Humagate: As with Nixon, FBI comes too late and Hillary Clinton could be next “criminal” US President

October 29, 2016

Deja Vu.

Huma Mahmood Abedin is to Hillary Clinton as H R “Bob” Haldeman was to Richard Nixon. Part Svengali and part monster. Humagate now and Watergate then. Huma Abedin was not even born then. The Hillary Clinton connections with Saudi Arabian money facilitated by Huma Abedin are probably the skeleton in the closet being inadvertently exposed by the “careless” use of a personal server.

Wa Po October 10th 1972

Wa Po October 10th 1972

On October 10th 1972, the Washington Post ran with the story of the conspiracy – established by the FBI – behind the Watergate cover up. Yet Richard Nixon won reelection – by a landslide – on 11th November 1972.

Now on October 28th 2016 it seems that the FBI have found enough to have to announce that the investigation of Clinton’s emails has been reopened. The announcement is so unusual, with just 10 days left before the election, that criminal activity by Clinton is almost certain. Yet it comes too late, I think, to bring Clinton down. The world is much more “instant” now than it was in 1972. But the astounding reopening of Hillary Clinton’s (and of Huma Abedin’s) emails may take some time to penetrate the US electoral psyche. The alternative being a buffoon increases the resistance to the absorption of the revelations.

It took almost 2 years till August 1974 for Nixon to finally bite the bullet and resign.

Watergate timeline

  • October 10, 1972: FBI agents establish that the Watergate break-in stems from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon reelection effort, The Post reports.
  • November 11, 1972: Nixon is reelected in one of the largest landslides in American political history, taking more than 60 percent of the vote and crushing the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.
  • ………
  • August 8, 1974: Richard Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to resign. Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumes the country’s highest office. He will later pardon Nixon of all charges related to the Watergate case.

My expectation now is that Hillary Clinton will win and become the next President of the United States. And some two years hence she will probably be impeached and resign for her past criminal activities.

 

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Diwali 2016

October 29, 2016

Little Diwali in South India today and the main celebrations tomorrow.

 

diwali

 

 

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Western backed rebels/terrorists in East Aleppo are holding civilians hostage just as ISIS is doing in Mosul

October 26, 2016

The rebels and terrorists in East Aleppo are largely financed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the US and the EU. They are holding civilians hostage and as “human shields” against Assad’s forces supported by Russian air power just as ISIS is preventing civilians from leaving Mosul. The media rhetoric about ISIS and Mosul is equally applicable to East Aleppo, but the difference which changes the media narrative is that the loss of Aleppo by the Western-supported rebels would be a very visible confirmation of the failure of the US/EU strategy of fomenting regime change in Syria.

Black Photo

Virginia Senator Richard Black

The Russian view of things in this interview with Virginia Senator Richard Black makes interesting reading. Even discounting the propaganda factor, the regime-change objectives in Syria have demonstrated the shallowness and wishful thinking that has dominated the US/EU strategies.

RT:The US and its allies could order their terrorist proxies in Aleppo to allow civilians to leave, but instead use them as hostages to escalate anti-Russia rhetoric in a bid to prevent the fall of the rebel stronghold, Virginia Senator Richard Black told RT.

…… The fact is when he (John Kerry) gave that speech, he was sitting next to Saudi Foreign Minister al-Jubeir, and Saudi Arabia has funded ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Al-Nusra – which is Al-Qaeda in Syria, a coordinating group within the Aleppo pocket in East Aleppo.

They have forbidden the civilians from leaving, using the civilians as a human shield, because they know that it forces Syria and Russia to be much more cautious with the bombing. You know, the hyperbolic language used by Secretary Kerry is really outrageous, because the United Nations Office of Human Affairs announced that in the two weeks between September 23 and October 8, there have been about 406 civilians killed. 

No one wants any civilians killed, but I’ve got to tell you, if you compare that to the American casualty figures during our invasion of Iraq, during that first year period, we killed approximately 100,000 civilians. So you’re talking about 406 versus 100,000. Frankly, I don’t know whether they taught arithmetic at Yale University, but Secretary Kerry, his rhetoric is terribly overblown.

There’s no doubt that the civilians are being killed in the east, there are significant numbers being killed in the west, and the civilians killed in the west are being deliberately killed and deliberately targeted as civilians. Whereas those in the east are simply being killed because they happen to be on the battlefield.

The combatants who are holding out in east Aleppo are financed and controlled by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United States. These powers have the ability to pressure the rebels to, say, get the civilians off the battlefield. Syria has allowed seven exit points, and made it very clear that they will care for, give medical attention, food, housing to all civilians who leave. It is what I call the axis power, the axis of evil – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. These are the people who are holding the civilians as human hostages, so that they can force Syria and Russia to take additional casualties as they conquer this final pocket of rebels within Aleppo. …….

……… The heart and soul of the Army of Conquest is Al-Nusra, which is Al-Qaeda in Syria. The Army of Conquest was set up by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, they have joint command headquarters in Idlib, Syria, and they command the whole operation in east Aleppo. If Saudi Arabia and Turkey gave order that the civilians were to leave, then the civilians would be allowed to leave, they would be welcomed by the Syrian government and be cared for. …..,

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Is the US election all over?

October 26, 2016

Some of the polls are now predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton.  The media are overwhelmingly convinced that Trump has shot his bolt (though I still question why – if the result is so certain – they take such a vituperative tone in their Trump coverage and don such rose-coloured glasses to view Hillary’s shortcomings and transgressions).

It does seem that even with the now expected Clinton win, the US political divide is going to be wider and more clearly delineated than it has been for a long time. A sharply divided US probably means that the muddle in the Middle East will be compounded rather than eased. Hillary’s track record as Secretary of State does not hold out much hope for any great improvement in foreign policy and strategies. Four years of increasing Russian influence can be expected.

On domestic policy, I suspect a Hillary Clinton term will be much of the same slow, gradual decline under Barack Obama. I am not sure which hole Obamacare will end up in but whichever road Clinton chooses is filled with pot-holes.

I suppose election night still contains some suspense and there is still a chance that the polls are wrong again (a la Brexit). Probably Clinton wins but with a result much closer than is being predicted by some.

 

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What value an EU/Canada agreement if Wallonia has to be coerced to accept it?

October 24, 2016

It is reported that the EU is putting intense pressure on Belgium and its regional parliament of Wallonia to coerce them to accept the trade deal with Canada (CETA). Maybe they will suicceed, but it only emphasises for me that the EU is built on oppression of minorities “for the greater good” as defined by Brussels.

EU democracy has degenerated to be the oppression of minorities – and whole countries can constitute such minorities. Minorities are coerced wherever there is a majority even if it is a majority of fools. If Brexit succeeds in putting a break on this rampant disregard for local opinions it would have achieved a great deal for the future of Europe.

France24:

Pressure has mounted on the Belgian government to save a landmark EU-Canada free trade agreement after the small French-speaking region of Wallonia essentially torpedoed the deal by voting to reject it. …. 

Belgium’s Prime Minister Charles Michel was left scrambling to find a solution after Wallonia’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject the agreement on Friday, but officials stressed that it was local governments rather than parliaments that would have the final say. Under Belgium’s complex political system, the government cannot approve the deal without support from assemblies representing the country’s three regions and three linguistic communities.

“I will not give powers to the federal government and Belgium will not sign CETA on October 18,” Paul Magnette, the Socialist head of Wallonia’s government, declared on Friday. “I do not intend this as a burial but as a demand to reopen negotiations.”

The move has threatened to derail CETA, which is backed by Canada and all 28 EU national governments, including Belgium’s. The deal is due to be voted by European trade ministers on Tuesday, who must unanimously approve it before it can be officially signed by EU leaders and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

France also stepped up pressure on its neighbor to the north by inviting Magnette to talks in Paris later on Friday with fellow Socialist, President François Hollande. After the meeting, Magnette hinted he was ready for a solution. “I am a natural optimist and very willing. What we are asking for is very reasonable,” he said.

Personally, I think CETA is a good thing but many people don’t. It is the EU method of suppressing minority views that I find despicable. Far better if Wallonia/Belgium could opt out and make their own agreement.

Corporateeurope: Behind the PR attempts by the Canadian Government and the European Commission to sell CETA as a progressive agreement, it remains what it always has been: an attack on democracy, workers, and the environment. …… Over the past weeks, to salvage CETA’s ratification process, the European Commission, the Canadian Government as well as some EU governments and MEPs had gone into a massive propaganda mode. …….  The latest PR move is a “joint interpretative declaration” on the trade deal hammered out by Ottawa and Brussels and published by investigative journalist collective Correctiv last Friday. It is designed to alleviate public concerns but in fact does nothing to fix CETA’s flaws.

 

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As costs go up in flames, time to pull Obamacare off the market?

October 24, 2016

Obamacare costs are no longer affordable. So even Barack Obama is comparing his Affordable Care Act with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7.

“When one of these companies comes out with a new smartphone… [and] it has a few bugs, what do they do, — they fix it, [they] upgrade it. Unless it catches fire – then they pull it off the market”.

And Obamacare is clearly on fire.

obamacare-premiums-2017-graphic-zerohedge

obamacare-premiums-2017-graphic-zerohedge

Dailywire: 

Obamacare’s Collapsing. That Was Always The Plan.

On Thursday, President Obama attempted to defend the skyrocketing costs of Obamacare by comparing them to the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, a smartphone that was banned on airplanes because it had a nasty habit of spontaneously combusting. …. Obama put the responsibility on the states for not expanding Medicaid, thereby avoiding picking up the costs of Obamacare. The vast majority of people who have enrolled in Obamacare have done so at point of government gun, and have done so as part of the Medicaid expansions Obamacare attempted to incentivize; as of October 2015, nearly all of the “newly insured” enrollees were Medicaid enrollees. Obama tried to claim that the federal government would pick up the tab for expanded Medicaid, but that neglects that over time, the states pick up more and more of the tab – and that the federal government is $20 trillion in debt.

Now, Obama’s pushing the public option, using George W. Bush’s egregiously awful Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit expansion. Part D has led to massive increases in healthcare costs, as well as to rejection of Medicare itself by health providers thanks to government restrictions on costs. As Mark Levin writes in Plunder and Deceit, “the impracticability of Medicare’s centralized management and archaic decision-making practices…significantly impairs the broader private sector.” …

….. I told Fox News back in August 2013 that Obamacare was designed to fail, thereby necessitating a government option. That option would bankrupt insurance companies – the government doesn’t have a necessity for profit margin, and therefore, for decent service – and lead to the complete government takeover of healthcare Obama has always sought. In other words, Obamacare was created with designed obsolescence – it’s as though Samsung had designed their phones to melt down so that they could then market the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, Government Edition.

Obamacare is not the shining example some people would like to pretend it is.

 

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Western media treatment of East Aleppo and Mosul is hypocrisy in action

October 23, 2016

The Western media (US and Europe) have views about the Middle East which are more than a little coloured by the self induced delusion that the US and Europe are on a righteous crusade against oppression and for the promotion of democracy. That has been and still is the overwhelming view from the time of the first Iraq war, the overthrow of Gaddaffi and all through the Arab spring uprisings in North Africa and now in Syria and Iraq again. That Europe and the US have not just encouraged and supported, but also instigated rebel groups to the prevailing regimes, to the point of recklessness is completely forgotten. Many of the rebel groups (including ISIS and Al-Nusra) would not have dared to begin their blood-letting without the false hopes raised by the Saudi money and the US/NATO/EU support. (It is the same pattern of reckless EU/NATO expansionism – but without the Saudi money – which prevailed in Ukraine and led to the Russian aggression and annexation of the Crimea). This “political correctness” is now blatantly apparent in the difference of media treatment to the assaults on East Aleppo in Syria and on Mosul in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn has this in The Unz Review (originally in The Independent):

In Libya, Gaddafi was demonised as the sole cause of all his country’s ills while his opponents were lauded as valiant freedom fighters whose victory would bring liberal democracy to the Libyan people. Instead, as was fairly predictable, the overthrow of Gaddafi rapidly reduced Libya to a violent and criminalised anarchy with little likelihood of recovery.

In present day Syria and Iraq one can see much the same process at work. In both countries, two large Sunni Arab urban centres – East Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq – are being besieged by pro-government forces strongly supported by foreign airpower. In East Aleppo, some 250,000 civilians and 8,000 insurgents, are under attack by the Syrian Army allied to Shia paramilitaries from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and supported by the Russian and Syrian air forces. The bombing of East Aleppo has rightly caused worldwide revulsion and condemnation.

But look at how differently the international media is treating a similar situation in Mosul, 300 miles east of Aleppo, where one million people and an estimated 5,000 Isis fighters are being encircled by the Iraqi army fighting alongside Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia and Sunni paramilitaries and with massive support from a US-led air campaign. In the case of Mosul, unlike Aleppo, the defenders are to blame for endangering civilians by using them as human shields and preventing them leaving. In East Aleppo, fortunately, there are no human shields – though the UN says that half the civilian population wants to depart – but simply innocent victims of Russian savagery.

Destruction in Aleppo by Russian air strikes is compared to the destruction of Grozny in Chechnya sixteen years ago, but, curiously, no analogy is made with Ramadi, a city of 350,000 on the Euphrates in Iraq, that was 80 per cent destroyed by US-led air strikes in 2015. Parallels go further: civilians trapped in East Aleppo are understandably terrified of what the Syrian Mukhabara secret police would do to them if they leave and try to pass through Syrian government checkpoints. ……

…….

The advance on Mosul is being led by the elite Special Forces of the Iraqi counter-terrorism units and Shia militias are not supposed to enter the city, almost all of whose current inhabitants are Sunni Arabs. But in the last few days these same special forces entered the town of Bartella on the main road twelve miles from Mosul in their black Humvees which were reportedly decorated with Shia religious banners. Kurdish troops asked them to remove the banners and they refused. An Iraqi soldier named Ali Saad was quoted as saying: “(T)hey asked if we were militias. We said we’re not militias, we are Iraqi forces and these are our beliefs.”

It may be that Isis will not fight for Mosul, but the probability is that they will, in which case the outlook will not be good for the civilian population. Isis did not fight to the last man in Fallujah west of Baghdad so much of the city is intact, but they did fight for Khalidiya, a nearby town of 30,000, where today only four buildings are still standing according to the Americans.

The extreme bias shown in foreign media coverage of similar events in Iraq and Syria will be a rewarding subject for PhDs students looking at the uses and abuses of propaganda down the ages.

This has been the pattern of reporting of the wars in Syria and Iraq over the last five years. Nothing much has changed since 2003 when the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein had persuaded foreign governments and media alike that the invading American and British armies would be greeted with rapture by the Iraqi people. A year later the invaders were fighting for their lives. Misled by opposition propagandists and their own wishful thinking, foreign government officials and journalists had wholly misread the local political landscape. Much the same thing is happening today.

 

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Paradoxes for our times / 4

October 22, 2016

paradoxes-4

 

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Update: ESA’s Schiaparelli destroyed by 300km/h impact

October 21, 2016

ESA has now confirmed that pictures from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter now show that Schiaparelli was destroyed on impact.

ESA:

Schiaparelli entered the martian atmosphere at 14:42 GMT on 19 October for its 6-minute descent to the surface, but contact was lost shortly before expected touchdown. …..  

……. Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h. The relatively large size of the feature would then arise from disturbed surface material. It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full. These preliminary interpretations will be refined following further analysis.

Reuters:

Images taken by a NASA Mars orbiter indicate that a missing European space probe was destroyed on impact after plummeting to the surface of the Red Planet from a height of 2-4 km (1.2 to 2.5 miles), the European Space Agency said on Friday.

The disc-shaped, 577-kg (1,272 lb) Schiaparelli probe, part of the Russian-European ExoMars program to search for evidence of life on Mars, descended on Wednesday to test technologies for a rover that scientists hope to send to the surface of the planet in 2020.

But contact with the vehicle was lost around 50 seconds before the expected landing time, leaving its fate uncertain until the NASA images were received.

“Schiaparelli reached the ground with a velocity that was much higher than it should have been, several hundred kilometers per hour, and was then unfortunately destroyed by the impact,” ExoMars Flight Director Michel Denis told Reuters TV.

It was only the second European attempt to land a craft on Mars, after a failed mission by the British landing craft Beagle 2 in 2003.

The U.S. space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the planet for about 10 years, took low-resolution pictures that show a bright spot that ESA believes is the 12-metre parachute that Schiaparelli used to slow down. They also show a fuzzy dark patch, around 15 by 40 meters in size, about 1 km north of the parachute, which scientists interpret as having been created by the impact of the lander following a longer-than-planned free fall.

The ESA/NASA  plan to put a rover on Mars by 2021 (ExoMars Rover) is likely to be delayed considerably. NASA is also looking at another project to launch in 2020 and land a rover on Mars perhaps in 2022.

The Indian/Russian plan with Chandrayan 2 to put a lunar rover onto the moon is still on the cards for 2019.

 

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For trade deals (Canada) or for foreign policy (Russia sanctions) the EU is not a competent organisation

October 21, 2016

The message from the latest failures of the EU are quite clear. In its ambitions (or should it be delusions) to act as a single state, the EU is a failed organisation. When it does act as a state it is only by oppressing its own dissenting minorities.

In the first of the latest failures, one regional parliament in Belgium rejected the trade deal with Canada (CETA), which prevented Belgium from approving the deal, and which, in turn, caused the deal to be rejected (since it requires unanimity). The point is that even if Belgium had approved, it would have been by strong-arming and suppressing dissent, just as Germany and Spain and France have already done. There is something fundamentally unjust in the manner in which the EU forces small regions to accept policies and actions against their own interests. “Global EU issues” take precedence over local issues. It is bureaucracy gone mad. Canada would have been far better off negotiating 28 separate bilateral deals. It would have been faster (7 years for the EU rejection) and it would have had the flexibility to be nuanced enough to cope with local needs. The message to the world is quite clear. The EU is not a competent negotiating partner and is unable to represent the disparate views within the EU member countries.

The second failure was the drive by the UK and France to increase EU sanctions on Russia for its support of Assad against rebel groups in Aleppo. That the UK and French objective was not so much humanitarian as driven by the need to protect rebel groups that they have been supporting was not given much publicity. However the Italians and the Greeks and others were looking for ways to increase dialogue with Russia and nothing came of the UK / French “initiative”. The EU is proving incapable of bringing together the foreign policy views of its 28 members. And if that is so, one can wonder why one bothers with the expensive and useless and unrepresentative paraphernalia of an EU External Action and the Foreign Affairs Council.

Fractured Europe (image Counterpoint)

Fractured Europe (image Counterpoint)

 

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