Guest Column: Trump Fires Comey

Spin doctors go wild in the swamp
By Jon Rappoport [original column here]

In the political swamp that is Washington, and in the press swamp, motor boats began speeding every which way in the wake of Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Comey.

People in the boats are holding up signs to explain the reason for the firing.

The first sign was: COMEY LIED. Comey lied the other day. He lied in testimony before Congress, when he said Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long-time aide, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner, some of which contained classified information. The truth was, the FBI says, contradicting Comey, a great many of those emails were merely “backed up” on Weiner’s laptop via “backup devices.” Huh? Does that actually mean something? Weiner obtained those emails out of the sky, delivered by a chariot, and not from Huma? Weiner’s laptop was serving as a storage device, a personal little cloud? Somebody not connected to the Hillary campaign was using the social-media’s porn star as a backup for classified data? Who would that be? Putin? Putin hacked the Hillary/DNC emails, and sent them to both WikiLeaks and Anthony Weiner? “Hi Anthony. Vlad here. Keep these thousands of emails for posterity.” Continue reading

Guest Column: Seeds of Our Destruction

How Information Is Controlled by Washington, Israel, and Trolls
By Paul Craig Roberts [full original column here]

Dear Readers: I very much appreciate the support you show for me in your emails. I seldom receive a rude email from you, and when I do it is usually something off subject, such as a reader angry with Israel and unloading on me with an accusation that I am a coward and a “Jew-lover” because I don’t do enough to expose the crimes of the Jews.

This accusation always amuses me as the ADL lists me as an anti-Semite because I occasionally make an entirely justified criticism of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and excessive influence over US foreign policy, as have many outstanding scholars, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and many Jews themselves.

My friends find my designation by the ADL as an anti-Semite hilarious. The person whom I selected as my principal deputy in the US Treasury is a Jew. David Meiselman, my friend and co-author with me of an important study of the Congressional Budget Office, is a Jew (deceased). I went to Oxford for the express purpose of studying under Michael Polanyi, a Jew who had to leave his scientific post in Germany to escape the Nazis. Milton Friedman, an early supporter of the Institute for Political Economy, is a Jew (deceased). When my book (1971) on the Soviet economy was republished in 1990 without a word changed, it was a Jew who wrote the Introduction. He asked, “Why did only Roberts get it right?” Continue reading

Guest Column: Are Speech Rights Grinding to a Halt?

The suppression of ideas and the closing out of debate
by Jon Rappoport [Original column in Nomorefakenews.com here]

Let’s start with an extreme case. A case that has been roiled in emotion for decades. A case that triggers people into making all sorts of comments.

At quora.com, there is an interesting Q and A. The subject is the Nazi holocaust.

The question is: Why is holocaust denial a crime in some countries?

One answer is offered by Olaf Simons, who states he is an “historian at the Gotha Research Centre.” Here is an excerpt:

“Anyone who tells you it [the holocaust] is ‘not real’ (because he has found something to support his doubt) is manipulating you with a political agenda.”

That’s quite a far-reaching assertion. It’s obvious that a) someone might come to the conclusion that the holocaust didn’t happen and b) he has no political agenda. Whether that person’s conclusion about the holocaust is true or false is beside the point. And even if that person did have a political agenda, why should his comments about the holocaust be suppressed? Continue reading

Guest Column: Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Moment

Trump launches illegal lethal attack based on raft of obvious lies
By Robert Parry, 4/7/2017 [full original column in Consortium News]

Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.

There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province. Continue reading

Guest Column: Howard Roark and the Collective

Why go to fiction to learn about power?
by Jon Rappoport [original column at nomorefakenews.com here]

Why go to fiction to learn about power?

Because in art we can see our visions. We can see ideals and archetypes. These fictional characters have the energy we strive for.

When Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead (1943), was asked whether Howard Roark, the hero of her novel, could exist in real life, she answered, with annoyance, “Of course.”

Her implication was: don’t you have the desire to discover your own highest ideals and live them out?

Roark is an architect who creates buildings no one has imagined before. His refusal to compromise his vision is legendary. He suffers deprivation and poverty and rejection with an astonishing amount of indifference. He is the epitome of the creative individual living in a collective world.

For reasons no one can discover (must there always be reasons?), Roark has freed himself from The Group. Perhaps he was born free.

Roark’s hidden nemesis is a little man named Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture columnist for a New York newspaper, who is quietly building a consensus that has, as its ultimate goal, the destruction of all thought and action by the individual for the individual. Continue reading

Guest Column: Global Warming Wrapup

Key questions for the liberty-minded concerned about man-made envirodamage
by Paul Craig Roberts [Original column here]

The mental convolutions in which some will engage in order to ignore the evidence that the polar ice caps are melting—and if not from warming from what?—is as astounding as the convolutions and denial of basic facts that characterize those who believe the government’s official 9/11 fairy tale.

If all the science is rigged, as a few of you say, by the Bilderbergs, Rockefeller, or the Rothschilds, then where does your science, your information come from? If there is no reliable scientific information about climate change, what is the basis for your argument? Why are only carbon industry spokespersons honest? How come the Rothschilds didn’t rig them also?

Yes, the carbon tax is another way of following the money, but it obviously leads in the opposite direction of where a few want to take it. The carbon tax is not a solution offered by climate scientists. It is the industry solution backed by the industry’s free market libertarian allies and Wall St, which sees it as another profitable trading vehicle. The industry sees it as a replacement for regulation and emphasis on alternative green energy sources.

The readers who assured me that the polar ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter did not know that more melts than refreezes and that the polar ice cap is shrinking dramatically. Continue reading

Guest Column: FBI’s Conspiracy Theory Has No Clothes

Lack of evidence of Putin/Trump collusion doesn’t stop Presstitute Media
By Paul Craig Roberts

Unable to provide an ounce of evidence that a Trump/Putin conspiracy stole the presidential election from Hillary Clinton, the corrupt US “intelligence” agencies are shifting their focus to social media and to Internet sites such as Alex Jones and Breitbart. Little doubt the FBI investigation will trickle down to Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Zero Hedge, the Ron Paul Institute, Nomi Prins, Naked Capitalism, Lew Rockwell, Global Research, antiwar.com, and to others on the PropOrNot, Harvard Library, and Le Monde lists, such as top Reagan administration officials David Stockman and myself. It is extraordinary that the FBI is so desperate to protect the budget of the military/security complex that it brings such embarrassment to itself. Who in the future will believe any FBI report or anything a FBI official says?

Those behind this “investigation” understand that it is so ridiculous that they must give it gravity and credibility. They selected two reporters, Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, in the McClatchy News Washington Bureau, who fit Udo Ulfkotte’s definition of “bought journalists.” Hiding behind anonymous sources—“two people familiar with the inquiry” and “sources who spoke on condition of anonymity”—the presstitutes fell in with the attack on independent media, reporting that one former US intelligence official said: “This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence.” http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article139695453.html

Wow! A totally ridiculous “investigation” is one of the most important in history. The implication is that the Russians are operating through scores or hundreds of independent media sites to control how Americans vote.

There was once a time in America when people were skeptical of anonymous sources. It was widely understood that anyone could tell a reporter anything and that a reporter could claim an anonymous source whether or not the source existed. Perhaps it was the Watergate “investigation” by the Washington Post that gave anonymity credibility. The Post’s reports made it sound like any sources ratting on Nixon’s perfidy was at risk of their lives, and the subtle emphasis on risk gave anonymity credibility. Continue reading