Taking it from the top:
"Islamic State executes American; Aid worker an ex-soldier, Muslim convert; Obama decries ‘act of pure evil’" by Rukmini Callimachi | New York Times November 17, 2014
(Blog editor reflexively groans)
GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Islamic State militants released a chilling videotape Sunday showing they had beheaded a fifth Western hostage, an American aid worker the group had threatened to kill in retaliation for airstrikes carried out by the United States in Iraq and Syria.
President Obama on Sunday confirmed the death of the aid worker, Peter Kassig, a former Army Ranger who disappeared more than a year ago at a checkpoint in northeastern Syria while delivering medical supplies.
Oh, well, then, it must be true!
Pffffft!
Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” Obama said in a statement from aboard Air Force One.
Like dropping drone missiles and air strikes on people?
In recent days, US intelligence agencies received strong indications the Islamic State had killed Kassig. The president’s announcement was the first official confirmation....
I'm actually supposed to believe what US intelligence agencies and their mouthpiece media say
--more--"
A "Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization" was cited as an expert while Kassig's fellow cast members included Foley, Sotloff, Haines and Henning (you can dig up the links here if you wish) -- complete with crisis actor parents.
The beheading videos are all bad fakes, folks, but I'm going to keep on rolling with the hacking:
"State Deptartment computers hacked, e-mail shut down" Associated Press November 17, 2014
WASHINGTON — The State Department has taken the unprecedented step of shutting down its entire unclassified e-mail system as technicians repair possible damage from a suspected hacker attack.
A senior department official said Sunday that ‘‘activity of concern’’ was detected in the system around the same time as a previously reported incident that targeted the White House computer network.
Better check your mail.
That incident was made public in late October, but there was no indication then that the State Department had been affected.
More $elf-$erving psyops from the masters.
The official said none of the State Department’s classified systems was affected. However, the official said the department shut down its worldwide e-mail late on Friday as part of a scheduled outage of some of its Internet-linked systems to make security improvements to its main unclassified computer network.
Does anyone even read e-mail anymore, what with the faces and tweets flying all over the place?
The official would not discuss who might be responsible for the breach.
Meaning it was either Israel or the Jewish mafia located in Eastern Europe. You know, the one that is hands-off for the FBI.
Earlier attacks have been blamed on Russian or Chinese attackers, although their origin has never been publicly confirmed.
Yeah, any hacker trained by the USraeli governments can reroute them through servers anywhere.
Who benefits from all the hacking? Who?
The State Department is expected to address the shutdown once the security improvements have been completed on Monday or Tuesday.
--more--"
Hackers all over the place, but the NSA can not find a one despite the data-collection dragnet?
Hmmmmmmmm.
"G-20 finalizes plan to boost global GDP" by Kristen Gelineau | Associated Press November 17, 2014
BRISBANE, Australia — Under pressure to jolt the lethargic world economy back to life, leaders of the G-20 nations on Sunday finalized a plan to boost global gross domestic product by more than $2 trillion over five years.
A communique from the Brisbane summit of Group of 20 wealthy and emerging nations revealed that the plan includes investing in infrastructure, increasing trade, and creating a global infrastructure hub that would help match potential investors with projects.
In other words, more globalist garbage meant to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest. Seen this all before.
I mean, think of it. This same crowd has been running the world for decades now and it is nothing but a shit hole except for the globalist 1%.
But they are the ones who will $olve things, yup! So says my 1% mouthpiece of a paper.
Leaders also aim to reduce the gap between male and female participation in the workforce by 25 percent by 2025, saying that would put 100 million more women in employment and reduce poverty.
With the added benefit of further eroding traditional families and advancing the globalist agenda via another avenue of division cloaked under altrui$tic goodne$$.
At the end of the summit, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, said countries will hold each other to account by monitoring implementation of their commitments to boost growth.
The G-20, criticized in recent years as being all talk and no action, was urged to deliver measurable results this year.
The action is the wealth flowing upward. What I'm getting from the propaganda pre$$ is just gaseous talk.
Perhaps in response, the group said the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will also play a role in monitoring progress and estimating the economic benefits of the growth plan.
Now you are in $afe and $ecure hands!
The IMF’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, dismissed concerns that countries might fudge their growth figures, saying that while the monitoring is not scientific, it is thorough and detailed.
‘‘We’ll make sure they keep their feet to the fire,’’ she said.
I wish someone would burn down that freakish-looking witch!
Yeah, the IMF is going to make sure you governments stick to austerity, etc!!
******
But the G-20, which represents about 85 percent of the global economy, faces an uphill struggle.
Just when the U.S recovery is roaring to life, etc?
International agencies have downgraded growth forecasts in recent months. Growth in China and Japan has weakened, and Europe is on the brink of another recession.
And experts warned that the countries would need to comply with every one of the 800 measures to achieve the 2.1 percent target, a virtually impossible task.
Then this is all hot air.
‘‘There are two questions: whether the specifics are credible and whether the political backing by leaders is convincing,’’ said Thomas Bernes, an analyst at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a Canadian think thank.
Abbott said the group had been most productive on the issue of trade, calling it the ‘‘key driver of growth.’’ The leaders adopted plans to streamline customs procedures and reduce regulatory burdens.
The G-20 also tackled the tricky issue of tax evasion by multinational corporations, declaring that profits should be taxed in the country where they are earned. There has been an ongoing effort by governments to crack down on the practice of big companies such as Google and Amazon moving profits earned in one country to others with lower tax rates.
--more--"
I thought I would tackle that "tricky i$$ue(!)" for just a moment:
Nations back plan to deter corporate tax manipulation
US clampdown on tax maneuver leaves its mark
Won't keep Pfizer here:
"For Pfizer, a major deal would help offset a lack of revenue growth in coming years as its major drugs lose patent protection. The company is considering breaking up into individual companies, but that probably would not happen until at least 2017, according to Read. Pfizer on Monday reported third-quarter net income rose 3 percent to $2.67 billion, or 42 cents a share, from $2.59 billion, or 39 cents, a year earlier. Earnings excluding one-time items of 57 cents a share beat by 2 cents the average of 18 analysts’ estimates. Pfizer lowered its full-year sales and earnings forecasts for the second straight quarter. Revenue for the third quarter fell 2 percent to $12.4 billion, Pfizer reported. Full-year sales will be as much as $49.7 billion this year, compared with a prior forecast of $50.7 billion, the company said. Profit excluding one-time items will be $2.23 a share to $2.27 a share, narrowing from a prior forecast of $2.20 to $2.30."
They should have no problem paying the $325 million settlement, either.
AbbVie board recommends against $55b merger with Shire
Speaking of the Shire:
EU regulator pushes inquiry on tax deals
Over 51 nations issued a warning to Ireland -- and they ignored it.
UPDATE: THE MONEY IN YOUR BANK ACCOUNT WAS STOLEN THIS MORNING
Now to get back down to earth:
"Dutch investigators collect debris from plane downed over Ukraine" by Neil MacFarquhar | New York Times November 17, 2014
(Blog editor reflexively groans)
MOSCOW — Investigators on Sunday began winching large pieces of wreckage from the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet shot down over Ukraine last summer onto trucks to transport them back to the Netherlands, the Dutch Safety Board said in The Hague.
The Dutch investigators said the operation would take at least several days.
Since Flight MH-17 was shot down in July en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, killing all 298 people on board, fighting in the area has interrupted attempts to study the wreckage. But the race against time has become more pressing as investigators try to finish their work before winter sets in and snow blankets the area.
Winter is already here, and what really has taken so long (I'm sure it's Russia's fault)?
The current plan is to collect as much wreckage as possible near the crash site, then take it to an airport in the eastern city of Kharkiv for a flight back to the Netherlands, the statement said.
The safety board plans to reconstruct a section of the aircraft as part of its investigation.
I've had enough cover-up crap from western safety agencies, sorry.
Investigators were working with observers from the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe as well as representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which controls many of the fields and villages where debris landed.
In the meantime, the accusations and counteraccusations continue over who shot down the plane. The general explanation in the West is that separatists wielding a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile brought down the Boeing 777, mistaking it for a Ukrainian military aircraft similar to ones they had shot down in previous weeks.
That is the one that is false, period. Been proven time and again.
The rebels deny any role in the downing, and Moscow has long said that it does not arm the separatists. Two Russian state television stations broadcast a video during the weekend that they said proved Russia’s claim that a Ukrainian fighter plane had fired the deadly projectile that brought the plane down.
Yesterday it was just a satellite photo, so....
Some Russian bloggers denounced the video as a crude fake.
I see them on television all the time when I deign to watch the crap cable news shows -- which is never.
The preliminary report by Dutch investigators released in September said the plane had been peppered with “high-energy objects” but it did not assign blame.
Meaning it was shot down by "friendly" fire -- if it was shot down at all.
Another newly released video shows that the burning passenger jet came close to hitting village homes and suggests that residents first assumed it was a Ukrainian military plane that had been struck, the Associated Press reported.
The amateur footage, filmed by a resident of Hrabove, shows people reacting in alarm as wreckage blazes only a few feet from their homes on the afternoon of July 17. The video is perhaps the first taken after the plane came down.
In this video, residents of the village of Hrabove can be heard asking about the whereabouts of the pilot.
I don't trust any video cited by my lying, distorting, and deceiving ma$$ media. Sorry.
This is significant because multiple Ukrainian military planes had been shot down by this time, and their pilots and crew were regularly taken prisoner by rebel forces.
Oh, right, I left out agenda-pushing.
Three days before Flight MH17 was brought down, rebels claimed responsibility for shooting down an Antonov-24 military transport plane.
The downing of Flight MH17 stunned Ukrainian defense officials.
They argued that the aircraft must have been targeted by Russian fighter jets, as it was flying at an altitude far beyond the reach of the Igla portable surface-to-air missiles then being used by rebel fighters. The plane was flying at 33,000 feet when it was hit.
--more--"
UPDATE: CLAIMED MH17 SHOOTDOWN SATELLITE IMAGE IS A FAKE!
"Obama rebukes Russia over actions in Ukraine" by Mark Landler | New York Times November 17, 2014
(Blog editor reflexively groans)
BRISBANE, Australia — President Obama edged closer to describing Russia’s military incursions in Ukraine as an invasion, saying Sunday that the Western campaign to isolate Moscow would continue, though additional sanctions were unnecessary for now.
Speaking to reporters at the end of the annual meeting of the Group of 20, an organization of 19 industrial and emerging-market countries along with the European Union, Obama said the Russians were supplying heavy arms to separatists in Ukraine in violation of an agreement the country signed with Ukraine a few weeks ago.
“We’re also very firm on the need to uphold core international principles,” he said, “and one of those principles is you don’t invade other countries or finance proxies and support them in ways that break up a country that has mechanisms for democratic elections.”
Oh, you mean like WHAT the U.S. GOVERNMENT under this president is doing in IRAQ and SYRIA?
(Blog editor is stunned by the arrogance of the figurehead)
Obama warned Putin....
Pffft!
The president’s words were among the toughest he has used about Russia’s actions during the Ukraine crisis.
Yeah, Obama is real butch.
But after meeting with European leaders to discuss next steps, it was unclear whether the allies had the stomach for another round of sanctions.
“At this point, the sanctions that we have in place are biting plenty good,” Obama said.
I'm surprised the delusional sphincter isn't dizzy from so much spinning.
Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine spilled over into the Group of 20 meeting. Putin got a chilly reception from several leaders, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain also condemned Putin’s actions, saying the Russian leader was at a “crossroads if he continues to destabilize Ukraine,” during a news conference in Brisbane.
Ignoring the fact that it is the EU and US that destabilized and are continuing to destabilize the place.
This rote rank rot will no longer do, readers.
Putin himself put a rather positive spin on events, saying before leaving Brisbane that virtually every issue discussed had been helpful — even the issue of new sanctions over Ukraine — and that he was leaving early only because he had a long flight home.
He's a better man than me.
********
Putin said he had gotten across his point of view that sanctions hurt both those who impose them and those who are targeted.
The foreign ministers of the European Union plan to meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss the sanctions and the situation in Ukraine, where sightings of suspected Russian military convoys have fueled speculation that a new rebel offensive is near.
Rebels, of course, are good in Syria!
“It might sound strange to you, but I think there are good hopes for being able to settle this situation,” Putin said, without delving into specifics. He did express surprise, however, that the Ukrainian government in Kiev was moving to sever all financial ties with the breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, calling it “an economic blockade.”
“Why are the authorities in Kiev now cutting off these regions with their own hands? I do not understand this,” he said, adding that this was not the right way to go about saving money....
This guy should have won the Peace Prize, and the fact that he didn't shows you how worthless is that self-adualting, self-aggrandizing award.
Putin denied that he was leaving early because he had been singled out for criticism at the summit meeting, attributing his departure to his work ethic. The flight from Brisbane to Vladivostok was nine hours, then he needed another nine to reach Moscow, he explained.
“We still have to get home and be ready for work on Monday,” the president said. “It would be nice to be able to sleep for four or five hours.”
The summit meeting was also shadowed by concerns about the state of the military campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, which Obama has said is at too early a stage to say whether the United States and its coalition allies are winning.
Pfft!
The latest reports in the paper say otherwise!
Obama denied reports that he had ordered a formal review of the strategy against the militants in Syria.
Meaning there is one.
So when are more US troops going to be sent?
He said that while the White House was constantly reviewing its tactics in both Syria and Iraq, the basic elements of the strategy remained in place.
--more--"
Hey, the surge worked once:
"Why the 2007 surge in Iraq actually failed" by Alex Kingsbury | November 17, 2014
“We had it won, thanks to the surge. It was won.” — John McCain, Sept. 11, 2014
The goals of the Iraq surge were spelled out explicitly by the White House
in Jan. 2007: Stop the raging sectarian bloodletting and reconcile
Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in the government. “A successful strategy for
Iraq goes beyond military operations,” then-President George W. Bush
said.
In light of all that has happened since that announcement, it is jaw-dropping to still hear the surge described as a success. Yet the myth of its success is as alive as it is dangerous. It’s a myth that prevents us from grappling with the realities of the last effort in Iraq, even as we embark on another.
To believe in the myth of the surge is to absolve Iraqis of their responsibility to resolve their differences. It gives the US government an unrealistic sense of its own capabilities. And it ignores the roots of the conflict now stretching from Damascus to Baghdad.
We are living under so many I can't begin to name them all. The received history is a myth. Current events are filled with scripted and staged false flag hoaxes. Ma$$ media distorts and fabricates. It's why I no longer believe in any of them.
“The
surge didn’t ‘win’ anything. It bought time,” writes retired Lieutenant
General Daniel Bolger in his new book, “Why We Lost: A General’s Inside
Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.” It’s not surprising that
those words of wisdom come from a retired officer. But it is a shame.
Credible institutional memory is of great value and often in short
supply. It’s an inoculant against the repetition of mistakes.
Much institutional knowledge about the conduct of the Iraqi surge, as learned on the frontlines by junior and non-commissioned officers, has been lost to attrition as the military shrinks. What remains is the mythology.
A former junior officer who served in Baghdad during the surge and now attends one of this city’s fine graduate schools recently told me that the gains he saw were akin to Potemkin villages. “I always thought that the Iraqis were just pretending to play nice so that we’d leave, and they could continue their civil war,” he said. Whatever their motivations then — and they are still not well understood — Iraqis are again at war with themselves.
This summer, the Iraqi army collapsed as the Islamic State insurgency swept across the Sunni heartland. Despite years of training, and billions of dollars worth of US weapons and materiel, Iraqi Army soldiers abandoned their uniforms, guns, and Humvees as they fled. The United States has sent more troops to Iraq and launched airstrikes.
But our mission is shackled to a conundrum: Why should Americans pick up weapons and fight the Islamic State if the other countries in the region, including the Iraqis themselves, won’t do the same? Why is the militant group an existential threat to us, yet not enough of a threat to spur its neighbors to take up arms?
When you recognize what the plan is, who created ISIS, and what is the goal, this all looks like rank propaganda.
*******
For Americans, the myth of the victorious surge is so seductive because it perpetuates an illusion of control.
It frames the Iraq War as something other than a geostrategic blunder and remembers our effort as something more than a stalemate. What’s more, it reinforces the notion that it’s possible to influence events around the world, if only military force is deployed properly. It’s a myth that makes victory in the current Iraq mission appear achievable.
Dispelling the myth of the successful surge begins by measuring it against its own metrics for success: violence and reconciliation.
There is far too little written on the Iraqi perspective, but their evaluation of the surge is illustrative: In 2008, only 4 percent of Iraqis said additional US forces were responsible for the decline in violence. They know their own country well.
Violence in Iraq began to decline before the surge started. Civilian deaths peaked in July 2006, at more than 3,250 per month,
a full six months before the surge policy was even announced. This was
the result of many factors, including the completion of the ethnic
cleansing of Baghdad’s neighborhoods. Some 80 percent of the casualties
in the Iraqi civil war pre-surge occurred within 30 miles of Baghdad.
As
early February 2005 and more widely in 2006, Sunni tribes began turning
against Al Qaeda, which entered the country for the first time on the
heels of the US invasion. Also critical was the 2007 stand-down by
militias — particularly the Mahdi Army under the control of Shiite
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A 2011 study published in the Small Wars Journal found these and other “intangible factors affect security more than the number of deployed coalition battalions.”
Other key factors included a greater unity of effort by American forces, better intelligence, and an overall renewed sense of mission under new leadership. The morale of US troops is almost never mentioned, but the shift from pessimism to cautious optimism that I remember between early 2007 and late 2008 was unmistakable.
The surge sent US troops into neighborhoods, which led to better intelligence gathering. But there were costs. No matter how brilliant the manual, counterinsurgency policy was implemented by average Americans. Brave and patriotic to be sure, and volunteers all. But putting 20-somethings on patrol as community policemen in a war zone, where they didn’t understand the language or culture, had serious and unintended consequences.
Many thousands of Iraqis were swept into an archipelago of US or Iraqi prisons for offenses — real or imagined. I remember watching the arrest of a student by a group of American soldiers. His offense was telling one American soldier, through an interpreter of dubious allegiances, a joke.
Thousands were arrested and held without trial. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was one of those arrested. He
and a dozen others, radicalized during their incarceration, are now the
leadership of ISIS, itself a reincarnation of the old Al Qaeda in Iraq
militia. Accounts of the prisons describe them as “jihadi universities.”
That's where he was trained.
It's madness to keep reading this rank-rot prop!
Many of the Iraqis swept up into prisons were dangerous insurgents and locking them up meant that they couldn’t plant IEDs or shoot mortars. Others took cash payments to not fight and to man checkpoints rather than bomb them.
The American soldiers I traveled with hated paying the Sons of Iraq, men who’d been insurgents only a day earlier. But they hated fighting them even more. It all led to a lull in the killing, one of the surge’s key goals.
When the Iraqi government stopped the flow of money, the violence began anew.
Which brings us to the second and equally important goal of the surge: political reconciliation. This also failed — and in spectacular fashion.
The corrupt, viciously sectarian government of Nouri al-Malaki was prone to terrible abuses of any and all opponents. And Muslims weren’t the only ones in the crosshairs. “Christians are finished in Iraq,” wrote one former Human Rights Watch worker this fall, after an exodus of some 750,000 people that predated the rise of the Islamic State.
Days after he was elected, I wrote from Baghdad that, regardless of what the incoming president Barack Obama wanted, the Iraqi government wanted all US forces out by 2011. The Bush administration duly agreed in December 2008, as the surge wound down.
What follows from the surge mythology is the idea that a few thousand residual US troops could have prevented Maliki from indulging in his worst sectarian impulses, or held off the ISIS rout. Given the record of an occupying US force many times larger, which was unable to halt either rampant ethnic cleansing or civil war, such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
Iraqis had the responsibility to capitalize on the lull in violence. They failed. And it is the Iraqis who are paying the steepest price for it.
And yet the failure of the surge shouldn’t be a source of shame. It was a tactical decision made with few good options available. Indeed, embracing the myth of victory has proven quite helpful for many vets and families of the fallen that I know well. But that shouldn’t stop policy makers from an honest assessment of the limits of American power.
Honesty is not something to be found in an AmeriKan newspaper. Sorry.
Also see: 'Painful' Arctic Blast to Pummel U.S.
There was SNOW OUTSIDE MY DOOR when I went to get my Glooooobe!
Yeah, some myths are so curious they are used as a Sword of Damocles over a certain oil-producing nation's head. The timing of it all is sure interesting.
Don't fall for the claptrap, folks.
The guy lied to Congress; you think he's telling the truth on TV?
Hey, at least the Justice Department is finally going to look into all the corruption at the Pentagon -- after six years and on their way out the door before investigations are completed.
"Four workers were killed and one was injured during the weekend after a hazardous chemical leak at a DuPont industrial plant in suburban Houston, company officials said. The chemical, methyl mercaptan, began leaking from a valve around 4 a.m. Saturday at the plant in La Porte, about 20 miles east of Houston. Plant officials said the release was contained by 6 a.m. Methyl mercaptan was used at the plant to create crop-protection products such as insecticides and fungicides, according to DuPont."
I hope you got a real kick out of this post, readers.
