ill depicted on screen; it's even rarer to see someone this aware of his own isolation and otherness.

[newaesthetes]

ok I'm gonna answer @basiilhallward‘s questions for the tag thing bc I need a Break from reading crime and punishment and there’s nothing nicer than an excuse to talk about myself

1. 5 songs you like, and what do you like about them?

brand new- soco amaretto lime. Youth! I don't know, it makes my heart swell a little, the lyrics could almost be a happy song, we’re young and it reminds me of walking in the dark when I'm tipsy after a party The front bottoms- the plan. its a nice little fuck you society song that its easy to jump around in your room to, also weirdly inspirational   the world is a beautiful place and I am no longer afraid to die- Wendover. a good song, a bit Sad John lennon- imagine because you know, I'm That champaign socialist. but this was also the first song I learnt on the guitar (also the green day cover version bc that one makes me wanna start a revolution) vampire weekend- unbelievers - its fun And makes me think about god and shit 2. favourite bit of theatre you’ve seen/read/heard

you Know I love Bourne’s swan lake. The opera I saw in Verona was an Experence. In terms of straight theatre? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is always a fave

3. if you could get any job, no questions asked, no qualifications needed, what would you chose?

ah I don't know, you mean right now at this point in my life or in the future. I guess I feel like if I couldn't deal with the questions and qualifications side of a job I wouldn't be ready to actually.... do it. idk, I guess id love to go into research. 4. someone you want to talk to again? i never want to talk to anyone lol. idk a few months ago i had a rather difficult conversation with one of my friends and we’ve grown apart since and i think I'm almost at the stage where ill want to reach out and talk to them again. but idk, if i want to talk to someone i message them, and i have a tendency to... not want to push reaching out again to people i used to be close to- the memories are there. when i was in yr 9 i remember wanting that friendship group to meet up again at the end of yr 13 to see how we’d all done but now I'm here i don't feel that desire at all really. 5. something good that happened recently!

i passed my driving test the other day which is... neat 6. pick up the nearest book and type out the 1st (few if needed) lines! do you like the book?

I'm sitting right next to my e m forster short stories so 

‘My pedometer told me that I was twenty-five; and, though it is a shocking thing to stop walking, I was so tired that I sat down on a milestone to rest. People outstripped me, jeering as they did so, and even when Miss Eliza Dimbleby, the great educationalist, swept past, exhorting me to persevere, I only smiled and raised my hat’ (that's the start of The Other Side of the Hedge)

yeah I like this book! ive only read three of the stories but they've been good so far, I'm keeping the rest for uni bc I find it better to read short stories than novels when I'm busy.

i actually wrote half of the answers to these questions yesterday including the above one and i thought id check out the book beside me today which is my Sylvia Plath journals. it begins ��july 1950- i may never be happy, but tonight i am content’ and i thought that was worth writing here. i tried to read all the jounals a number of years ago but gave up half way. putting aside the weirdness of reading someone’s diary, its an incredible read. she was fascinating. 7. do you believe in a higher power or a God?

no. Well, sometimes but not really. I am fully ready to accept the possibility that there is a God, I'm a bit of a classic agnostic in that I think its absurd to think anyone can Know either way. And sometimes I do rather fall back on the idea, and I Do have an affiliation with the Christian god. But in terms of true belief, in terms of faith, no. 8. a choice you wish you could have done differently

I don't have any specific regrets, there are some things ive done or said at various points (or not done or said) where life would be better if I had acted differently. But I’ve recently succumbed to the belief that the way we act is the only way we could have acted. I’ve acted the way I thought best at the time at any given point. I also think ive learned from every mistake ive made, if I avoided making it at one point I'm sure I would have made it again later. and I'm happy with where I am right now, its my choices that lead me here.

9. what brought you to tumblr in the beginning?

idk, i looked on my old blog and my first post was a reblog of that tyler josep tweet telling people to stay alive or smth. i was emo and sad and questioning my sexuality and from what i heard tumblr was the best place for being all of those things 10. somewhere you’ve never been and want to see?

Up to a month ago I would have said Florence but ive been there now :’) so next on my holiday pining list is probably st pertersburg, might take a few years.

11. what are you most proud of?

how far ive come in the last 2 years in terms of my self confidence. less abstractly, i independently researched and wrote an essay and presentation last year on art history and art theory and i put a lot of effort in and it was good

[ttyiwik]

I didn’t mean to reply so late, so all I can say is sorry for making you worry.

I don’t know how it is that you always says what I need to hear, but you do. To be honest, me and kris almost broke up. We had a huge fight. I ended up talking to my family about it, and I was honest and told them I cheated and all the issues we were having. Things were tough. But he told me a lot of stuff I didn’t realize.

I really was, and partially still am, an awful person. I’m a user. I didn’t realize how my actions were hurting him or my friends. He told me everything I had done, laid out on the table and I hated what he said. But none of it was wrong. I didn’t realize that my group from twitch con hated me because I left them behind. It wasn’t just that, not because I left them but because I made that one tweet about how I was lonely and that I’d never fit in. I realize with that one tweet, I disregarded all my friends I did have and took away their value because I couldn’t be like Leo and have streamer friends. It was so ugly. I was ugly.

I treated kris really awful too. I made him feel stupid and unwanted and didn’t do my part as his girlfriend, or even just a friend. The me of then and partially still now, because change isn’t instant, is learning how to better myself. How to stop being so sad and to stop caring so much about what people think. To be fairly honest, I think part of me knew I was bad, but not how bad I was. I said to you before I left seattle that if I stayed with you it wouldn’t be right, and I think it’s because deep down I knew I had shit to deal with. I needed to confront it and now I am.

I’m reading a book called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” and I really recommend it.

I haven’t listened to the song yet, mostly just because since Tuesday I’ll ive been doing is crying and self loathing into self reflecting. I read your messages, but I didn’t think it fair of me to reply in that moment only to tell you I didn’t know what to say.

I am in Vegas right now, I thought hanging out with my friends here might be good for me. I had fun spending today with tenzin. Things are rough with me and kris, and if things do work out we are actually going to go public. I’m not sure when that will be or if we will, but that is the plan.

I don’t know what life has in store for either of us, but I too hope that one day our paths can cross again. Almost like a movie. I hope you can tell the difference between my progress.

I want to be better, and I honestly almost cried reading what you said. Change does start with me and I have no idea how you knew I needed to hear something like that.

I’m sorry for being away without saying anything. I plan to be more active in things, but I probably will have to stop talking to you for a while. I hope when you hear my name or see me posts it doesn’t leave a sour feeling in your mouth. I saw your tweet about the people in your life and I wonder if it had anything to do with me. I have to be okay with the idea I’ll never know.

Whether it be a year or years from now, I’m excited to be better. To show you the me I’ll become. Keep your stories written down, I’ll be waiting to hear them.

I don’t want to stop writing, and I think that’s ultimately why I have to.

I hope you have a better today than yesterday, everyday.

Until next time gamer.

06;34.

[tune-collective]

Meet the Fyre Fest Attendee Who Live-Tweeted the Island Disaster

Meet the Fyre Fest Attendee Who Live-Tweeted the Island Disaster

Fyre Festival attendees were promised paradise on a private island, only to arrive in the Exumas, Bahamas, on Thursday (April 27) to find a half-finished festival site, uninhabitable accommodations and hundreds of fans pleading to get out.

The images of what was promised and what was actually delivered have dominated coverage of the failed festival, with many in the media turning to a Twitter feed run by a 32-year-old blogger named Seth Crossno from Raleigh, N.C., who uses the pen name William N. Finley IV. Crossno’s photos on Instagram and Twitter were some of the most widely shared images from Fyre Festival, giving the rest of the world a peak at the train-wreck festival that vastly under-delivered and was eventually canceled.

Billboard tracked down Crossno to discuss his experience on Exumas and learned how his images and social media posts resonated with hundreds of thousands of people watching from afar.

Why did you decide to attend Fyre Festival?

I needed a vacation. I haven’t been on one in a year and thought, ‘Cool, look at all this stuff I get to do at Fyre Festival.’ I think of myself as an influencer through my blog, which started out as a satire on the whole Raleigh scene. But once I landed at Exumas and saw the festival site, I was like, ‘All right, there’s no satire here. This is all real.’ So, I just started reporting what I was seeing. Then the media started reaching out, like rapid fire. I was just like, ‘Yeah, you can use this.’ I didn’t think my photos and tweets would pop up on the front page of every single site covering Fyre.

This sums up Fyre Festival. #fyre #fyrefestival #fyrefest pic.twitter.com/x4xcFBL8Yg

— William N. Finley IV (@WNFIV) April 28, 2017

Your photos were everywhere. At times it seemed like you were the only one there posting images.

That’s what I don’t understand. When we first got there, I asked myself, ‘Am I the only one who had higher expectations for this event?’ but it wasn’t long before my friend turned to me and said, ‘We’re getting off this f—ing island.’ I was like, ‘No, let’s give it an hour or two’ before admitting, ‘Okay, this really is terrible.’ Why did nobody else tweet out that this was such a shit hole? I don’t know.

Did you feel a sense of responsibility to report what was happening on the ground?

Yes, eventually, after I realized that a lot of my tweets were getting picked up by the outside media. 

But everyone was reporting the wrong name for you since your account has you listed as William N Finley IV.

Well, that’s the thing. I use that account for satire, but this was real and I didn’t have time to explain that because so many people were following me.

Your Periscope video has now been viewed over 175,000 times. Were you surprised that many people were tuning in?

Not really. People love a train wreck, especially if they’re people you both envy and want to be given a comeuppance. There was a lot of misinformation. It wasn’t $12,000 a ticket like many in the media were saying. I paid $4,000 — the VIP Artist Pass I purchased was $2,700 and I owed my buddy another $1,300 for my share of the $8,000 VIP villa we were supposed to be staying in. Yeah, that’s a lot of money, but that’s what I thought it would cost to spend four nights in the Bahamas hanging out with A-list celebrities. I was supposed to be flown in on a private plane with Wolfgang Puck making me omelets for breakfast. For $4,000, that’s pretty damn cheap. 

Did they have a VIP villa ready for you when you arrived?

No, and when we landed we could tell immediately we weren’t on a private island. We were on just a part of a larger island. It felt like a rock quarry or something. And you pull in and there’s just cars everywhere and trucks and people, and you just come up on all these disaster relief tents everywhere. We thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ And then, they dropped us off right in the middle of this crowd. And there’s just a huge line, and nobody’s telling you anything. And you’re standing in line, and that Billy McFarland guy is standing on a table trying to answer questions. But nobody can hear him. He looked like an idiot standing on this table, telling the people who rented villas to just go grab a tent. Any tent. And then people started running to the tents, grabbing up tents that had been assigned to someone else. It seemed like no one was in charge.

At what point did you just decide to get out and head to the airport?

Around 11 p.m. We had been kicked out of multiple tents and never actually shown the location of our VIP villa. We headed to the airport having no idea if it was actually open. Thankfully it was. We got there at 11:30, and the flight came in at 1:30 in the morning. And we got on and they were manually writing names and passport numbers down, but the manifest wasn’t checking up with the head count because a couple of people were still drunk and not listening for their names to be called. So they made us all get off the plane and get back on, checking us one by one. By that time, we sat on the plane again for another couple hours and then we had to deboard again because the crew needed a break. By this point, we’re now locked inside the airport because people kept walking outside to smoke, and because the place was so small, accidentally walking on the runway.  So they put a chain and bolt lock on the door, and it go so hot that this guy passed out. Then we finally got a plane at 7:30 or 8:30. Around like 9:30 or 10:00 we got on, took off, and finally got in about 11:00. 

At one point while you were still on the island you tweeted out a picture of a notepad that appeared to belong to one of the festival organizers. Where did you find that?

Billy McFarland was standing on this table to try and tell people what was going on and the notepad was on that table, and then it fell on the ground. I took a bunch of pictures of the notepad — what I didn’t show were pages with hundreds and hundreds of names, all hand-written.

Also, we found a notebook from one of the Fyre Fest planners on the ground. It is amazing. #fyrefestival #fyre pic.twitter.com/jFib0nO2RW

— William N. Finley IV (@WNFIV) April 28, 2017

Yesterday Ja Rule issued a statement promising fans that Fyre Festival was not a scam. What did you think when you heard that?

I never thought it was a scam — that implies there was some intent to defraud. I honestly think it’s a mix of total incompetence and the people putting it on really sucking at their jobs. But I will say there was a lot of things that changed as the event approached. At first it was supposed to be on a private island, but then it was moved to a section of an island next to a Sandals resort. I kept giving them the benefit of the doubt, probably to subconsciously talk myself into still going. I mean I was in $4,000 on this thing.

One of the most famous photos to come out Fyre was a picture of a sandwich with just bread, cheese and lettuce. Was there other food?

Yeah — there was a tent with sandwiches and another section had dinner with barbecued chicken, pasta salad and a bread roll. It wasn’t that bad.

The dinner that @fyrefestival promised us was catered by Steven Starr is literally bread, cheese, and salad with dressing. #fyrefestival pic.twitter.com/I8d0UlSNbd

— Tr3vor (@trev4president) April 28, 2017

So the picture was a misrepresentation?

Well, that was one of the options. Cheese sandwich. There was no menu. You just walked up to a table in a tent and they handed you food and then pointed you to a big basket of chips and some apples and oranges. It felt like a summer camp mess hall. Most of the people working the kitchens and food were from the Bahamas and they were extremely nice considering the terrible situation.

Did any part of the festival site feel like a tropical paradise?

No. Not really. It was mostly gravel and grass. There was some sand in front of the stage, but they just dumped it here to make it feel like the beach. But the rest of the island was gravel, dirt and mud. Thank God it didn’t start raining.

Any regrets?

I’m not sure, but I do know I convinced a lot of people not to show up. So many people reached out on Instagram and Twitter asking about the festival. I told them, ‘I wouldn’t come to this. It’s not what you think it is.’ And a lot of people said ‘Thanks a lot, I’m canceling my tickets.’ I was just happy that no one else would have to go through this. 

This article originally appeared on Billboard.

http://tunecollective.com/2017/05/01/meet-fyre-fest-attendee-live-tweeted-island-disaster/

[repwincoml4a0a5]

Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama back in September 2013 about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria.  At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared “to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!”

President Obama, despite having publicly declaring the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime a “red line” which, if crossed, would demand American military action, ultimately declined to order an attack, largely on the basis of warnings by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence linking the chemical attack on Ghouta was less than definitive.

President Barack Obama, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, observed, “there’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.” While the “Washington playbook,” Obama noted, could be useful during times of crisis, it could “also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

His “red line” on chemical weapons usage, combined with heated rhetoric coming from his closest advisors, including Secretary of State John Kerry, hinting at a military response, was such a trap. Ultimately, President Obama opted to back off, observing that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.” The media, Republicans and even members of his own party excoriated Obama for this decision.

Yet, in November 2016, as president-elect, Donald Trump doubled down on Obama’s eschewing of the “Washington playbook.” The situation on the ground in Syria had fundamentally changed since 2013; the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had taken over large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, establishing a “capital” in the Syrian city of Raqqa and declaring the creation of an Islamic “Caliphate.”  American efforts to remove Syrian President Assad from power had begun to bar fruit, forcing Russia to intervene in September 2015 in order to prop up the beleaguered Syrian president.

Trump, breaking from the mainstream positions held by most American policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, declared that the United States should focus on fighting and defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) and not pursuing regime change in Syria. “My attitude,” Trump noted, “was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria... Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.” Moreover, Trump observed, given the robust Russian presence inside Syria, if the United States attacked Assad, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

For more than two months, the new Trump administration seemed to breathe life into the notion that Donald Trump had, like his predecessor before him, thrown the “Washington playbook” out the window when it came to Syrian policy.  After ordering a series of new military deployments into Syria and Iraq specifically designed to confront ISIS, the Trump administration began to give public voice to a major shift in policy vis-à-vis the Syrian President.

For the first time since President Obama, in August 2011, articulated regime change in Damascus as a precondition for the cessation of the civil conflict that had been raging since April 2011, American government officials articulated that this was no longer the case.  “You pick and choose your battles,” the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told reporters on March 30, 2017.  “And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”  Haley’s words were echoed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who observed that same day, while on an official visit to Turkey, “I think the… longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.”

This new policy direction lasted barely five days. Sometime in the early afternoon of April 4, 2017, troubling images and video clips began to be transmitted out of the Syrian province of Idlib by anti-government activists, including members of the so-called “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue team whose work was captured in an eponymously-named Academy Award-winning documentary film. These images showed victims in various stages of symptomatic distress, including death, from what the activists said was exposure to chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian air force on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that very morning.

Images of these tragic deaths were immediately broadcast on American media outlets, with pundits decrying the horrific and heinous nature of the chemical attack, which was nearly unanimously attributed to the Syrian government, even though the only evidence provided was the imagery and testimony of the anti-Assad activists who, just days before, were decrying the shift in American policy regarding regime change in Syria. President Trump viewed these images, and was deeply troubled by what he saw, especially the depictions of dead and suffering children.

The images were used as exhibits in a passionate speech by Haley during a speech at the Security Council on April 5, 2017, where she confronted Russia and threatened unilateral American military action if the Council failed to respond to the alleged Syrian chemical attack. “Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures, to children foaming at the mouth, suffering convulsions, being carried in the arms of desperate parents,” Haley said, holding up two examples of the images provided by the anti-Assad activists. “We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers…we cannot close our eyes to those pictures.  We cannot close our minds of the responsibility to act.”  If the Security Council refused to take action against the Syrian government, Haley said, then “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama was confronted with images of dead and injured civilians, including numerous small children, from Syria that were every bit as heartbreaking as the ones displayed by Ambassador Haley. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, had made an impassioned speech that all but called for military force against Syria.  President Obama asked for, and received, a wide-range of military options from his national security team targeting the regime of President Assad; only the intervention of James Clapper, and the doubts that existed about the veracity of the intelligence linking the Ghouta chemical attack to the Syrian government, held Obama back from giving the green light for the bombing to begin. 

Like President Obama before him, President Trump asked for his national security team to prepare options for military action.  Unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump did not seek a pause in his decision making process to let his intelligence services investigate what had actually occurred in Khan Sheikhoun.  Like Nikki Haley, Donald Trump was driven by his visceral reaction to the imagery being disseminated by anti-Assad activists. In the afternoon of April 6, as he prepared to depart the White House for a summit meeting with a delegation led by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump’s own cryptic words in response to a reporter’s question about any American response seem to hint that his mind was already made up. “You’ll see,” he said, before walking away.

Within hours, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 advanced Block IV Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.41 million each), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Al Shayrat air base, located in central Syria.  Al Shayrat was home to two squadrons of Russian-made SU-22 fighter-bombers operated by the Syrian air force, one of which was tracked by American radar as taking off from Al Sharyat on the morning of April 4, 2017, and was overhead Khan Sheikhoun around the time the alleged chemical attack occurred. 

The purpose of the American strike was two-fold; first, to send a message to the Syrian government and its allies that, according to Secretary of State Tillerson, “the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” and in particular when confronted with evidence of a chemical attack from which the United States could not “turn away, turn a blind eye.”  The other purpose, according to a U.S. military spokesperson, to “reduce the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.” 

Moreover, the policy honeymoon the Trump administration had only recently announced about regime change in Syria was over. “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” President Trump told reporters before the missile strikes had commenced.  Secretary Tillerson went further: “It would seem there would be no role for him [Assad] to govern the Syrian people.”

Such a reversal in policy fundamentals and direction in such a short period of time is stunning; Donald Trump didn’t simply deviate slightly off course, but rather did a complete 180-degree turn. The previous policy of avoiding entanglement in the internal affairs of Syria in favor of defeating ISIS and improving relations with Russia had been replaced by a fervent embrace of regime change, direct military engagement with the Syrian armed forces, and a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Russian military presence in Syria.

Normally, such major policy change could only be explained by a new reality driven by verifiable facts. The alleged chemical weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun was not a new reality; chemical attacks had been occurring inside Syria on a regular basis, despite the international effort to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons capability undertaken in 2013 that played a central role in forestalling American military action at that time. International investigations of these attacks produced mixed results, with some being attributed to the Syrian government (something the Syrian government vehemently denies), and the majority being attributed to anti-regime fighters, in particular those affiliated with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Moreover, there exists a mixed provenance when it comes to chemical weapons usage inside Syria that would seem to foreclose any knee-jerk reaction that placed the blame for what happened at Khan Sheikhoun solely on the Syrian government void of any official investigation. Yet this is precisely what occurred.  Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible for the release of the chemicals that caused the deaths of so many civilians.

No one disputes the fact that a Syrian air force SU-22 fighter-bomber conducted a bombing mission against a target in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017. The anti-regime activists in Khan Sheikhoun, however, have painted a narrative that has the Syrian air force dropping chemical bombs on a sleeping civilian population.

A critical piece of information that has largely escaped the reporting in the mainstream media is that Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the center of the anti-Assad movement in Syria since 2011. Up until February 2017, Khan Sheikhoun was occupied by a pro-ISIS group known as Liwa al-Aqsa that was engaged in an oftentimes-violent struggle with its competitor organization, Al Nusra Front (which later morphed into Tahrir al-Sham, but under any name functioning as Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria) for resources and political influence among the local population.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Liwa al-Aqsa was using facilities in and around Khan Sheikhoun to manufacture crude chemical shells and landmines intended for ISIS forces fighting in Iraq. According to the Russians the Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapons facility was mirrored on similar sites uncovered by Russian and Syrian forces following the reoccupation of rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo. 

In Aleppo, the Russians discovered crude weapons production laboratories that filled mortar shells and landmines with a mix of chlorine gas and white phosphorus; after a thorough forensic investigation was conducted by military specialists, the Russians turned over samples of these weapons, together with soil samples from areas struck by weapons produced in these laboratories, to investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for further evaluation.

Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.  If the Russians are correct, and the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.

The counter-narrative offered by the Russians and Syrians, however, has been minimized, mocked and ignored by both the American media and the Trump administration. So, too, has the very illogic of the premise being put forward to answer the question of why President Assad would risk everything by using chemical weapons against a target of zero military value, at a time when the strategic balance of power had shifted strongly in his favor. Likewise, why would Russia, which had invested considerable political capital in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons capability after 2013, stand by idly while the Syrian air force carried out such an attack, especially when their was such a heavy Russian military presence at the base in question at the time of the attack?

Such analysis seems beyond the scope and comprehension of the American fourth estate.  Instead, media outlets like CNN embrace at face value anything they are told by official American sources, including a particularly preposterous insinuation that Russia actually colluded in the chemical weapons attack; the aforementioned presence of Russian officers at Al Shayrat air base has been cited as evidence that Russia had to have known about Syria’s chemical warfare capability, and yet did nothing to prevent the attack.

To sustain this illogic, the American public and decision-makers make use of a sophisticated propaganda campaign involving video images and narratives provided by forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, including organizations like the “White Helmets,” the Syrian-American Medical Society, the Aleppo Media Center, which have a history of providing slanted information designed to promote an anti-Assad message (Donald Trump has all but acknowledged that these images played a major role in his decision to reevaluate his opinion of Bashar al-Assad and order the cruise missile attack on Al Shayrat airbase.) 

Many of the fighters affiliated with Tahrir al-Sham are veterans of the battle for Aleppo, and as such are intimately familiar with the tools and trade of the extensive propaganda battle that was waged simultaneously with the actual fighting in an effort to sway western public opinion toward adopting a more aggressive stance in opposition to the Syrian government of Assad. These tools were brought to bear in promoting a counter-narrative about the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident (ironically, many of the activists in question, including the “White Helmets,” were trained and equipped in social media manipulation tactics using money provided by the United States; that these techniques would end up being used to manipulate an American President into carrying out an act of war most likely never factored into the thinking of the State Department personnel who conceived and implemented the program).

Even slick media training, however, cannot gloss over basic factual inconsistencies. Early on, the anti-Assad opposition media outlets were labeling the Khan Sheikhoun incident as a “Sarin nerve agent” attack; one doctor affiliated with Al Qaeda sent out images and commentary via social media that documented symptoms, such as dilated pupils, that he diagnosed as stemming from exposure to Sarin nerve agent. Sarin, however, is an odorless, colorless material, dispersed as either a liquid or vapor; eyewitnesses speak of a “pungent odor” and “blue-yellow” clouds, more indicative of chlorine gas.

And while American media outlets, such as CNN, have spoken of munitions “filled to the brim” with Sarin nerve agent being used at Khan Sheikhoun, there is simply no evidence cited by any source that can sustain such an account.  Heartbreaking images of victims being treated by “White Helmet” rescuers have been cited as proof of Sarin-like symptoms, the medical viability of these images is in question; there are no images taken of victims at the scene of the attack. Instead, the video provided by the “White Helmets” is of decontamination and treatment carried out at a “White Helmet” base after the victims, either dead or injured, were transported there. 

The lack of viable protective clothing worn by the “White Helmet” personnel while handling victims is another indication that the chemical in question was not military grade Sarin; if it were, the rescuers would themselves have become victims (some accounts speak of just this phenomena, but this occurred at the site of the attack, where the rescuers were overcome by a “pungent smelling” chemical – again, Sarin is odorless.)

More than 20 victims of the Khan Sheikhoun incident were transported to Turkish hospitals for care; three subsequently died. According to the Turkish Justice Minister, autopsies conducted on the bodies confirm that the cause of death was exposure to chemical agents. The World Health Organization has indicated that the symptoms of the Khan Sheikhoun victims are consistent with both Sarin and Chlorine exposure. American media outlets have latched onto the Turkish and WHO statements as “proof” of Syrian government involvement; however, any exposure to the chlorine/white phosphorous blend associated with Al Nusra chemical weapons would produce similar symptoms. 

Moreover, if Al Nusra was replicating the type of low-grade Sarin it employed at Ghouta in 2013 at Khan Sheikhoun, it is highly likely that some of the victims in question would exhibit Sarin-like symptoms. Blood samples taken from the victims could provide a more precise readout of the specific chemical exposure involved; such samples have allegedly been collected by Al Nusra-affiliated personnel, and turned over to international investigators (the notion that any serious investigatory body would allow Al Nusra to provide forensic evidence in support of an investigation where it is one of only two potential culprits is mindboggling, but that is precisely what has happened). But the Trump administration chose to act before these samples could be processed, perhaps afraid that their results would not sustain the underlying allegation of the employment of Sarin by the Syrian air force.

Mainstream American media outlets have willingly and openly embraced a narrative provided by Al Qaeda affiliates whose record of using chemical weapons in Syria and distorting and manufacturing “evidence” to promote anti-Assad policies in the west, including regime change, is well documented.  These outlets have made a deliberate decision to endorse the view of Al Qaeda over a narrative provided by Russian and Syrian government authorities without any effort to fact check either position. These actions, however, do not seem to shock the conscience of the American public; when it comes to Syria, the mainstream American media and its audience has long ago ceded the narrative to Al Qaeda and other Islamist anti-regime elements.

The real culprits here are the Trump administration, and President Trump himself. The president’s record of placing more weight on what he sees on television than the intelligence briefings he may or may not be getting, and his lack of intellectual curiosity and unfamiliarity with the nuances and complexities of both foreign and national security policy, created the conditions where the imagery of the Khan Sheikhoun victims that had been disseminated by pro-Al Nusra (i.e., Al Qaeda) outlets could influence critical life-or-death decisions.

That President Trump could be susceptible to such obvious manipulation is not surprising, given his predilection for counter-punching on Twitter for any perceived slight; that his national security team allowed him to be manipulated thus, and did nothing to sway Trump’s opinion or forestall action pending a thorough review of the facts, is scandalous. History will show that Donald Trump, his advisors and the American media were little more than willing dupes for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose manipulation of the Syrian narrative resulted in a major policy shift that furthers their objectives. 

The other winner in this sorry story is ISIS, which took advantage of the American strike against Al Shayrat to launch a major offensive against Syrian government forces around the city of Palmyra (Al Shayrat had served as the principal air base for operations in the Palmyra region). The breakdown in relations between Russia and the United States means that, for the foreseeable future at least, the kind of coordination that had been taking place in the fight against ISIS is a thing of the past, a fact that can only bode well for the fighters of ISIS. For a man who placed so much emphasis on defeating ISIS, President Trump’s actions can only be viewed as a self-inflicted wound, a kind of circular firing squad that marks the actions of a Keystone Cop, and not the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation in the world. 

But the person who might get the last laugh is President Assad himself. While the Pentagon has claimed that it significantly degraded the Al Shayrat air base, with 58 of 59 cruise missile hitting their targets, Russia has stated that only 23..

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2phfalx

[rtawngs20815]

Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama back in September 2013 about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria.  At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared “to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!”

President Obama, despite having publicly declaring the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime a “red line” which, if crossed, would demand American military action, ultimately declined to order an attack, largely on the basis of warnings by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence linking the chemical attack on Ghouta was less than definitive.

President Barack Obama, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, observed, “there’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.” While the “Washington playbook,” Obama noted, could be useful during times of crisis, it could “also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

His “red line” on chemical weapons usage, combined with heated rhetoric coming from his closest advisors, including Secretary of State John Kerry, hinting at a military response, was such a trap. Ultimately, President Obama opted to back off, observing that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.” The media, Republicans and even members of his own party excoriated Obama for this decision.

Yet, in November 2016, as president-elect, Donald Trump doubled down on Obama’s eschewing of the “Washington playbook.” The situation on the ground in Syria had fundamentally changed since 2013; the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had taken over large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, establishing a “capital” in the Syrian city of Raqqa and declaring the creation of an Islamic “Caliphate.”  American efforts to remove Syrian President Assad from power had begun to bar fruit, forcing Russia to intervene in September 2015 in order to prop up the beleaguered Syrian president.

Trump, breaking from the mainstream positions held by most American policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, declared that the United States should focus on fighting and defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) and not pursuing regime change in Syria. “My attitude,” Trump noted, “was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria... Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.” Moreover, Trump observed, given the robust Russian presence inside Syria, if the United States attacked Assad, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

For more than two months, the new Trump administration seemed to breathe life into the notion that Donald Trump had, like his predecessor before him, thrown the “Washington playbook” out the window when it came to Syrian policy.  After ordering a series of new military deployments into Syria and Iraq specifically designed to confront ISIS, the Trump administration began to give public voice to a major shift in policy vis-à-vis the Syrian President.

For the first time since President Obama, in August 2011, articulated regime change in Damascus as a precondition for the cessation of the civil conflict that had been raging since April 2011, American government officials articulated that this was no longer the case.  “You pick and choose your battles,” the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told reporters on March 30, 2017.  “And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”  Haley’s words were echoed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who observed that same day, while on an official visit to Turkey, “I think the… longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.”

This new policy direction lasted barely five days. Sometime in the early afternoon of April 4, 2017, troubling images and video clips began to be transmitted out of the Syrian province of Idlib by anti-government activists, including members of the so-called “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue team whose work was captured in an eponymously-named Academy Award-winning documentary film. These images showed victims in various stages of symptomatic distress, including death, from what the activists said was exposure to chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian air force on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that very morning.

Images of these tragic deaths were immediately broadcast on American media outlets, with pundits decrying the horrific and heinous nature of the chemical attack, which was nearly unanimously attributed to the Syrian government, even though the only evidence provided was the imagery and testimony of the anti-Assad activists who, just days before, were decrying the shift in American policy regarding regime change in Syria. President Trump viewed these images, and was deeply troubled by what he saw, especially the depictions of dead and suffering children.

The images were used as exhibits in a passionate speech by Haley during a speech at the Security Council on April 5, 2017, where she confronted Russia and threatened unilateral American military action if the Council failed to respond to the alleged Syrian chemical attack. “Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures, to children foaming at the mouth, suffering convulsions, being carried in the arms of desperate parents,” Haley said, holding up two examples of the images provided by the anti-Assad activists. “We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers…we cannot close our eyes to those pictures.  We cannot close our minds of the responsibility to act.”  If the Security Council refused to take action against the Syrian government, Haley said, then “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama was confronted with images of dead and injured civilians, including numerous small children, from Syria that were every bit as heartbreaking as the ones displayed by Ambassador Haley. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, had made an impassioned speech that all but called for military force against Syria.  President Obama asked for, and received, a wide-range of military options from his national security team targeting the regime of President Assad; only the intervention of James Clapper, and the doubts that existed about the veracity of the intelligence linking the Ghouta chemical attack to the Syrian government, held Obama back from giving the green light for the bombing to begin. 

Like President Obama before him, President Trump asked for his national security team to prepare options for military action.  Unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump did not seek a pause in his decision making process to let his intelligence services investigate what had actually occurred in Khan Sheikhoun.  Like Nikki Haley, Donald Trump was driven by his visceral reaction to the imagery being disseminated by anti-Assad activists. In the afternoon of April 6, as he prepared to depart the White House for a summit meeting with a delegation led by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump’s own cryptic words in response to a reporter’s question about any American response seem to hint that his mind was already made up. “You’ll see,” he said, before walking away.

Within hours, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 advanced Block IV Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.41 million each), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Al Shayrat air base, located in central Syria.  Al Shayrat was home to two squadrons of Russian-made SU-22 fighter-bombers operated by the Syrian air force, one of which was tracked by American radar as taking off from Al Sharyat on the morning of April 4, 2017, and was overhead Khan Sheikhoun around the time the alleged chemical attack occurred. 

The purpose of the American strike was two-fold; first, to send a message to the Syrian government and its allies that, according to Secretary of State Tillerson, “the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” and in particular when confronted with evidence of a chemical attack from which the United States could not “turn away, turn a blind eye.”  The other purpose, according to a U.S. military spokesperson, to “reduce the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.” 

Moreover, the policy honeymoon the Trump administration had only recently announced about regime change in Syria was over. “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” President Trump told reporters before the missile strikes had commenced.  Secretary Tillerson went further: “It would seem there would be no role for him [Assad] to govern the Syrian people.”

Such a reversal in policy fundamentals and direction in such a short period of time is stunning; Donald Trump didn’t simply deviate slightly off course, but rather did a complete 180-degree turn. The previous policy of avoiding entanglement in the internal affairs of Syria in favor of defeating ISIS and improving relations with Russia had been replaced by a fervent embrace of regime change, direct military engagement with the Syrian armed forces, and a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Russian military presence in Syria.

Normally, such major policy change could only be explained by a new reality driven by verifiable facts. The alleged chemical weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun was not a new reality; chemical attacks had been occurring inside Syria on a regular basis, despite the international effort to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons capability undertaken in 2013 that played a central role in forestalling American military action at that time. International investigations of these attacks produced mixed results, with some being attributed to the Syrian government (something the Syrian government vehemently denies), and the majority being attributed to anti-regime fighters, in particular those affiliated with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Moreover, there exists a mixed provenance when it comes to chemical weapons usage inside Syria that would seem to foreclose any knee-jerk reaction that placed the blame for what happened at Khan Sheikhoun solely on the Syrian government void of any official investigation. Yet this is precisely what occurred.  Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible for the release of the chemicals that caused the deaths of so many civilians.

No one disputes the fact that a Syrian air force SU-22 fighter-bomber conducted a bombing mission against a target in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017. The anti-regime activists in Khan Sheikhoun, however, have painted a narrative that has the Syrian air force dropping chemical bombs on a sleeping civilian population.

A critical piece of information that has largely escaped the reporting in the mainstream media is that Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the center of the anti-Assad movement in Syria since 2011. Up until February 2017, Khan Sheikhoun was occupied by a pro-ISIS group known as Liwa al-Aqsa that was engaged in an oftentimes-violent struggle with its competitor organization, Al Nusra Front (which later morphed into Tahrir al-Sham, but under any name functioning as Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria) for resources and political influence among the local population.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Liwa al-Aqsa was using facilities in and around Khan Sheikhoun to manufacture crude chemical shells and landmines intended for ISIS forces fighting in Iraq. According to the Russians the Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapons facility was mirrored on similar sites uncovered by Russian and Syrian forces following the reoccupation of rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo. 

In Aleppo, the Russians discovered crude weapons production laboratories that filled mortar shells and landmines with a mix of chlorine gas and white phosphorus; after a thorough forensic investigation was conducted by military specialists, the Russians turned over samples of these weapons, together with soil samples from areas struck by weapons produced in these laboratories, to investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for further evaluation.

Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.  If the Russians are correct, and the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.

The counter-narrative offered by the Russians and Syrians, however, has been minimized, mocked and ignored by both the American media and the Trump administration. So, too, has the very illogic of the premise being put forward to answer the question of why President Assad would risk everything by using chemical weapons against a target of zero military value, at a time when the strategic balance of power had shifted strongly in his favor. Likewise, why would Russia, which had invested considerable political capital in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons capability after 2013, stand by idly while the Syrian air force carried out such an attack, especially when their was such a heavy Russian military presence at the base in question at the time of the attack?

Such analysis seems beyond the scope and comprehension of the American fourth estate.  Instead, media outlets like CNN embrace at face value anything they are told by official American sources, including a particularly preposterous insinuation that Russia actually colluded in the chemical weapons attack; the aforementioned presence of Russian officers at Al Shayrat air base has been cited as evidence that Russia had to have known about Syria’s chemical warfare capability, and yet did nothing to prevent the attack.

To sustain this illogic, the American public and decision-makers make use of a sophisticated propaganda campaign involving video images and narratives provided by forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, including organizations like the “White Helmets,” the Syrian-American Medical Society, the Aleppo Media Center, which have a history of providing slanted information designed to promote an anti-Assad message (Donald Trump has all but acknowledged that these images played a major role in his decision to reevaluate his opinion of Bashar al-Assad and order the cruise missile attack on Al Shayrat airbase.) 

Many of the fighters affiliated with Tahrir al-Sham are veterans of the battle for Aleppo, and as such are intimately familiar with the tools and trade of the extensive propaganda battle that was waged simultaneously with the actual fighting in an effort to sway western public opinion toward adopting a more aggressive stance in opposition to the Syrian government of Assad. These tools were brought to bear in promoting a counter-narrative about the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident (ironically, many of the activists in question, including the “White Helmets,” were trained and equipped in social media manipulation tactics using money provided by the United States; that these techniques would end up being used to manipulate an American President into carrying out an act of war most likely never factored into the thinking of the State Department personnel who conceived and implemented the program).

Even slick media training, however, cannot gloss over basic factual inconsistencies. Early on, the anti-Assad opposition media outlets were labeling the Khan Sheikhoun incident as a “Sarin nerve agent” attack; one doctor affiliated with Al Qaeda sent out images and commentary via social media that documented symptoms, such as dilated pupils, that he diagnosed as stemming from exposure to Sarin nerve agent. Sarin, however, is an odorless, colorless material, dispersed as either a liquid or vapor; eyewitnesses speak of a “pungent odor” and “blue-yellow” clouds, more indicative of chlorine gas.

And while American media outlets, such as CNN, have spoken of munitions “filled to the brim” with Sarin nerve agent being used at Khan Sheikhoun, there is simply no evidence cited by any source that can sustain such an account.  Heartbreaking images of victims being treated by “White Helmet” rescuers have been cited as proof of Sarin-like symptoms, the medical viability of these images is in question; there are no images taken of victims at the scene of the attack. Instead, the video provided by the “White Helmets” is of decontamination and treatment carried out at a “White Helmet” base after the victims, either dead or injured, were transported there. 

The lack of viable protective clothing worn by the “White Helmet” personnel while handling victims is another indication that the chemical in question was not military grade Sarin; if it were, the rescuers would themselves have become victims (some accounts speak of just this phenomena, but this occurred at the site of the attack, where the rescuers were overcome by a “pungent smelling” chemical – again, Sarin is odorless.)

More than 20 victims of the Khan Sheikhoun incident were transported to Turkish hospitals for care; three subsequently died. According to the Turkish Justice Minister, autopsies conducted on the bodies confirm that the cause of death was exposure to chemical agents. The World Health Organization has indicated that the symptoms of the Khan Sheikhoun victims are consistent with both Sarin and Chlorine exposure. American media outlets have latched onto the Turkish and WHO statements as “proof” of Syrian government involvement; however, any exposure to the chlorine/white phosphorous blend associated with Al Nusra chemical weapons would produce similar symptoms. 

Moreover, if Al Nusra was replicating the type of low-grade Sarin it employed at Ghouta in 2013 at Khan Sheikhoun, it is highly likely that some of the victims in question would exhibit Sarin-like symptoms. Blood samples taken from the victims could provide a more precise readout of the specific chemical exposure involved; such samples have allegedly been collected by Al Nusra-affiliated personnel, and turned over to international investigators (the notion that any serious investigatory body would allow Al Nusra to provide forensic evidence in support of an investigation where it is one of only two potential culprits is mindboggling, but that is precisely what has happened). But the Trump administration chose to act before these samples could be processed, perhaps afraid that their results would not sustain the underlying allegation of the employment of Sarin by the Syrian air force.

Mainstream American media outlets have willingly and openly embraced a narrative provided by Al Qaeda affiliates whose record of using chemical weapons in Syria and distorting and manufacturing “evidence” to promote anti-Assad policies in the west, including regime change, is well documented.  These outlets have made a deliberate decision to endorse the view of Al Qaeda over a narrative provided by Russian and Syrian government authorities without any effort to fact check either position. These actions, however, do not seem to shock the conscience of the American public; when it comes to Syria, the mainstream American media and its audience has long ago ceded the narrative to Al Qaeda and other Islamist anti-regime elements.

The real culprits here are the Trump administration, and President Trump himself. The president’s record of placing more weight on what he sees on television than the intelligence briefings he may or may not be getting, and his lack of intellectual curiosity and unfamiliarity with the nuances and complexities of both foreign and national security policy, created the conditions where the imagery of the Khan Sheikhoun victims that had been disseminated by pro-Al Nusra (i.e., Al Qaeda) outlets could influence critical life-or-death decisions.

That President Trump could be susceptible to such obvious manipulation is not surprising, given his predilection for counter-punching on Twitter for any perceived slight; that his national security team allowed him to be manipulated thus, and did nothing to sway Trump’s opinion or forestall action pending a thorough review of the facts, is scandalous. History will show that Donald Trump, his advisors and the American media were little more than willing dupes for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose manipulation of the Syrian narrative resulted in a major policy shift that furthers their objectives. 

The other winner in this sorry story is ISIS, which took advantage of the American strike against Al Shayrat to launch a major offensive against Syrian government forces around the city of Palmyra (Al Shayrat had served as the principal air base for operations in the Palmyra region). The breakdown in relations between Russia and the United States means that, for the foreseeable future at least, the kind of coordination that had been taking place in the fight against ISIS is a thing of the past, a fact that can only bode well for the fighters of ISIS. For a man who placed so much emphasis on defeating ISIS, President Trump’s actions can only be viewed as a self-inflicted wound, a kind of circular firing squad that marks the actions of a Keystone Cop, and not the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation in the world. 

But the person who might get the last laugh is President Assad himself. While the Pentagon has claimed that it significantly degraded the Al Shayrat air base, with 58 of 59 cruise missile hitting their targets, Russia has stated that only 23..

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2phfalx

[rtscrndr53704]

Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama back in September 2013 about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria.  At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared “to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!”

President Obama, despite having publicly declaring the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime a “red line” which, if crossed, would demand American military action, ultimately declined to order an attack, largely on the basis of warnings by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence linking the chemical attack on Ghouta was less than definitive.

President Barack Obama, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, observed, “there’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.” While the “Washington playbook,” Obama noted, could be useful during times of crisis, it could “also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

His “red line” on chemical weapons usage, combined with heated rhetoric coming from his closest advisors, including Secretary of State John Kerry, hinting at a military response, was such a trap. Ultimately, President Obama opted to back off, observing that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.” The media, Republicans and even members of his own party excoriated Obama for this decision.

Yet, in November 2016, as president-elect, Donald Trump doubled down on Obama’s eschewing of the “Washington playbook.” The situation on the ground in Syria had fundamentally changed since 2013; the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had taken over large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, establishing a “capital” in the Syrian city of Raqqa and declaring the creation of an Islamic “Caliphate.”  American efforts to remove Syrian President Assad from power had begun to bar fruit, forcing Russia to intervene in September 2015 in order to prop up the beleaguered Syrian president.

Trump, breaking from the mainstream positions held by most American policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, declared that the United States should focus on fighting and defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) and not pursuing regime change in Syria. “My attitude,” Trump noted, “was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria... Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.” Moreover, Trump observed, given the robust Russian presence inside Syria, if the United States attacked Assad, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

For more than two months, the new Trump administration seemed to breathe life into the notion that Donald Trump had, like his predecessor before him, thrown the “Washington playbook” out the window when it came to Syrian policy.  After ordering a series of new military deployments into Syria and Iraq specifically designed to confront ISIS, the Trump administration began to give public voice to a major shift in policy vis-à-vis the Syrian President.

For the first time since President Obama, in August 2011, articulated regime change in Damascus as a precondition for the cessation of the civil conflict that had been raging since April 2011, American government officials articulated that this was no longer the case.  “You pick and choose your battles,” the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told reporters on March 30, 2017.  “And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”  Haley’s words were echoed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who observed that same day, while on an official visit to Turkey, “I think the… longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.”

This new policy direction lasted barely five days. Sometime in the early afternoon of April 4, 2017, troubling images and video clips began to be transmitted out of the Syrian province of Idlib by anti-government activists, including members of the so-called “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue team whose work was captured in an eponymously-named Academy Award-winning documentary film. These images showed victims in various stages of symptomatic distress, including death, from what the activists said was exposure to chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian air force on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that very morning.

Images of these tragic deaths were immediately broadcast on American media outlets, with pundits decrying the horrific and heinous nature of the chemical attack, which was nearly unanimously attributed to the Syrian government, even though the only evidence provided was the imagery and testimony of the anti-Assad activists who, just days before, were decrying the shift in American policy regarding regime change in Syria. President Trump viewed these images, and was deeply troubled by what he saw, especially the depictions of dead and suffering children.

The images were used as exhibits in a passionate speech by Haley during a speech at the Security Council on April 5, 2017, where she confronted Russia and threatened unilateral American military action if the Council failed to respond to the alleged Syrian chemical attack. “Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures, to children foaming at the mouth, suffering convulsions, being carried in the arms of desperate parents,” Haley said, holding up two examples of the images provided by the anti-Assad activists. “We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers…we cannot close our eyes to those pictures.  We cannot close our minds of the responsibility to act.”  If the Security Council refused to take action against the Syrian government, Haley said, then “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama was confronted with images of dead and injured civilians, including numerous small children, from Syria that were every bit as heartbreaking as the ones displayed by Ambassador Haley. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, had made an impassioned speech that all but called for military force against Syria.  President Obama asked for, and received, a wide-range of military options from his national security team targeting the regime of President Assad; only the intervention of James Clapper, and the doubts that existed about the veracity of the intelligence linking the Ghouta chemical attack to the Syrian government, held Obama back from giving the green light for the bombing to begin. 

Like President Obama before him, President Trump asked for his national security team to prepare options for military action.  Unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump did not seek a pause in his decision making process to let his intelligence services investigate what had actually occurred in Khan Sheikhoun.  Like Nikki Haley, Donald Trump was driven by his visceral reaction to the imagery being disseminated by anti-Assad activists. In the afternoon of April 6, as he prepared to depart the White House for a summit meeting with a delegation led by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump’s own cryptic words in response to a reporter’s question about any American response seem to hint that his mind was already made up. “You’ll see,” he said, before walking away.

Within hours, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 advanced Block IV Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.41 million each), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Al Shayrat air base, located in central Syria.  Al Shayrat was home to two squadrons of Russian-made SU-22 fighter-bombers operated by the Syrian air force, one of which was tracked by American radar as taking off from Al Sharyat on the morning of April 4, 2017, and was overhead Khan Sheikhoun around the time the alleged chemical attack occurred. 

The purpose of the American strike was two-fold; first, to send a message to the Syrian government and its allies that, according to Secretary of State Tillerson, “the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” and in particular when confronted with evidence of a chemical attack from which the United States could not “turn away, turn a blind eye.”  The other purpose, according to a U.S. military spokesperson, to “reduce the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.” 

Moreover, the policy honeymoon the Trump administration had only recently announced about regime change in Syria was over. “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” President Trump told reporters before the missile strikes had commenced.  Secretary Tillerson went further: “It would seem there would be no role for him [Assad] to govern the Syrian people.”

Such a reversal in policy fundamentals and direction in such a short period of time is stunning; Donald Trump didn’t simply deviate slightly off course, but rather did a complete 180-degree turn. The previous policy of avoiding entanglement in the internal affairs of Syria in favor of defeating ISIS and improving relations with Russia had been replaced by a fervent embrace of regime change, direct military engagement with the Syrian armed forces, and a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Russian military presence in Syria.

Normally, such major policy change could only be explained by a new reality driven by verifiable facts. The alleged chemical weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun was not a new reality; chemical attacks had been occurring inside Syria on a regular basis, despite the international effort to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons capability undertaken in 2013 that played a central role in forestalling American military action at that time. International investigations of these attacks produced mixed results, with some being attributed to the Syrian government (something the Syrian government vehemently denies), and the majority being attributed to anti-regime fighters, in particular those affiliated with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Moreover, there exists a mixed provenance when it comes to chemical weapons usage inside Syria that would seem to foreclose any knee-jerk reaction that placed the blame for what happened at Khan Sheikhoun solely on the Syrian government void of any official investigation. Yet this is precisely what occurred.  Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible for the release of the chemicals that caused the deaths of so many civilians.

No one disputes the fact that a Syrian air force SU-22 fighter-bomber conducted a bombing mission against a target in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017. The anti-regime activists in Khan Sheikhoun, however, have painted a narrative that has the Syrian air force dropping chemical bombs on a sleeping civilian population.

A critical piece of information that has largely escaped the reporting in the mainstream media is that Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the center of the anti-Assad movement in Syria since 2011. Up until February 2017, Khan Sheikhoun was occupied by a pro-ISIS group known as Liwa al-Aqsa that was engaged in an oftentimes-violent struggle with its competitor organization, Al Nusra Front (which later morphed into Tahrir al-Sham, but under any name functioning as Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria) for resources and political influence among the local population.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Liwa al-Aqsa was using facilities in and around Khan Sheikhoun to manufacture crude chemical shells and landmines intended for ISIS forces fighting in Iraq. According to the Russians the Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapons facility was mirrored on similar sites uncovered by Russian and Syrian forces following the reoccupation of rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo. 

In Aleppo, the Russians discovered crude weapons production laboratories that filled mortar shells and landmines with a mix of chlorine gas and white phosphorus; after a thorough forensic investigation was conducted by military specialists, the Russians turned over samples of these weapons, together with soil samples from areas struck by weapons produced in these laboratories, to investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for further evaluation.

Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.  If the Russians are correct, and the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.

The counter-narrative offered by the Russians and Syrians, however, has been minimized, mocked and ignored by both the American media and the Trump administration. So, too, has the very illogic of the premise being put forward to answer the question of why President Assad would risk everything by using chemical weapons against a target of zero military value, at a time when the strategic balance of power had shifted strongly in his favor. Likewise, why would Russia, which had invested considerable political capital in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons capability after 2013, stand by idly while the Syrian air force carried out such an attack, especially when their was such a heavy Russian military presence at the base in question at the time of the attack?

Such analysis seems beyond the scope and comprehension of the American fourth estate.  Instead, media outlets like CNN embrace at face value anything they are told by official American sources, including a particularly preposterous insinuation that Russia actually colluded in the chemical weapons attack; the aforementioned presence of Russian officers at Al Shayrat air base has been cited as evidence that Russia had to have known about Syria’s chemical warfare capability, and yet did nothing to prevent the attack.

To sustain this illogic, the American public and decision-makers make use of a sophisticated propaganda campaign involving video images and narratives provided by forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, including organizations like the “White Helmets,” the Syrian-American Medical Society, the Aleppo Media Center, which have a history of providing slanted information designed to promote an anti-Assad message (Donald Trump has all but acknowledged that these images played a major role in his decision to reevaluate his opinion of Bashar al-Assad and order the cruise missile attack on Al Shayrat airbase.) 

Many of the fighters affiliated with Tahrir al-Sham are veterans of the battle for Aleppo, and as such are intimately familiar with the tools and trade of the extensive propaganda battle that was waged simultaneously with the actual fighting in an effort to sway western public opinion toward adopting a more aggressive stance in opposition to the Syrian government of Assad. These tools were brought to bear in promoting a counter-narrative about the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident (ironically, many of the activists in question, including the “White Helmets,” were trained and equipped in social media manipulation tactics using money provided by the United States; that these techniques would end up being used to manipulate an American President into carrying out an act of war most likely never factored into the thinking of the State Department personnel who conceived and implemented the program).

Even slick media training, however, cannot gloss over basic factual inconsistencies. Early on, the anti-Assad opposition media outlets were labeling the Khan Sheikhoun incident as a “Sarin nerve agent” attack; one doctor affiliated with Al Qaeda sent out images and commentary via social media that documented symptoms, such as dilated pupils, that he diagnosed as stemming from exposure to Sarin nerve agent. Sarin, however, is an odorless, colorless material, dispersed as either a liquid or vapor; eyewitnesses speak of a “pungent odor” and “blue-yellow” clouds, more indicative of chlorine gas.

And while American media outlets, such as CNN, have spoken of munitions “filled to the brim” with Sarin nerve agent being used at Khan Sheikhoun, there is simply no evidence cited by any source that can sustain such an account.  Heartbreaking images of victims being treated by “White Helmet” rescuers have been cited as proof of Sarin-like symptoms, the medical viability of these images is in question; there are no images taken of victims at the scene of the attack. Instead, the video provided by the “White Helmets” is of decontamination and treatment carried out at a “White Helmet” base after the victims, either dead or injured, were transported there. 

The lack of viable protective clothing worn by the “White Helmet” personnel while handling victims is another indication that the chemical in question was not military grade Sarin; if it were, the rescuers would themselves have become victims (some accounts speak of just this phenomena, but this occurred at the site of the attack, where the rescuers were overcome by a “pungent smelling” chemical – again, Sarin is odorless.)

More than 20 victims of the Khan Sheikhoun incident were transported to Turkish hospitals for care; three subsequently died. According to the Turkish Justice Minister, autopsies conducted on the bodies confirm that the cause of death was exposure to chemical agents. The World Health Organization has indicated that the symptoms of the Khan Sheikhoun victims are consistent with both Sarin and Chlorine exposure. American media outlets have latched onto the Turkish and WHO statements as “proof” of Syrian government involvement; however, any exposure to the chlorine/white phosphorous blend associated with Al Nusra chemical weapons would produce similar symptoms. 

Moreover, if Al Nusra was replicating the type of low-grade Sarin it employed at Ghouta in 2013 at Khan Sheikhoun, it is highly likely that some of the victims in question would exhibit Sarin-like symptoms. Blood samples taken from the victims could provide a more precise readout of the specific chemical exposure involved; such samples have allegedly been collected by Al Nusra-affiliated personnel, and turned over to international investigators (the notion that any serious investigatory body would allow Al Nusra to provide forensic evidence in support of an investigation where it is one of only two potential culprits is mindboggling, but that is precisely what has happened). But the Trump administration chose to act before these samples could be processed, perhaps afraid that their results would not sustain the underlying allegation of the employment of Sarin by the Syrian air force.

Mainstream American media outlets have willingly and openly embraced a narrative provided by Al Qaeda affiliates whose record of using chemical weapons in Syria and distorting and manufacturing “evidence” to promote anti-Assad policies in the west, including regime change, is well documented.  These outlets have made a deliberate decision to endorse the view of Al Qaeda over a narrative provided by Russian and Syrian government authorities without any effort to fact check either position. These actions, however, do not seem to shock the conscience of the American public; when it comes to Syria, the mainstream American media and its audience has long ago ceded the narrative to Al Qaeda and other Islamist anti-regime elements.

The real culprits here are the Trump administration, and President Trump himself. The president’s record of placing more weight on what he sees on television than the intelligence briefings he may or may not be getting, and his lack of intellectual curiosity and unfamiliarity with the nuances and complexities of both foreign and national security policy, created the conditions where the imagery of the Khan Sheikhoun victims that had been disseminated by pro-Al Nusra (i.e., Al Qaeda) outlets could influence critical life-or-death decisions.

That President Trump could be susceptible to such obvious manipulation is not surprising, given his predilection for counter-punching on Twitter for any perceived slight; that his national security team allowed him to be manipulated thus, and did nothing to sway Trump’s opinion or forestall action pending a thorough review of the facts, is scandalous. History will show that Donald Trump, his advisors and the American media were little more than willing dupes for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose manipulation of the Syrian narrative resulted in a major policy shift that furthers their objectives. 

The other winner in this sorry story is ISIS, which took advantage of the American strike against Al Shayrat to launch a major offensive against Syrian government forces around the city of Palmyra (Al Shayrat had served as the principal air base for operations in the Palmyra region). The breakdown in relations between Russia and the United States means that, for the foreseeable future at least, the kind of coordination that had been taking place in the fight against ISIS is a thing of the past, a fact that can only bode well for the fighters of ISIS. For a man who placed so much emphasis on defeating ISIS, President Trump’s actions can only be viewed as a self-inflicted wound, a kind of circular firing squad that marks the actions of a Keystone Cop, and not the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation in the world. 

But the person who might get the last laugh is President Assad himself. While the Pentagon has claimed that it significantly degraded the Al Shayrat air base, with 58 of 59 cruise missile hitting their targets, Russia has stated that only 23..

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2phfalx

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama back in September 2013 about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria.  At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared “to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!”

President Obama, despite having publicly declaring the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime a “red line” which, if crossed, would demand American military action, ultimately declined to order an attack, largely on the basis of warnings by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence linking the chemical attack on Ghouta was less than definitive.

President Barack Obama, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, observed, “there’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.” While the “Washington playbook,” Obama noted, could be useful during times of crisis, it could “also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

His “red line” on chemical weapons usage, combined with heated rhetoric coming from his closest advisors, including Secretary of State John Kerry, hinting at a military response, was such a trap. Ultimately, President Obama opted to back off, observing that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.” The media, Republicans and even members of his own party excoriated Obama for this decision.

Yet, in November 2016, as president-elect, Donald Trump doubled down on Obama’s eschewing of the “Washington playbook.” The situation on the ground in Syria had fundamentally changed since 2013; the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had taken over large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, establishing a “capital” in the Syrian city of Raqqa and declaring the creation of an Islamic “Caliphate.”  American efforts to remove Syrian President Assad from power had begun to bar fruit, forcing Russia to intervene in September 2015 in order to prop up the beleaguered Syrian president.

Trump, breaking from the mainstream positions held by most American policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, declared that the United States should focus on fighting and defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) and not pursuing regime change in Syria. “My attitude,” Trump noted, “was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria... Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.” Moreover, Trump observed, given the robust Russian presence inside Syria, if the United States attacked Assad, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

For more than two months, the new Trump administration seemed to breathe life into the notion that Donald Trump had, like his predecessor before him, thrown the “Washington playbook” out the window when it came to Syrian policy.  After ordering a series of new military deployments into Syria and Iraq specifically designed to confront ISIS, the Trump administration began to give public voice to a major shift in policy vis-à-vis the Syrian President.

For the first time since President Obama, in August 2011, articulated regime change in Damascus as a precondition for the cessation of the civil conflict that had been raging since April 2011, American government officials articulated that this was no longer the case.  “You pick and choose your battles,” the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told reporters on March 30, 2017.  “And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”  Haley’s words were echoed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who observed that same day, while on an official visit to Turkey, “I think the… longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.”

This new policy direction lasted barely five days. Sometime in the early afternoon of April 4, 2017, troubling images and video clips began to be transmitted out of the Syrian province of Idlib by anti-government activists, including members of the so-called “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue team whose work was captured in an eponymously-named Academy Award-winning documentary film. These images showed victims in various stages of symptomatic distress, including death, from what the activists said was exposure to chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian air force on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that very morning.

Images of these tragic deaths were immediately broadcast on American media outlets, with pundits decrying the horrific and heinous nature of the chemical attack, which was nearly unanimously attributed to the Syrian government, even though the only evidence provided was the imagery and testimony of the anti-Assad activists who, just days before, were decrying the shift in American policy regarding regime change in Syria. President Trump viewed these images, and was deeply troubled by what he saw, especially the depictions of dead and suffering children.

The images were used as exhibits in a passionate speech by Haley during a speech at the Security Council on April 5, 2017, where she confronted Russia and threatened unilateral American military action if the Council failed to respond to the alleged Syrian chemical attack. “Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures, to children foaming at the mouth, suffering convulsions, being carried in the arms of desperate parents,” Haley said, holding up two examples of the images provided by the anti-Assad activists. “We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers…we cannot close our eyes to those pictures.  We cannot close our minds of the responsibility to act.”  If the Security Council refused to take action against the Syrian government, Haley said, then “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama was confronted with images of dead and injured civilians, including numerous small children, from Syria that were every bit as heartbreaking as the ones displayed by Ambassador Haley. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, had made an impassioned speech that all but called for military force against Syria.  President Obama asked for, and received, a wide-range of military options from his national security team targeting the regime of President Assad; only the intervention of James Clapper, and the doubts that existed about the veracity of the intelligence linking the Ghouta chemical attack to the Syrian government, held Obama back from giving the green light for the bombing to begin. 

Like President Obama before him, President Trump asked for his national security team to prepare options for military action.  Unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump did not seek a pause in his decision making process to let his intelligence services investigate what had actually occurred in Khan Sheikhoun.  Like Nikki Haley, Donald Trump was driven by his visceral reaction to the imagery being disseminated by anti-Assad activists. In the afternoon of April 6, as he prepared to depart the White House for a summit meeting with a delegation led by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump’s own cryptic words in response to a reporter’s question about any American response seem to hint that his mind was already made up. “You’ll see,” he said, before walking away.

Within hours, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 advanced Block IV Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.41 million each), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Al Shayrat air base, located in central Syria.  Al Shayrat was home to two squadrons of Russian-made SU-22 fighter-bombers operated by the Syrian air force, one of which was tracked by American radar as taking off from Al Sharyat on the morning of April 4, 2017, and was overhead Khan Sheikhoun around the time the alleged chemical attack occurred. 

The purpose of the American strike was two-fold; first, to send a message to the Syrian government and its allies that, according to Secretary of State Tillerson, “the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” and in particular when confronted with evidence of a chemical attack from which the United States could not “turn away, turn a blind eye.”  The other purpose, according to a U.S. military spokesperson, to “reduce the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.” 

Moreover, the policy honeymoon the Trump administration had only recently announced about regime change in Syria was over. “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” President Trump told reporters before the missile strikes had commenced.  Secretary Tillerson went further: “It would seem there would be no role for him [Assad] to govern the Syrian people.”

Such a reversal in policy fundamentals and direction in such a short period of time is stunning; Donald Trump didn’t simply deviate slightly off course, but rather did a complete 180-degree turn. The previous policy of avoiding entanglement in the internal affairs of Syria in favor of defeating ISIS and improving relations with Russia had been replaced by a fervent embrace of regime change, direct military engagement with the Syrian armed forces, and a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Russian military presence in Syria.

Normally, such major policy change could only be explained by a new reality driven by verifiable facts. The alleged chemical weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun was not a new reality; chemical attacks had been occurring inside Syria on a regular basis, despite the international effort to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons capability undertaken in 2013 that played a central role in forestalling American military action at that time. International investigations of these attacks produced mixed results, with some being attributed to the Syrian government (something the Syrian government vehemently denies), and the majority being attributed to anti-regime fighters, in particular those affiliated with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Moreover, there exists a mixed provenance when it comes to chemical weapons usage inside Syria that would seem to foreclose any knee-jerk reaction that placed the blame for what happened at Khan Sheikhoun solely on the Syrian government void of any official investigation. Yet this is precisely what occurred.  Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible for the release of the chemicals that caused the deaths of so many civilians.

No one disputes the fact that a Syrian air force SU-22 fighter-bomber conducted a bombing mission against a target in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017. The anti-regime activists in Khan Sheikhoun, however, have painted a narrative that has the Syrian air force dropping chemical bombs on a sleeping civilian population.

A critical piece of information that has largely escaped the reporting in the mainstream media is that Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the center of the anti-Assad movement in Syria since 2011. Up until February 2017, Khan Sheikhoun was occupied by a pro-ISIS group known as Liwa al-Aqsa that was engaged in an oftentimes-violent struggle with its competitor organization, Al Nusra Front (which later morphed into Tahrir al-Sham, but under any name functioning as Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria) for resources and political influence among the local population.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Liwa al-Aqsa was using facilities in and around Khan Sheikhoun to manufacture crude chemical shells and landmines intended for ISIS forces fighting in Iraq. According to the Russians the Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapons facility was mirrored on similar sites uncovered by Russian and Syrian forces following the reoccupation of rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo. 

In Aleppo, the Russians discovered crude weapons production laboratories that filled mortar shells and landmines with a mix of chlorine gas and white phosphorus; after a thorough forensic investigation was conducted by military specialists, the Russians turned over samples of these weapons, together with soil samples from areas struck by weapons produced in these laboratories, to investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for further evaluation.

Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.  If the Russians are correct, and the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.

The counter-narrative offered by the Russians and Syrians, however, has been minimized, mocked and ignored by both the American media and the Trump administration. So, too, has the very illogic of the premise being put forward to answer the question of why President Assad would risk everything by using chemical weapons against a target of zero military value, at a time when the strategic balance of power had shifted strongly in his favor. Likewise, why would Russia, which had invested considerable political capital in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons capability after 2013, stand by idly while the Syrian air force carried out such an attack, especially when their was such a heavy Russian military presence at the base in question at the time of the attack?

Such analysis seems beyond the scope and comprehension of the American fourth estate.  Instead, media outlets like CNN embrace at face value anything they are told by official American sources, including a particularly preposterous insinuation that Russia actually colluded in the chemical weapons attack; the aforementioned presence of Russian officers at Al Shayrat air base has been cited as evidence that Russia had to have known about Syria’s chemical warfare capability, and yet did nothing to prevent the attack.

To sustain this illogic, the American public and decision-makers make use of a sophisticated propaganda campaign involving video images and narratives provided by forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, including organizations like the “White Helmets,” the Syrian-American Medical Society, the Aleppo Media Center, which have a history of providing slanted information designed to promote an anti-Assad message (Donald Trump has all but acknowledged that these images played a major role in his decision to reevaluate his opinion of Bashar al-Assad and order the cruise missile attack on Al Shayrat airbase.) 

Many of the fighters affiliated with Tahrir al-Sham are veterans of the battle for Aleppo, and as such are intimately familiar with the tools and trade of the extensive propaganda battle that was waged simultaneously with the actual fighting in an effort to sway western public opinion toward adopting a more aggressive stance in opposition to the Syrian government of Assad. These tools were brought to bear in promoting a counter-narrative about the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident (ironically, many of the activists in question, including the “White Helmets,” were trained and equipped in social media manipulation tactics using money provided by the United States; that these techniques would end up being used to manipulate an American President into carrying out an act of war most likely never factored into the thinking of the State Department personnel who conceived and implemented the program).

Even slick media training, however, cannot gloss over basic factual inconsistencies. Early on, the anti-Assad opposition media outlets were labeling the Khan Sheikhoun incident as a “Sarin nerve agent” attack; one doctor affiliated with Al Qaeda sent out images and commentary via social media that documented symptoms, such as dilated pupils, that he diagnosed as stemming from exposure to Sarin nerve agent. Sarin, however, is an odorless, colorless material, dispersed as either a liquid or vapor; eyewitnesses speak of a “pungent odor” and “blue-yellow” clouds, more indicative of chlorine gas.

And while American media outlets, such as CNN, have spoken of munitions “filled to the brim” with Sarin nerve agent being used at Khan Sheikhoun, there is simply no evidence cited by any source that can sustain such an account.  Heartbreaking images of victims being treated by “White Helmet” rescuers have been cited as proof of Sarin-like symptoms, the medical viability of these images is in question; there are no images taken of victims at the scene of the attack. Instead, the video provided by the “White Helmets” is of decontamination and treatment carried out at a “White Helmet” base after the victims, either dead or injured, were transported there. 

The lack of viable protective clothing worn by the “White Helmet” personnel while handling victims is another indication that the chemical in question was not military grade Sarin; if it were, the rescuers would themselves have become victims (some accounts speak of just this phenomena, but this occurred at the site of the attack, where the rescuers were overcome by a “pungent smelling” chemical – again, Sarin is odorless.)

More than 20 victims of the Khan Sheikhoun incident were transported to Turkish hospitals for care; three subsequently died. According to the Turkish Justice Minister, autopsies conducted on the bodies confirm that the cause of death was exposure to chemical agents. The World Health Organization has indicated that the symptoms of the Khan Sheikhoun victims are consistent with both Sarin and Chlorine exposure. American media outlets have latched onto the Turkish and WHO statements as “proof” of Syrian government involvement; however, any exposure to the chlorine/white phosphorous blend associated with Al Nusra chemical weapons would produce similar symptoms. 

Moreover, if Al Nusra was replicating the type of low-grade Sarin it employed at Ghouta in 2013 at Khan Sheikhoun, it is highly likely that some of the victims in question would exhibit Sarin-like symptoms. Blood samples taken from the victims could provide a more precise readout of the specific chemical exposure involved; such samples have allegedly been collected by Al Nusra-affiliated personnel, and turned over to international investigators (the notion that any serious investigatory body would allow Al Nusra to provide forensic evidence in support of an investigation where it is one of only two potential culprits is mindboggling, but that is precisely what has happened). But the Trump administration chose to act before these samples could be processed, perhaps afraid that their results would not sustain the underlying allegation of the employment of Sarin by the Syrian air force.

Mainstream American media outlets have willingly and openly embraced a narrative provided by Al Qaeda affiliates whose record of using chemical weapons in Syria and distorting and manufacturing “evidence” to promote anti-Assad policies in the west, including regime change, is well documented.  These outlets have made a deliberate decision to endorse the view of Al Qaeda over a narrative provided by Russian and Syrian government authorities without any effort to fact check either position. These actions, however, do not seem to shock the conscience of the American public; when it comes to Syria, the mainstream American media and its audience has long ago ceded the narrative to Al Qaeda and other Islamist anti-regime elements.

The real culprits here are the Trump administration, and President Trump himself. The president’s record of placing more weight on what he sees on television than the intelligence briefings he may or may not be getting, and his lack of intellectual curiosity and unfamiliarity with the nuances and complexities of both foreign and national security policy, created the conditions where the imagery of the Khan Sheikhoun victims that had been disseminated by pro-Al Nusra (i.e., Al Qaeda) outlets could influence critical life-or-death decisions.

That President Trump could be susceptible to such obvious manipulation is not surprising, given his predilection for counter-punching on Twitter for any perceived slight; that his national security team allowed him to be manipulated thus, and did nothing to sway Trump’s opinion or forestall action pending a thorough review of the facts, is scandalous. History will show that Donald Trump, his advisors and the American media were little more than willing dupes for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose manipulation of the Syrian narrative resulted in a major policy shift that furthers their objectives. 

The other winner in this sorry story is ISIS, which took advantage of the American strike against Al Shayrat to launch a major offensive against Syrian government forces around the city of Palmyra (Al Shayrat had served as the principal air base for operations in the Palmyra region). The breakdown in relations between Russia and the United States means that, for the foreseeable future at least, the kind of coordination that had been taking place in the fight against ISIS is a thing of the past, a fact that can only bode well for the fighters of ISIS. For a man who placed so much emphasis on defeating ISIS, President Trump’s actions can only be viewed as a self-inflicted wound, a kind of circular firing squad that marks the actions of a Keystone Cop, and not the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation in the world. 

But the person who might get the last laugh is President Assad himself. While the Pentagon has claimed that it significantly degraded the Al Shayrat air base, with 58 of 59 cruise missile hitting their targets, Russia has stated that only 23..

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2phfalx

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama back in September 2013 about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria.  At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared “to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!”

President Obama, despite having publicly declaring the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime a “red line” which, if crossed, would demand American military action, ultimately declined to order an attack, largely on the basis of warnings by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence linking the chemical attack on Ghouta was less than definitive.

President Barack Obama, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, observed, “there’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.” While the “Washington playbook,” Obama noted, could be useful during times of crisis, it could “also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

His “red line” on chemical weapons usage, combined with heated rhetoric coming from his closest advisors, including Secretary of State John Kerry, hinting at a military response, was such a trap. Ultimately, President Obama opted to back off, observing that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.” The media, Republicans and even members of his own party excoriated Obama for this decision.

Yet, in November 2016, as president-elect, Donald Trump doubled down on Obama’s eschewing of the “Washington playbook.” The situation on the ground in Syria had fundamentally changed since 2013; the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had taken over large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, establishing a “capital” in the Syrian city of Raqqa and declaring the creation of an Islamic “Caliphate.”  American efforts to remove Syrian President Assad from power had begun to bar fruit, forcing Russia to intervene in September 2015 in order to prop up the beleaguered Syrian president.

Trump, breaking from the mainstream positions held by most American policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, declared that the United States should focus on fighting and defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) and not pursuing regime change in Syria. “My attitude,” Trump noted, “was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria... Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.” Moreover, Trump observed, given the robust Russian presence inside Syria, if the United States attacked Assad, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

For more than two months, the new Trump administration seemed to breathe life into the notion that Donald Trump had, like his predecessor before him, thrown the “Washington playbook” out the window when it came to Syrian policy.  After ordering a series of new military deployments into Syria and Iraq specifically designed to confront ISIS, the Trump administration began to give public voice to a major shift in policy vis-à-vis the Syrian President.

For the first time since President Obama, in August 2011, articulated regime change in Damascus as a precondition for the cessation of the civil conflict that had been raging since April 2011, American government officials articulated that this was no longer the case.  “You pick and choose your battles,” the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told reporters on March 30, 2017.  “And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”  Haley’s words were echoed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who observed that same day, while on an official visit to Turkey, “I think the… longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.”

This new policy direction lasted barely five days. Sometime in the early afternoon of April 4, 2017, troubling images and video clips began to be transmitted out of the Syrian province of Idlib by anti-government activists, including members of the so-called “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue team whose work was captured in an eponymously-named Academy Award-winning documentary film. These images showed victims in various stages of symptomatic distress, including death, from what the activists said was exposure to chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian air force on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that very morning.

Images of these tragic deaths were immediately broadcast on American media outlets, with pundits decrying the horrific and heinous nature of the chemical attack, which was nearly unanimously attributed to the Syrian government, even though the only evidence provided was the imagery and testimony of the anti-Assad activists who, just days before, were decrying the shift in American policy regarding regime change in Syria. President Trump viewed these images, and was deeply troubled by what he saw, especially the depictions of dead and suffering children.

The images were used as exhibits in a passionate speech by Haley during a speech at the Security Council on April 5, 2017, where she confronted Russia and threatened unilateral American military action if the Council failed to respond to the alleged Syrian chemical attack. “Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures, to children foaming at the mouth, suffering convulsions, being carried in the arms of desperate parents,” Haley said, holding up two examples of the images provided by the anti-Assad activists. “We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers…we cannot close our eyes to those pictures.  We cannot close our minds of the responsibility to act.”  If the Security Council refused to take action against the Syrian government, Haley said, then “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama was confronted with images of dead and injured civilians, including numerous small children, from Syria that were every bit as heartbreaking as the ones displayed by Ambassador Haley. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, had made an impassioned speech that all but called for military force against Syria.  President Obama asked for, and received, a wide-range of military options from his national security team targeting the regime of President Assad; only the intervention of James Clapper, and the doubts that existed about the veracity of the intelligence linking the Ghouta chemical attack to the Syrian government, held Obama back from giving the green light for the bombing to begin. 

Like President Obama before him, President Trump asked for his national security team to prepare options for military action.  Unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump did not seek a pause in his decision making process to let his intelligence services investigate what had actually occurred in Khan Sheikhoun.  Like Nikki Haley, Donald Trump was driven by his visceral reaction to the imagery being disseminated by anti-Assad activists. In the afternoon of April 6, as he prepared to depart the White House for a summit meeting with a delegation led by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump’s own cryptic words in response to a reporter’s question about any American response seem to hint that his mind was already made up. “You’ll see,” he said, before walking away.

Within hours, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 advanced Block IV Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.41 million each), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Al Shayrat air base, located in central Syria.  Al Shayrat was home to two squadrons of Russian-made SU-22 fighter-bombers operated by the Syrian air force, one of which was tracked by American radar as taking off from Al Sharyat on the morning of April 4, 2017, and was overhead Khan Sheikhoun around the time the alleged chemical attack occurred. 

The purpose of the American strike was two-fold; first, to send a message to the Syrian government and its allies that, according to Secretary of State Tillerson, “the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” and in particular when confronted with evidence of a chemical attack from which the United States could not “turn away, turn a blind eye.”  The other purpose, according to a U.S. military spokesperson, to “reduce the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.” 

Moreover, the policy honeymoon the Trump administration had only recently announced about regime change in Syria was over. “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” President Trump told reporters before the missile strikes had commenced.  Secretary Tillerson went further: “It would seem there would be no role for him [Assad] to govern the Syrian people.”

Such a reversal in policy fundamentals and direction in such a short period of time is stunning; Donald Trump didn’t simply deviate slightly off course, but rather did a complete 180-degree turn. The previous policy of avoiding entanglement in the internal affairs of Syria in favor of defeating ISIS and improving relations with Russia had been replaced by a fervent embrace of regime change, direct military engagement with the Syrian armed forces, and a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Russian military presence in Syria.

Normally, such major policy change could only be explained by a new reality driven by verifiable facts. The alleged chemical weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun was not a new reality; chemical attacks had been occurring inside Syria on a regular basis, despite the international effort to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons capability undertaken in 2013 that played a central role in forestalling American military action at that time. International investigations of these attacks produced mixed results, with some being attributed to the Syrian government (something the Syrian government vehemently denies), and the majority being attributed to anti-regime fighters, in particular those affiliated with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Moreover, there exists a mixed provenance when it comes to chemical weapons usage inside Syria that would seem to foreclose any knee-jerk reaction that placed the blame for what happened at Khan Sheikhoun solely on the Syrian government void of any official investigation. Yet this is precisely what occurred.  Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible for the release of the chemicals that caused the deaths of so many civilians.

No one disputes the fact that a Syrian air force SU-22 fighter-bomber conducted a bombing mission against a target in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017. The anti-regime activists in Khan Sheikhoun, however, have painted a narrative that has the Syrian air force dropping chemical bombs on a sleeping civilian population.

A critical piece of information that has largely escaped the reporting in the mainstream media is that Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the center of the anti-Assad movement in Syria since 2011. Up until February 2017, Khan Sheikhoun was occupied by a pro-ISIS group known as Liwa al-Aqsa that was engaged in an oftentimes-violent struggle with its competitor organization, Al Nusra Front (which later morphed into Tahrir al-Sham, but under any name functioning as Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria) for resources and political influence among the local population.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Liwa al-Aqsa was using facilities in and around Khan Sheikhoun to manufacture crude chemical shells and landmines intended for ISIS forces fighting in Iraq. According to the Russians the Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapons facility was mirrored on similar sites uncovered by Russian and Syrian forces following the reoccupation of rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo. 

In Aleppo, the Russians discovered crude weapons production laboratories that filled mortar shells and landmines with a mix of chlorine gas and white phosphorus; after a thorough forensic investigation was conducted by military specialists, the Russians turned over samples of these weapons, together with soil samples from areas struck by weapons produced in these laboratories, to investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for further evaluation.

Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.  If the Russians are correct, and the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.

The counter-narrative offered by the Russians and Syrians, however, has been minimized, mocked and ignored by both the American media and the Trump administration. So, too, has the very illogic of the premise being put forward to answer the question of why President Assad would risk everything by using chemical weapons against a target of zero military value, at a time when the strategic balance of power had shifted strongly in his favor. Likewise, why would Russia, which had invested considerable political capital in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons capability after 2013, stand by idly while the Syrian air force carried out such an attack, especially when their was such a heavy Russian military presence at the base in question at the time of the attack?

Such analysis seems beyond the scope and comprehension of the American fourth estate.  Instead, media outlets like CNN embrace at face value anything they are told by official American sources, including a particularly preposterous insinuation that Russia actually colluded in the chemical weapons attack; the aforementioned presence of Russian officers at Al Shayrat air base has been cited as evidence that Russia had to have known about Syria’s chemical warfare capability, and yet did nothing to prevent the attack.

To sustain this illogic, the American public and decision-makers make use of a sophisticated propaganda campaign involving video images and narratives provided by forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, including organizations like the “White Helmets,” the Syrian-American Medical Society, the Aleppo Media Center, which have a history of providing slanted information designed to promote an anti-Assad message (Donald Trump has all but acknowledged that these images played a major role in his decision to reevaluate his opinion of Bashar al-Assad and order the cruise missile attack on Al Shayrat airbase.) 

Many of the fighters affiliated with Tahrir al-Sham are veterans of the battle for Aleppo, and as such are intimately familiar with the tools and trade of the extensive propaganda battle that was waged simultaneously with the actual fighting in an effort to sway western public opinion toward adopting a more aggressive stance in opposition to the Syrian government of Assad. These tools were brought to bear in promoting a counter-narrative about the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident (ironically, many of the activists in question, including the “White Helmets,” were trained and equipped in social media manipulation tactics using money provided by the United States; that these techniques would end up being used to manipulate an American President into carrying out an act of war most likely never factored into the thinking of the State Department personnel who conceived and implemented the program).

Even slick media training, however, cannot gloss over basic factual inconsistencies. Early on, the anti-Assad opposition media outlets were labeling the Khan Sheikhoun incident as a “Sarin nerve agent” attack; one doctor affiliated with Al Qaeda sent out images and commentary via social media that documented symptoms, such as dilated pupils, that he diagnosed as stemming from exposure to Sarin nerve agent. Sarin, however, is an odorless, colorless material, dispersed as either a liquid or vapor; eyewitnesses speak of a “pungent odor” and “blue-yellow” clouds, more indicative of chlorine gas.

And while American media outlets, such as CNN, have spoken of munitions “filled to the brim” with Sarin nerve agent being used at Khan Sheikhoun, there is simply no evidence cited by any source that can sustain such an account.  Heartbreaking images of victims being treated by “White Helmet” rescuers have been cited as proof of Sarin-like symptoms, the medical viability of these images is in question; there are no images taken of victims at the scene of the attack. Instead, the video provided by the “White Helmets” is of decontamination and treatment carried out at a “White Helmet” base after the victims, either dead or injured, were transported there. 

The lack of viable protective clothing worn by the “White Helmet” personnel while handling victims is another indication that the chemical in question was not military grade Sarin; if it were, the rescuers would themselves have become victims (some accounts speak of just this phenomena, but this occurred at the site of the attack, where the rescuers were overcome by a “pungent smelling” chemical – again, Sarin is odorless.)

More than 20 victims of the Khan Sheikhoun incident were transported to Turkish hospitals for care; three subsequently died. According to the Turkish Justice Minister, autopsies conducted on the bodies confirm that the cause of death was exposure to chemical agents. The World Health Organization has indicated that the symptoms of the Khan Sheikhoun victims are consistent with both Sarin and Chlorine exposure. American media outlets have latched onto the Turkish and WHO statements as “proof” of Syrian government involvement; however, any exposure to the chlorine/white phosphorous blend associated with Al Nusra chemical weapons would produce similar symptoms. 

Moreover, if Al Nusra was replicating the type of low-grade Sarin it employed at Ghouta in 2013 at Khan Sheikhoun, it is highly likely that some of the victims in question would exhibit Sarin-like symptoms. Blood samples taken from the victims could provide a more precise readout of the specific chemical exposure involved; such samples have allegedly been collected by Al Nusra-affiliated personnel, and turned over to international investigators (the notion that any serious investigatory body would allow Al Nusra to provide forensic evidence in support of an investigation where it is one of only two potential culprits is mindboggling, but that is precisely what has happened). But the Trump administration chose to act before these samples could be processed, perhaps afraid that their results would not sustain the underlying allegation of the employment of Sarin by the Syrian air force.

Mainstream American media outlets have willingly and openly embraced a narrative provided by Al Qaeda affiliates whose record of using chemical weapons in Syria and distorting and manufacturing “evidence” to promote anti-Assad policies in the west, including regime change, is well documented.  These outlets have made a deliberate decision to endorse the view of Al Qaeda over a narrative provided by Russian and Syrian government authorities without any effort to fact check either position. These actions, however, do not seem to shock the conscience of the American public; when it comes to Syria, the mainstream American media and its audience has long ago ceded the narrative to Al Qaeda and other Islamist anti-regime elements.

The real culprits here are the Trump administration, and President Trump himself. The president’s record of placing more weight on what he sees on television than the intelligence briefings he may or may not be getting, and his lack of intellectual curiosity and unfamiliarity with the nuances and complexities of both foreign and national security policy, created the conditions where the imagery of the Khan Sheikhoun victims that had been disseminated by pro-Al Nusra (i.e., Al Qaeda) outlets could influence critical life-or-death decisions.

That President Trump could be susceptible to such obvious manipulation is not surprising, given his predilection for counter-punching on Twitter for any perceived slight; that his national security team allowed him to be manipulated thus, and did nothing to sway Trump’s opinion or forestall action pending a thorough review of the facts, is scandalous. History will show that Donald Trump, his advisors and the American media were little more than willing dupes for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose manipulation of the Syrian narrative resulted in a major policy shift that furthers their objectives. 

The other winner in this sorry story is ISIS, which took advantage of the American strike against Al Shayrat to launch a major offensive against Syrian government forces around the city of Palmyra (Al Shayrat had served as the principal air base for operations in the Palmyra region). The breakdown in relations between Russia and the United States means that, for the foreseeable future at least, the kind of coordination that had been taking place in the fight against ISIS is a thing of the past, a fact that can only bode well for the fighters of ISIS. For a man who placed so much emphasis on defeating ISIS, President Trump’s actions can only be viewed as a self-inflicted wound, a kind of circular firing squad that marks the actions of a Keystone Cop, and not the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation in the world. 

But the person who might get the last laugh is President Assad himself. While the Pentagon has claimed that it significantly degraded the Al Shayrat air base, with 58 of 59 cruise missile hitting their targets, Russia has stated that only 23..

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2phfalx