4558-ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? | View Thread

At the very beginning of the of the Skripal incident, the security services blocked by D(SMA) notice any media mention of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian. Gordon Corera, "BBC Security Correspondent", did not name the source who told him to say this, but helpfully illustrated his tweet with a nice picture of MI6 Headquarters.

MI6's most important media conduit (after Frank Gardner) is Luke Harding of the Guardian.

A number of people replied to Harding's tweet to point out that this was demonstrably untrue, and Pablo Miller had listed his employment by Orbis Business Intelligence on his Linkedin profile. That profile had just been deleted, but a google search for "Pablo Miller" plus "Orbis Business Intelligence", without Linkedin as a search term, brought up Miller's Linkedin profile as the first result (although there are twelve other Pablo Millers on Linkedin and the search brought up none of them). Plus a 2017 forum discussed Pablo Miller's Orbis connection and it both cited and linked to his Linkedin entry.

You might think that any journalist worth his salt would want to consider this interesting counter-evidence. But Harding merely tweeted again the blank denials of the security services, without question.

This is an important trait of Harding. Last year we both appeared, separately, at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Harding was promoting a book and putting the boot into Wikileaks and Snowden. After his talk, I approached him in an entirely friendly manner, and told him there were a couple of factual errors in his presentation on matters to which I was an eye-witness, and I should be very happy to brief him, off the record, but we could discuss which bits he might use. He said he would talk later, and dashed off. Later I saw him in the author's lounge, and as I walked towards him he hurriedly got up and left, looking at me.

Of course, nobody is obliged to talk to me. But at that period I had journalists from every major news agency contacting me daily wishing to interview me about Wikileaks, all of whom I was turning down, and there was no doubt of my inside knowledge and direct involvement with a number of the matters of which Harding was writing and speaking. A journalist who positively avoids knowledge of his subject is an interesting phenomenon.

But then Harding is that. From a wealthy family background, privately educated at Atlantic College and then Oxford, Harding became the editor of Oxford University's Cherwell magazine without showing any leftwing or rebel characteristics. It was not a surprise to those who knew him as a student when he was employed at the very right wing "Daily Mail". From there he moved to the Guardian. In 2003 Harding was embedded with US forces in Iraq and filing breathless reports of US special forces operations.

Moving to Moscow in 2007 as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, others in the Moscow press corps and in the British expatriate community found him to be a man of strongly hawkish neo-con views, extremely pro-British establishment, and much closer to the British Embassy and to MI6 than anybody else in the press corps. It was for this reason Harding was the only resident British journalist, to my knowledge, whose visa the Russians under Putin have refused to renew. They suspected he is actually an MI6 officer, although he is not.

With this background, people who knew Harding were dumbfounded when Harding appeared to be the supporter and insider of first Assange and then Snowden. The reason for this dichotomy is that Harding was not - he wrote books on Wikileaks and on Snowden that claimed to be insider accounts, but in fact just carried on Harding's long history of plagiarism, as Julian Assange makes clear. Harding's books were just careful hatchet jobs pretending to be inside accounts. The Guardian's historical reputation for radicalism was already a sham under the editorship of Rusbridger, and has completely vanished under Viner, in favour of hardcore Clinton identity politics failing to disguise unbending neo-conservatism. The Guardian smashed the hard drives containing the Snowden files under GCHQ supervision, having already undertaken "not to even look at" the information on Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact the hard drives were not the only copies in the world does not excuse their cravenness.

We know, of course, what MI6 have fed to Harding, because it is reflected every day in his output. What we do not know, but may surmise, is what Harding fed back to the security services that he gleaned from the Guardian's association with Wikileaks and Snowden.

Harding has since made his living from peddling a stream of anti-Assange, anti-Snowden and above all, anti-Russian books, with great commercial success, puffed by the entire mainstream media. But when challenged by the non-mainstream media about the numerous fact free assertions on behalf of the security services to be found in his books, Harding is not altogether convincing. You can watch this video, in which Harding outlines how emoticons convinced him someone was a Russian agent, together with this fascinating analysis which really is a must-read study of anti-Russian paranoia. There is a similar analysis here.

Perhaps still more revealing is this 2014 interview with his old student newspaper Cherwell, where he obvously felt comfortable enough to let the full extent of his monstrous boggle-eyed Russophobia become plain:

His analogies span the bulk of the 20th century and his predictions for the future are equally far-reaching. "This is the biggest crisis in Europe since the Cold War. It's not the break-up of Yugoslavia, but the strategic consensus since 1945 has been ripped up. We now have an authoritarian state, with armies on the march." What next?

"It's clear to me that Putin intends to dismember Ukraine and join it up with Transnistria, then perhaps he'll go as far as Moldova in one way or another," Harding says. This is part of what he deems Putin's over-arching project: an expansionist attempt to gather Russo-phones together under one yoke, which he terms 'scary and Eurasian-ist', and which he notes is darkly reminiscent of "another dictator of short stature" who concocted "a similarly irredentist project in the 1930s".

But actually I think you can garner everything you want to know about Harding from looking at his twitter feed over the last two months. He has obsessively retweeted scores of stories churning out the government's increasingly strained propaganda line on what occurred in Salisbury. Not one time had Harding ever questioned, even in the mildest way, a single one of the multiple inconsistencies in the government account or referred to anybody who does. He has acted, purely and simply, as a conduit for government propaganda, while abandoning all notion of a journalistic duty to investigate.

We still have no idea of who attacked Sergei Skripal and why. But the fact that, right from the start, the government blocked the media from mentioning Pablo Miller, and put out denials that this has anything to do with Christopher Steele and Orbis, including lying that Miller had never been connected to Orbis, convinces me that this is the most promising direction in which to look.

It never seemed likely to me that the Russians had decided to assassinate an inactive spy who they let out of prison many years ago, over something that happened in Moscow over a decade ago. It seemed even less likely when Boris Johnson claimed intelligence showed this was the result of a decade long novichok programme involving training in secret assassination techniques.Why would they blow all that effort on old Skripal?

That the motive is the connection to the hottest issue in US politics today, and not something in Moscow a decade ago, always seemed to me much more probable. Having now reviewed matters and seen that the government actively tried to shut down this line of inquiry, makes it still more probable this is right.

This does not tell us who did it. Possibly the Russians did, annoyed that Skripal was feeding information to the Steele dossier, against the terms of his release.

Given that the Steele dossier is demonstrably in large degree nonsense, it seems to me more probable the idea was to silence Skripal to close the danger that he would reveal his part in the concoction of this fraud. Remember he had sold out Russian agents to the British for cash and was a man of elastic loyalties. It is also worth noting that Luke Harding has a bestselling book currently on sale, in large part predicated on the truth of the Steele Dossier.

Steele, MI6 and the elements of the CIA which are out to get Trump, all would have a powerful motive to have the Skripal loose end tied.

Rule number one of real investigative journalism: look where they tell you not to look.

(sott.net)

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/1/2018 10:41:38 AM
	A Yellowstone geyser has experienced unusual eruptions lately — and scientists can’t explain why By Alex Horton April 29 at 2:23 PM The Steamboat geyser, one of the world's largest active geysers, erupted in 2014 at Yellowstone National Park. (Yellowstone NPS) The Steamboat Geyser at Yellowstone National Park can spout 300 feet of scalding water into the air, a feature of the world’s tallest active geyser. That is known. What isn’t known is why is the geyser has erupted three times in the past six weeks, including one event on Friday in an unusual pattern that hasn't occurred since 2003. The spike in activity has puzzled scientists who closely monitor Yellowstone — the crown jewel of the national park system that rests on top of a violent supervolcano measuring 44 miles across. Though scientists say the reasons for the eruptions are unclear, officials at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory cautioned that the geyser activity is not a sign of impending doom. “There is nothing to indicate that any sort of volcanic eruption is imminent,” Michael Poland, scientist in charge of the observatory, told The Washington Post. The last eruption was 70,000 years ago, and there are no signs of another one, including the recent Steamboat activity, he said Sunday. [The Yellowstone supervolcano is a disaster waiting to happen] Geysers are the result of magma heating water that has seeped into the ground, triggering an eruption of liquid through vents in the earth surface for as long as dozens of minutes, followed by billowing steam that may last days. Yet geysers are difficult to study. Most have unpredictable eruptions that may happen in intervals lasting years, making it challenging to assign resources such as seismic monitors and cameras, Poland said. For instance, no scientists observed Friday’s eruption. It was reported by a visitor, he said. Poland said he is not sure what exactly is going on with the Steamboat geyser. One possibility he offered: The three eruptions, on March 15, April 19 and Friday, could point to thermal disturbances — heated ground that can change the behavior of geysers and springs or form new ones, he said. The string of eruptions over a year in 2003 may have been connected to a particularly violent thermal disturbance that killed trees and nearly boiled trails in the Norris Basin, where several geysers, including Steamboat, are located. Tourists view the Morning Glory hot spring in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images) Poland also suggested that Steamboat is relieving pressure through smaller eruptions rather than one big event. The second and third eruptions were about the same size — about 10 times as large as that of the park’s famous Old Faithful geyser, Poland said. But since most geysers produce erratic activity, the trio of eruptions “might just reflect the randomness of geysers,” Poland said. Steamboat erupted several times in the early 1980s but was inactive for five decades, ending its drought in 1961, he said. So it’s difficult to pin routine behavior on the geyser. “This is what geysers do. They erupt,” Poland said. The appropriately named Old Faithful to the south of Steamboat is an outlier, with eruptions so predictable that the park operates a Twitter feed of alerts with a 10-minute margin of error. But geysers are not structurally similar to one another. Old Faithful has a straightforward plumbing system that probably includes chambers that produce heating, Poland said. The plumbing network underneath Steamboat's vent may be more intricate, with uneven magma activity. [Remains of 140 children unearthed in Peru, the largest child sacrifice in human history] So what does the Steamboat activity mean for the risk of an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, an event that could blanket Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago in a foot of ash? Essentially nothing, Poland said. “Yellowstone has this strange psychology to it about a world-ending event,” he said, but the potential for an eruption in this lifetime is incredibly remote. Although Poland said volcanic eruptions do not follow a timetable, there have been no seismic activities that would point to an increased chance of a catastrophic event. And, Poland said, the Steamboat eruptions are a good sign that there is no imminent danger. Rising magma would dry up pools of water, so geysers going dormant would be a worrying event. Scientists will gather next week for a scheduled meeting about research priorities, and Poland expects the Steamboat eruptions to generate discussion. It may lead to more resources if researchers are thinking that there may be more activity to come. “It’s cool, it’s exciting, it’s neat,” Poland said about the eruptions. “It’s nothing to be afraid about.” (The Washington Post)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/1/2018 5:01:14 PM
	Why We Have a Surveillance State APRIL 30, 2018 By Bill Frezza It is the inevitable consequence of our prevailing governing philosophy. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Henry Stimson, Secretary of State, 1929 I was upbraided recently by a dear friend for my frequent praise of outcast investor Peter Thiel over Thiel’s involvement with big data company Palantir. He forwarded me a Bloomberg article titled “Peter Thiel’s data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens” adding: “Really scary. Not good for democracy; a better version of the Stasi’s filing system and way cheaper and more efficient.” Increasingly, we live under the kind of comprehensive surveillance predicted by science fiction writers. But Palantir is just an arms merchant, not the architect of our brave new world. Like gun manufacturers, its products can be used for good or evil. I have always believed that moral responsibility lies with the wielder of weapons, not the manufacturers. (This is often expressed as “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”) Peter Thiel’s choice to become an arms merchant rather than invest his considerable talents and fortune elsewhere is a fair question given his libertarian leanings. I have no insight into the answer. I would guess that he founded Palantir as an act of patriotism after 9/11, and it metastasized following the money, cash being the mother’s milk of the state, something the celebrated Alexander Hamilton deeply understood. Surveillance Is Not the Problem, but It Is a Symptom The real threat to the republic, however, lies not in the weapons available but in the unlimited and unaccountable bureaucracy in Washington that deploys them, both at home and abroad. Having broken free of constitutional constraints, America’s political class now directs an all-powerful state that naturally adopts every tool technology has to offer. Because our prevailing governing philosophy acknowledges no limits to the doing of good or the thwarting of evil, any means necessary may be employed as long as worthy ends can be plausibly asserted. Evil must be discouraged, taxed, or outlawed; good must be encouraged, subsidized, or made mandatory. This progressive government mission must be implemented in the public square, in the marketplace, in our educational institutions, around the world, and in our homes until all forms of social injustice are eliminated. To be sure, such an expansive impulse is not unique. The communists felt the same way from the 1920s to the 1980s as did the fascists through the 1930s and 1940s, alarmingly making a recent comeback. But the sustained march of the progressive movement from Woodrow Wilson’s cartelization of the economy to support his War to End all Wars to FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society to the spectacle of Obamacare outlasted all other pretenders. Progressivism has fueled a centralization of American power whose growth and global reach is unparalleled in human history. The end result is a multi-headed Leviathan that scoffs at the quaint notion that the federal government should be limited to the 17 powers enumerated in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution. Examples of Democracy’s Dependence on Surveillance Abound Since the passage of the 16th amendment, we have learned to live with an Internal Revenue Service against which citizens have no right to privacy, no right to remain silent, and no presumption of innocence. This most invasive tax system ever devised insists on comprehensive intrusion into every citizen’s financial life, dragooning every employer, banker, broker, and financial intermediary into an unpaid spy network that makes Palantir look like a rank amateur. Government schools began educating us to submit to this kind of blanket surveillance as the price we pay for civilized society long before computers played a role. As Congress increasingly abdicated regulatory power to agencies of the executive branch a parallel judicial system emerged wherein administrative law courts act as legislators, prosecutors, police, judge, and jury in matters touching every aspect of our lives and businesses. This system, too, has a voracious appetite for information. How else to ensure that its tens of thousands of mandates, regulations, prohibitions, guidances, edicts, and reporting requirements are strictly obeyed? The opportunity to manipulate this shadow government invites a degree of lobbying and influence peddling that would make the Grant administration blush. Our national government was once unique in having only two crimes over which it claimed jurisdiction: treason and counterfeiting. This was due to the federalist architecture our founders devised, reserving ordinary police powers for the states. But such a division of powers did not hold. Our central government has since created a vast and complex criminal code with laws too numerous to count. This includes weaponized vagaries like conspiracy, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice that ensure crimes can be manufactured even after exhaustive investigations find that none have been committed. This has empowered a cabal of politicized federal prosecutors that can selectively indict anyone they please, using legal thuggery to threaten targets with bankruptcy to better extract plea bargains, which is why 90 percent of their cases never go to trial. These inquisitors also have the power to compel third parties to surrender vast troves of information that agents can comb through searching for anything that can be construed as a crime, even if these infractions bear no relation to the charges for which the target was originally indicted. So I disagree that comprehensive and inescapable surveillance is “not good for democracy.” It is the inevitable consequence of democracy, only recently empowered by the advent of big data and total interconnectedness. Our founders were rightly fearful of democracy, doing everything they could to make sure it never took root in America. Their efforts to preserve our liberty, our property, and our privacy failed, and we are paying the price. Bill Frezza is the former host of RealClear Radio Hour and the author of New Zealand’s Far-Reaching Reforms: A Case Study in How to Save Democracy from Itself. This article was sourced from FEE.org (activistpost.com)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/1/2018 5:59:50 PM
	Military Industrial Complex Stocks Sent Crashing as North and South Korea Achieve Peace APRIL 29, 2018 By Rachel Blevins North and South Korea reached a historic peace deal this week, and as the leaders from the two nations met in person for the first time and agreed to pursue an end to the Korean War, it signaled an incredible breakthrough in diplomacy and sent the stocks of defense contractors in the United States crashing. When North Korea’s Kim Jong-un shook hands with South Korea’s Moon Jae-in for the first time on Friday, they put thousands of people both at home and around the world at ease, as they agreed to a peace deal that has the power to break the tension that has been between the two countries for decades. All smiles, hugs & holding hands as North & South Korean leaders meet (PHOTOS, VIDEO)https://t.co/r5zeArvpMh pic.twitter.com/wpnp2ZZrHS — RT (@RT_com) April 27, 2018 However, while peace may seem like the best possible outcome to the average person who is aware of how the ongoing war has hurt both North and South Korea over the years, it is a resolution that hurts the United States military-industrial complex, as can be seen by the results from stocks following the meeting. On Friday alone, the five largest defense contractors in the U.S. lost more than $10 billion in value. Lockheed Martin (LMT) started the week at $352.79 per share and ended it at $321.95 per share, falling 2.5 percent to a valuation of about $92 billion. Northrop Grumman (NOC) started the week at $356.67 per share and ended it at $321.86 per share, falling 3.4 percent to a valuation of $56 billion. General Dynamics (GD) started the week at $222.92 per share and ended it at $203.70 per share, falling 3.8 percent to a valuation of $60 billion. Raytheon (RTN) started the week at $227.67 per share and ended it at $204.09 per share, falling $3.6 percent to a valuation of $50 billion. Boeing (BA) lost less than 1 percent of its stock, ending the week with an evaluation of $200 billion. When the United States invades sovereign nations, overthrows foreign governments and launches countless drone strikes that kill innocent civilians, the military-industrial complex profits by the billions. But the industry is so volatile that while a peaceful meeting between two leaders can send its stocks crashing, threats and angry Tweets from another leader can cause its stocks to soar. President Trump vowed to meet North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” in August 2017, and as The Free Thought Project reported, the stocks of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors increased significantly in response: Fear has infected the planet—so the fraught business of national defense is booming.‘ The level of dialogue around missile defense is now at the prime minister and minister of defense level,’ vice president of Lockheed’s Air and Missile Defense business, Tom Cahill, noted in an interview with Reuters, which added, ‘Some countries are putting missile defense at the top of their list of desired capabilities, Cahill said. Interest has increased over the last 12 to 18 months, as have threats, he said. Shares of Lockheed are up nearly 8 percent, to $300.10, since North Korea’s first long-range missile test on July 4. The stock is up 20 percent year-to-date.’ Of course, that was yesterday. Today, Lockheed Martin stocks continue to rise—just prior to publication, stocks hovered around $305 per share—and show no indications of falling to levels typical of a less charged global atmosphere. The United State government accounted for around 70 percent of Lockheed Martin’s revenue in 2016, and when the Trump Administration began threatening to launch a full-scale war against North Korea, the company’s shares skyrocketed by 8 percent, marking a 20 percent increase in Lockheed Martin’s stock in the first 8 months of the year. Now that lasting peace could be on the horizon between North and Korea and stocks are dropping, it raises questions about how defense contractors in the U.S. will recover. If there is no bear to poke and no war to threaten in North Korea, will the U.S. increase tensions in Syria, at the risk of provoking Russia? Or will it resume its propaganda campaign against Iran in an attempt to convince Americans that the country is in desperate need of “freedom and democracy,” when in reality the military-industrial complex is in dire need of high stocks and successful profits? (activistpost.com)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/1/2018 7:18:41 PM
	Look Where They Tell You Not to Look Craig Murray craigmurray.co.uk Mon, 30 Apr 2018 09:30 UTC At the very beginning of the of the Skripal incident, the security services blocked by D(SMA) notice any media mention of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian. Gordon Corera, "BBC Security Correspondent", did not name the source who told him to say this, but helpfully illustrated his tweet with a nice picture of MI6 Headquarters. MI6's most important media conduit (after Frank Gardner) is Luke Harding of the Guardian. A number of people replied to Harding's tweet to point out that this was demonstrably untrue, and Pablo Miller had listed his employment by Orbis Business Intelligence on his Linkedin profile. That profile had just been deleted, but a google search for "Pablo Miller" plus "Orbis Business Intelligence", without Linkedin as a search term, brought up Miller's Linkedin profile as the first result (although there are twelve other Pablo Millers on Linkedin and the search brought up none of them). Plus a 2017 forum discussed Pablo Miller's Orbis connection and it both cited and linked to his Linkedin entry. You might think that any journalist worth his salt would want to consider this interesting counter-evidence. But Harding merely tweeted again the blank denials of the security services, without question. This is an important trait of Harding. Last year we both appeared, separately, at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Harding was promoting a book and putting the boot into Wikileaks and Snowden. After his talk, I approached him in an entirely friendly manner, and told him there were a couple of factual errors in his presentation on matters to which I was an eye-witness, and I should be very happy to brief him, off the record, but we could discuss which bits he might use. He said he would talk later, and dashed off. Later I saw him in the author's lounge, and as I walked towards him he hurriedly got up and left, looking at me. Of course, nobody is obliged to talk to me. But at that period I had journalists from every major news agency contacting me daily wishing to interview me about Wikileaks, all of whom I was turning down, and there was no doubt of my inside knowledge and direct involvement with a number of the matters of which Harding was writing and speaking. A journalist who positively avoids knowledge of his subject is an interesting phenomenon. But then Harding is that. From a wealthy family background, privately educated at Atlantic College and then Oxford, Harding became the editor of Oxford University's Cherwell magazine without showing any leftwing or rebel characteristics. It was not a surprise to those who knew him as a student when he was employed at the very right wing "Daily Mail". From there he moved to the Guardian. In 2003 Harding was embedded with US forces in Iraq and filing breathless reports of US special forces operations. Moving to Moscow in 2007 as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, others in the Moscow press corps and in the British expatriate community found him to be a man of strongly hawkish neo-con views, extremely pro-British establishment, and much closer to the British Embassy and to MI6 than anybody else in the press corps. It was for this reason Harding was the only resident British journalist, to my knowledge, whose visa the Russians under Putin have refused to renew. They suspected he is actually an MI6 officer, although he is not. With this background, people who knew Harding were dumbfounded when Harding appeared to be the supporter and insider of first Assange and then Snowden. The reason for this dichotomy is that Harding was not - he wrote books on Wikileaks and on Snowden that claimed to be insider accounts, but in fact just carried on Harding's long history of plagiarism, as Julian Assange makes clear. Harding's books were just careful hatchet jobs pretending to be inside accounts. The Guardian's historical reputation for radicalism was already a sham under the editorship of Rusbridger, and has completely vanished under Viner, in favour of hardcore Clinton identity politics failing to disguise unbending neo-conservatism. The Guardian smashed the hard drives containing the Snowden files under GCHQ supervision, having already undertaken "not to even look at" the information on Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact the hard drives were not the only copies in the world does not excuse their cravenness. We know, of course, what MI6 have fed to Harding, because it is reflected every day in his output. What we do not know, but may surmise, is what Harding fed back to the security services that he gleaned from the Guardian's association with Wikileaks and Snowden. Harding has since made his living from peddling a stream of anti-Assange, anti-Snowden and above all, anti-Russian books, with great commercial success, puffed by the entire mainstream media. But when challenged by the non-mainstream media about the numerous fact free assertions on behalf of the security services to be found in his books, Harding is not altogether convincing. You can watch this video, in which Harding outlines how emoticons convinced him someone was a Russian agent, together with this fascinating analysis which really is a must-read study of anti-Russian paranoia. There is a similar analysis here. Perhaps still more revealing is this 2014 interview with his old student newspaper Cherwell, where he obvously felt comfortable enough to let the full extent of his monstrous boggle-eyed Russophobia become plain: His analogies span the bulk of the 20th century and his predictions for the future are equally far-reaching. "This is the biggest crisis in Europe since the Cold War. It's not the break-up of Yugoslavia, but the strategic consensus since 1945 has been ripped up. We now have an authoritarian state, with armies on the march." What next? "It's clear to me that Putin intends to dismember Ukraine and join it up with Transnistria, then perhaps he'll go as far as Moldova in one way or another," Harding says. This is part of what he deems Putin's over-arching project: an expansionist attempt to gather Russo-phones together under one yoke, which he terms 'scary and Eurasian-ist', and which he notes is darkly reminiscent of "another dictator of short stature" who concocted "a similarly irredentist project in the 1930s". But actually I think you can garner everything you want to know about Harding from looking at his twitter feed over the last two months. He has obsessively retweeted scores of stories churning out the government's increasingly strained propaganda line on what occurred in Salisbury. Not one time had Harding ever questioned, even in the mildest way, a single one of the multiple inconsistencies in the government account or referred to anybody who does. He has acted, purely and simply, as a conduit for government propaganda, while abandoning all notion of a journalistic duty to investigate. We still have no idea of who attacked Sergei Skripal and why. But the fact that, right from the start, the government blocked the media from mentioning Pablo Miller, and put out denials that this has anything to do with Christopher Steele and Orbis, including lying that Miller had never been connected to Orbis, convinces me that this is the most promising direction in which to look. It never seemed likely to me that the Russians had decided to assassinate an inactive spy who they let out of prison many years ago, over something that happened in Moscow over a decade ago. It seemed even less likely when Boris Johnson claimed intelligence showed this was the result of a decade long novichok programme involving training in secret assassination techniques.Why would they blow all that effort on old Skripal? That the motive is the connection to the hottest issue in US politics today, and not something in Moscow a decade ago, always seemed to me much more probable. Having now reviewed matters and seen that the government actively tried to shut down this line of inquiry, makes it still more probable this is right. This does not tell us who did it. Possibly the Russians did, annoyed that Skripal was feeding information to the Steele dossier, against the terms of his release. Given that the Steele dossier is demonstrably in large degree nonsense, it seems to me more probable the idea was to silence Skripal to close the danger that he would reveal his part in the concoction of this fraud. Remember he had sold out Russian agents to the British for cash and was a man of elastic loyalties. It is also worth noting that Luke Harding has a bestselling book currently on sale, in large part predicated on the truth of the Steele Dossier. Steele, MI6 and the elements of the CIA which are out to get Trump, all would have a powerful motive to have the Skripal loose end tied. Rule number one of real investigative journalism: look where they tell you not to look. (sott.net)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 5/2/2018 10:29:52 AM
	May Day riot in Paris: Masked protesters torch cars as police deploy tear gas & arrest 200+ (VIDEOS) Published time: 1 May, 2018 14:33Edited time: 2 May, 2018 07:51 A car and a motorbike burn during a demonstration on the side lines of the march for the annual May Day workers' rally, in Paris, on May 1, 2018. © Alain Jocard / AFP Police in Paris have used water cannons to break up a tumultuous rally, arresting over 200 rioters. Amid May Day demonstrations, hooded individuals threw smoke bombs and set vehicles on fire in the French capital. Live feeds from Paris showed chaotic scenes, as police attempt to disperse violent protesters while redirecting crowds of peaceful marchers to side streets. Loud bangs are heard in the background as smoke and tear gas billow down the streets. Police pushed back against the rioters, peppering the crowd with tear gas grenades from behind riot shields and hitting the crowd with water cannon. Protesters lobbed firecrackers at the advancing force, as well as picking up and throwing back some of the gas canisters. Armored police vans and fire trucks are backed up advance. More than 200 rioters were arrested, but only four people were injured in the clashes, including a police officer, according to Paris police chief Michel Delpuech. Earlier, law enforcement tweeted there were around 1,200 “hooded and masked” individuals among the May Day demonstrators at the Pont d’Austerlitz bridge in central Paris. On Monday, police warned of possible clashes with far-left anarchists, after calls to make it a “revolutionary day” appeared on social media. The rioters have torched several vehicles and vandalized shop fronts, including reportedly throwing a petrol bomb through a McDonald’s window. France marks Labor Day as President Emmanuel Macron finds himself in a protracted battle with unions and students over his reform plans. Railroad workers have been striking since mid-April, angry at plans to freeze salaries, cut over 120,000 jobs, and employ more private contractors. Students have previously occupied several universities across France, protesting Macron’s move to reform the education system, including introducing new admissions criteria and ranking young people who apply to public universities. Emmanuel Macron, who has remained unmoved by the protests and vowed to proceed with the reforms, is not in Paris to witness the unrest, having flown to Australia for a state visit. (RT)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

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May Day riot in Paris: Masked protesters torch cars as police deploy tear gas & arrest 200+ (VIDEOS)

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