Category Archives: Activism

Jade Helm: Part II

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Previous Post on Jade Helm: 

 Jade Helm 15 – Training, Terror, Or Hoax? (5/2/15).

Jade Helm – Part II

The Symbolism of Jade Helm:

That the clog is a symbol of the Nazi concentration camp has been noted also on the Common Sense Show.

This is helpful, because overnight I was wondering if I was being  paranoid.

So the clog can symbolize anarcho-syndicalism, the French Revolution,  Jewish persecution by Muslims during the middle ages and by Nazis in the 20th century, and also orthodox Sephardic Jews, as I posted earlier.

That connection makes me more confident that Jade Helm could be read as Green Helmet, which is the color of the steel helmets of the Nazi army.

Here’s the Jade Helm logo again:

Special ops: Operation Jade Helm will involve Green Berets and SEALs and special forces from the Air Force and Marines starting in July and lasting 8 weeks

The Reach of Jade Helm:

I wrote before that some of the blogs were getting it wrong about the number of forces being deployed. 1200 is the number only in Texas.

This blog seems to think that that will be the largest number overall in any individual state, but that the largest numbers at any specific time will be in Florida and Mississippi, because the HQ’s of the operation are located there, at Eglin Airforce Base and Camp Shelby, respectively.

Eglin Airforce Base lies about 60 miles east of Pensacola in north-west Florida. Camp Shelby in southern Mississippi is the largest reserve training site in the country.

Most interestingly,  local HQ in at least 3 of the Texas counties involved will be set up at private ranches, two of them being that of Steve Blaylock and of T. Michael O’Connor.

Reportedly, the ranches were volunteered and the owners are not compensated in any way, not even with tax write-offs.

Previous Drills:

There was a large military drill in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the end of March.

On April 11, 2015, armed national guards patrolled a neighborhood in Ontario, California.

Abrogation of Law:

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 had a section providing for the indefinite detention of US citizens on suspicion of terrorism. The provision was reaffirmed by Obama in 2014.

Context of false-flags and black ops

A good article published at Global Research rounds up the various false-flags and black ops that make people wary of Jade Helm. It makes the point that the alternative media is not to be trusted either.

When the Washington Post condemns conspiracy theories by featuring them prominently, the reader is probably wise not to take either the theories or the critics at face-value but to reserve judgment until he understands all the facts for himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fruit of Peace

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Ann Diener writes about an early collaboration between Palestinians and Israelis:

According to Wikipedia, “Jewish immigrants to Palestine adopted the Jaffa orange variety from Arab farmers. Partnerships in growing and exporting these oranges was an example of Arab-Jewish cooperation despite rising political tensions.

“By 1939, Jewish and Arab orange orchards in Palestine covered 75,000 acres (300 km2), employed over 100,000 workers, and their produce was a primary export. During World War II (1939–1945) citrus-growing declined, but recovered after the war with the vigorous assistance of the British Mandate authorities.”

“Jaffa oranges are harvested in Israel between November and March, with the marketing season beginning in September and extending through until April. More than half the annual crop is exported, and Israel is a main provider of other citrus fruits to the European Union.”

The Jaffa orange groves were a sign of success of cooperation post the writing of the “Iron Wall.”

Currently, more attention is paid towards the failures that include rockets in Israel and destruction of Arab society in Palestine through warlike activities potentially based on the “Iron Wall” thinking and isolation of Israeli society with the premise that the wall will keep them safe and force the Palestinians into submission with the threat of “enormous suffering.”

What if the solution was found in the exact opposite tactic, one of cooperation to produce success for both sides, like that of the Jaffa orange?

According to the Hope Simpson Royal Commission Report of 1930, “The cultivation of the orange, introduced by the Arabs before the commencement of Jewish settlement, has developed to a very great extent in consequence of that settlement. There is no doubt that the pitch of perfection to which the technique of plantation and cultivation of the orange and grape-fruit have been brought in Palestine is due to the scientific methods of the Jewish agriculturist.”

Therefore, maybe after over sixty years of conflict, the government of Israel should consider former President Ronald Reagan’s famous line, “Tear down this wall,” in their mindset. and try a new, more positively based strategy. Then, maybe we will see a better headline like “Jewish Agriculturalist and Arab Products Create Perfection with Orange,” rather than “Children Terrified and Burnt to Death in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

Men Forced Into Sex More Often Than Women

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In a thoroughly documented piece, “Yellow Journalism and the Meme of Rape Culture,” a blogger  takes apart Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage of the University of Viriginia “gang-rape” story to show the incredibly shoddy standards of investigation of many elite (read, left-liberal) news outlets and the biased advocacy that passes itself off as objective reporting.

Rolling Stone has retracted the story and issued an apology but no one has been fired for what amounts to criminal libel.

The agenda behind this, as admitted by the reporter herself, was to find a rape story that was “emblematic” of the rape culture that feminists declare is threatening women on campus.

But as I’ve blogged many times,  this isn’t so.

To find a “rape culture” on American campuses,  you would need to use a broad definition of rape that included seduction with alcohol, fraud, or other means.

I tend to agree with the broadening of what we define as rape, while disbelieving that the criminal justice system is the best place to address any of it.

Both Heather McDonald and Emily Yoffe named the beast that nobody wants to confront: an alcohol-lubricated hookup culture that begins in high school (if not earlier) and turns colleges and universities into rape traps for both women and men.

U-VA President Teresa Sullivan didn’t mention alcohol – not even once – in her November 22 statement about the Rolling Stone report of a gang rape at a fraternity house and her intention to quell sexual abuse on campus.

Yet a 2004 study by the Harvard School of Public Health (Correlates of Rape while Intoxicated in a National Sample of College Women) of almost 24,000 women at 119 colleges found that 72% of campus rapes happened when the victims were so intoxicated they were unable to consent or refuse.”

In this broad sense (but not in the narrow one) there is a “rape-culture”.

Only, today it victimizes men as much, or more, than women, as is the case elsewhere in the world .

Riversong.wordpress.com

“If any unwanted or not fully consensual sexual activity is defined now as rape, then more men then women are victims of rape and most of their victimizers are women.

An article about college students published in the Journal of Sex Research Vol. 31, No. 2 (1994), noted that Muehlenhard and Cook (1988) found that 46% of women and 63% of men had acquiesced to unwanted sexual intercourse, while Muehlenhard and Long (1988) also found that more men (49%) than women (40%) had engaged in unwanted sex. Muehlenhard and Rodgers (1993) found that 34% of women reported having engaged in token resistance to sex, in which they said “no” when they really desired to have sex. US women acknowledge a 55% rate of consent to unwanted sex, which is consistent with the findings of 50% false rape allegations in university studies.

[Charlene L. Muehlenhard, PhD, the author of all those studies, is a Professor of Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fellow in Three Divisions of the American Psychological Association (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Society for the Psychology of Women, Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues), and a Fellow in the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality]

According to a 2014 paper published in the American Psychological Association journal, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 43% of high school and college-aged men say they’ve had “unwanted sexual contact”, and 95% of those say a female acquaintance was the aggressor.

Researchers found that 18% reported sexual coercion by force (including by use of weapon), 31% said they were verbally coerced into sex, 26% said they’d experienced unwanted seduction, and 7% said they were compelled after being given alcohol or drugs.

Dr. Bryana French, who teaches counseling psychology and black studies at University of Missouri and co-authored the study, says that male victims are often less willing to describe sexual coercion in detail, “but when asked if it happened, they say it happened”.

French said, “Seduction was a particularly salient and potentially unique form of coercion for teenage boys and young men when compared to their female counterparts.”

The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions is co-authored by Lara Stemple, Health and Human Rights Law Project, UCLA, and Ilan H. Meyer, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.

The authors assessed 12-month prevalence of sexual victimization from five federal surveys conducted, independently, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2010 through 2012. The review of these surveys provides an unprecedented wealth of new data about male victimization, challenging long-held stereotypes about the sex of victims.

In one of the studies included in the analysis, the CDC found that an estimated 1.3 million women experienced nonconsensual sex, or rape, in the previous year.

Notably, nearly the same number of men also reported nonconsensual sex. In comparison to the number of women who were raped, nearly 1.3 million men were “made to penetrate” someone else. The CDC data reveal that both women and men experienced nonconsensual sex in alarming and equal numbers.

The study also included the 2012 National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that 38% of all reported rape and sexual assault incidents were committed against males, an increase over past years that challenges the common belief that males are rarely victims of this crime.

“These findings are striking, yet misconceptions about male victimization persist. We identified reasons for this, which include the over-reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions used by some federal agencies, and methodological sampling biases.”

The 2011 CDC analysis referred to in the 2014 report found that 6.7% of men (7.6 million) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else, and that 82.6% of male victims of “made to penetrate” events and 80% of male victims of sexual coercion reported female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman, according to the current and broadly accepted definition of rape as any unwanted sexual encounter.

The CDC report’s statistics for the preceding 12 months showed that a higher percentage of men were “made to penetrate” (1.7%) than women were raped (1.6%), such that if you properly include “made to penetrate” in the definition of rape, men were raped by women at least as often as women were raped by men.”

Fatu Kekula: True Survivalist

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From the LA Times:

“Fatu had been away at a relative’s home in Grand Bassa County when her father, a 52-year-old administrator at a local clinic, got sick July 29. About a week earlier, he had been diagnosed with typhoid and given a bed that had just been vacated by an Ebola patient in the clinic where he worked.

His wife, Victoria, sent her four youngest foster children away and did her best to care for him, but when he weakened dramatically, with vomiting and diarrhea, she called Fatu home Aug. 3.

Fatu and her sister, Vivienne, took Moses by taxi, 90 minutes on punishing roads, to Monrovia, but no Ebola treatment unit could take him. On the ride back, Fatu made her plan.

“Since I know small, small medicine, I said, ‘God, with my faith I’m going to get my father home, and he’ll survive.’”

She set up a makeshift isolation room in a spare unfinished room outside the house. She bought raincoats, rain boots, chlorine and other supplies. Then she went to work.
I never felt tired. I was fighting for my family and their lives. – Liberian nursing student Fatu Kekula

When she entered her father’s treatment room she put on socks, plastic bags donned like waders, rain boots, four sets of gloves, a coat, a mask and a plastic bag over her hair. He wouldn’t eat. Carefully, she put in an intravenous drip. She poured rehydration liquids down his throat, drop by drop.

She gave him blood pressure medicine, antibiotics, analgesics for his fever and splitting headache. She even gave him an antiretroviral medicine normally used to save the lives of AIDS patients.

“He was restless. I did his blood pressure and it was very low, and I was afraid that he might die,” she said.

Moses Kekula was struggling to breathe, with a shattering headache, aches all over his body.

“I was almost like giving up. I kept praying to survive,” he recalled.

A week later, just as he was beginning to show signs of improvement, his wife became sick. Then the disease struck daughter Vivienne and her cousin, who’d been sent to live with them by his father, a farmer.

Around the clock, one or the other of them would be weakly calling Fatu for help. She dozed 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there.

“It was a bit difficult for me to sleep because all the time they would call me, maybe two of them would call me at the same time. Every time I would go into a dangerous room, I would dress up,” she said.

“The whole virus thing, it’s like carrying a baby in your hands, because it turns them into a child. You have to be sorry for them. You have to put yourself into the shoes of that person and ask yourself, ‘What if it were me?’”

She went through four boxes of surgical gloves, and bags of raincoats. When she took off the clothing, she had to shrug it off carefully to avoid touching the exterior. She sprayed copiously with chlorinated water. She carefully burned all the waste.

She swiftly burned through the $600 in her bank account.
Ebola in Liberia
Liberians with symptoms of Ebola report to nurses wearing protective clothing last month at the John F. Kennedy Hospital treatment center in Monrovia, Liberia. (Ahmed Jallanzo / European Pressphoto Agency)

“My approach was just to treat them based on their symptoms. I never felt tired. I was fighting for my family and their lives. I would do it for other people in the hospital so I knew I could do it for my family.”

On the 18th day, as Alfred’s condition swiftly declined, an ambulance arrived. She watched it depart with her family members, fear gripping her heart. Would she see them again?

“I was worried. I worried a lot because my entire family went there. They had the symptoms of the virus, and the virus had no cure.”

She prayed as hard as she could that their Ebola tests would be negative. All would come back positive.

Outside John F. Kennedy Medical Center, Alfred collapsed, convulsing.

“He said, ‘Aunty, I want to lie down,’” Victoria said. There were no beds inside, so Moses, Victoria, Vivienne and Alfred were given mattresses lined up next to each on the floor. Alfred’s skin became hot, he started bleeding from his mouth, convulsing again.

When Victoria awoke the next morning at 5, she saw Alfred, her foster child, just a yard away on the next mattress, drenched in blood from his head.

“I was afraid to touch him,” she said. “Then I saw he wasn’t breathing.

“I cried. I said ‘It’s a shame on me, because I took somebody’s child, a relative’s child, and he died in my hands.’”

Victoria’s health declined sharply, she began ranting unintelligibly, her skin broke out in a rash. But she would ultimately survive.

After helping her family, Fatu wants to spread hope, passing her knowledge on to other desperate families. She addressed workshops organized by the Ministry of Health, teaching people how to use plastic bags to protect themselves when there’s nothing else.

“I’m going to teach them the things I’ve already done, because I treated four people, and only one died,” she said.

OSINT, espionage, & sedition

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A university researcher wrote to me a week or two ago. He asked if I would be interested in a project studying Operation Mockingbird and the CIA’s past and continuing use of the news media (and of social media).

A little research into the researcher showed that he was involved in a website promoting the use of  OSINT.

OSINT is the graceless acronym the government bestows on something called open-source intelligence.

OSINT is public information similar to what this blog uses.

Not just media reports, but links on forums,  government data,  court documents, commentary at blogs and in discussion groups, social media postings.

As long as it’s not confidential (a lawyer’s privileged conversation) or obviously private (a home phone number or medical information), it’s all fair game.

Until “national security” gets involved.

Of course, “national security” is an elastic term that seems to include everything.

The empire’s desire for full-spectrum dominance makes anything in outer – or inner – space part of “national security.”

Now, until I encountered the term OSINT in the past few days, I‘d no idea that what I was doing by chance bears a resemblance to what a whole wing of the CIA specializes in.

I do it because I’ve generally found the major media unreliable (and uninteresting) and the alternative media, while far more interesting,  ideologically biased.

But there’s a catch.

OSINT can get an un-credentialed journalist or blogger into serious trouble.

How serious?

Wikipedia on the dangers of OSINT:

“Accredited journalists have some protection in asking questions, and researching for recognized media outlets. Even so they can be imprisoned, even executed, for seeking out OSINT.

Private individuals illegally collecting data for a foreign military or intelligence agency is considered espionage in most countries. Of course, espionage that is not treason (i.e. betraying one’s country of citizenship) has been a tool of statecraft since ancient times, is widely engaged in by nearly all countries, and is considered an honorable trade.”

So, well-paid mercenaries and meddlesome bureaucrats who provoke international conflicts and break domestic and foreign laws while  spying on foreign countries are patriots, while unpaid citizen-bloggers/journalists trying to deconstruct the dense fog  of corporate-state propaganda to help ordinary people should be shot.

Very rational.

That leads me back to the curious invitation in my mail-box.

If gathering open-source intelligence can in some circumstances be seen as  treasonous, then why the invitation?

Blogging from public sources is one thing. But blogging that is intended to inform an enemy might be another.

The OSINT web-site I saw gave me a hint by referring to an open-source “revolution.“

Long-time readers of my blog will probably know  how I feel about “revolutions,” especially those led by what I call techno-utopians.

And sure enough, in the last two weeks it seems that the 45-year-old meme of “open source revolution” has been revived.

Yes, 45 years. That’s how old this “cutting-edge” meme is.

Only now it’s migrated from the soft-ware community, where it began, to the intelligence community.

Going back, the term “open-source” was a spin-off from a community of “hackers” creating what was later called free software at an MIT artificial intelligence lab in 1971.

The word hacker here doesn’t mean anything criminal. It’s a positive word for people who take apart and improve on computer programs for the sheer fun of it and for the good of the public.

At least, that’s the self-portrait.

The developer of free software, Richard Stallings, later worked at Lawrence Livermore lab and won a MacArthur “genius” award.

Lawrence Livermore is a government lab devoted to science and research in the interests of national security.

The cypherpunk group, devoted to developing strong cryptography ,  was the group from which Julian Assange and Wikileaks emerged.

It  included one researcher from the Lawrence Livermore lab, as well as many senior people from Bell, MIT, and Sun Microsystems (among others).

Stallings himself is a strong supporter of free software.

He developed the “copyleft” approach to IP, which allows changes to be made to code by innovators, so long as each innovator in turn allows other users the same freedom.

Copyleft also allows people the freedom to commercialize their innovations.

Stallings is a strong supporter of the hacker collective Anonymous, seeing it as a kind of legitimate “street protest.”

You can search this blog to find my ruminations about Anonymous….

(To be continued)

Unknown devices…..

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Unknown devices keep showing up under network adapters in my device manager. I keep disabling them and they keep showing up.

They have no signature, no device ID or function, no location or vendor information. They just have the word root and then a number.

Then there’s the comment link on which I accidentally clicked that took me to an empty website. Was someone tying to download something or find my IP address?

My computer got very buggy and slow yesterday. Then my security software keeps turning off.

Worse, there are the unknown devices of my fellow man.

Someone sent me an email at which to contact them. The handle was something like city-slicker@usa.com (not the actual handle, of course).

Now do high-profile people usually have emails with such handles,  and, even if they do, do they give it out to strangers on the web?  Do they insist on contacting you and then insist that you respond only on personal email and private cell numbers?

And then do they comment on this blog using a fake handle?

One with a link on which I accidentally click that takes me to an empty website set up a long while ago?

Methinks I smell a set-up.  Especially when the high-profile one claims to have intelligence contacts/experience.

I could be wrong, of course. In which case, my profound apologies.

But that is why I do not respond except in ways I choose.

And that is why I like to keep it strictly about politics, except for people who have actually intersected with me.

Even then, I tend to be wary.

Anything a stranger needs to tell me can be posted at this blog.

If it’s confidential and has some public importance, disguise the information and post pseudonymously.

If it’s private information, please find a personal friend in whom to confide.

It does you, the reader, and me, the blogger,  no good to confuse web-reality with real-reality.

“Mobs” Ist Edition was 2007, not 2009

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I just saw this on Amazon, in a Google search of
“Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” (Bonner & Rajiva, Wiley, 2007)

Product Details

The 2007 publication date is what ought to be in the catalog, because that is when the first edition, the hardcover, came out.

There are six English language editions, besides foreign-language versions:

1. Hard-cover,  1st edition, August 31,  2007

2. Unknown binding, 2007 (Not sure what this is)

3.  Audible book, October 30, 2007

4. Pre–loaded digital audio, Sept. 1 2008

5.  Kindle,  May 18, 2009

6. Paper-back,  September 8, 2009

By 2009, there  were already five editions.

Yet the sixth version of “Mobs” is listed as the first edition.

And then this first edition is dated at 2009, not 2007.

Technical glitch? Careless mistake?

Or does someone want to revise the date of publication?

Inquiring minds want to know…..

 

 

Voice of the Martyrs: Fraud and Pedophilia?

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Michael Wurmbrand is the son of the famous Jewish-born communist, Richard Wurmbrand, who converted to Christianity and suffered extraordinary persecution in communist Romania.

In February 2014, Michael Wurmbrand  wrote to Voice of the Martyrs, the prominent Christian organization founded by his deceased father, to drop their association with his name because of suspected fraud and pedophilia in its leadersip:

My parents died in 2000-2001 and I am now 74 years old.

Against my express request NOT TO DO SO, the mission Voice of the Martyrs of Bartlesville (VOM), Oklahoma, USA and its international affiliates, continue to use Richard Wurmbrand, Sabina Wurmbrand, my parents’ persona, pictures, writings and books, my persona also to obtain your donations!

Tom White, the past Voice of the Martyrs Chairman for more than 20-years, committed suicide in April, 2012, only two to three hours after an accusation of child sexual molestation (pedophilia) of a 10-years old girl was formally filed by her parents with the local police, and while the Bartlesville, OK. police were searching to arrest him. This terrible event made world news. At the time of his committing suicide, Tom White had a $140,000+, plus perks, yearly salary and very substantial travel and expense accounts used in his extensive and frequent international travel year after year. Since the suspected perpetrator was dead, the police closed any further investigation of the sexual molestation. The police chief and the former mayor of the town of Bartlesville, OK. were personally serving on the Board of Directors of Voice of the Martyrs. A few other directors are related to each other or get salaries from the organization.

I asked in writing of the Voice of the Martyrs Board of Directors for an independent investigation, to be undertaken from outside of VOM. The investigation in the famous legal action in England of Jimmy Saville, the BBC children program head while alive, started with only 2 cases BUT there were more than 600 pedophilia complaints after Saville died. In the last 4 years, the state of Arizona, for instance, failed to investigate 6,000 cases of children molestation. Being the son of Richard Wurmbrand, a person of my background and position could have more inside information, than I can discuss publicly. I asked therefore for an independent investigation!….”

This is one more instance of the highest levels of conservative anti-communist circles being associated, rightly or wrongly, with pedophilia.

Here are some other recent scandals in conservative Christian circles.

More here.

Some Protestant foes of the Roman Catholic Church derided Wurmbrand’s ecumenism as a false-front for a New World Order co-optation of Christianity.  (LINK DELETED)

[ADDED: I should clarify that I consider this accusation deluded and semi-litarate.]

It is important to consider that the allegation of pedophilia has not been followed by any public testimony from victims, which is usual in such cases.

There was a third-party statement by a Christian minister in the area to the effect that he had spoken to the father of the alleged victim and was sure that the abuse had taken place.

However, that isn’t evidence.

The minister in question was Wade Burleson,  pastor of the  Southern Baptist Emmanuel Enid church.  In a comment on his blog, defending his unsubstantiated statement, he described his past government affiliations.

Wade Burleson said…

Ken,
I have worked as a chaplain for the Tulsa Police Department (1987-1992), the Garfield County Sheriff’s Department (1992-2012), the Department of Justice (1995), the FBI and DEA special task forces (1995-2012), and have had training in hostage negotiation, criminal interrogation and the like. You can trust me when I say the man on the phone was who he says he is–though not one ounce of my training is even needed to immediately ascertain the truth. Of course, for me to tell you how I know would give too much information that I have pledged to keep confidential.

Tue May 01, 08:27:00 AM 2012

His blog post was addressed to the ten-year old girl and confirmed her abuse, but it didn’t produce any evidence.

The post was reproduced at Christianpost.com, where astute readers faulted it for its theatricality and lack of substance.

[I will add more on this as I research the story.]

The local police-chief who was in charge of the investigation  was  on the board of Voice of the Martyrs  at the time and shut the case down, without disclosing anything further.

The case was closed within a month of the charge, even before the coroner’s office issued a medical report.

That report, shared with the press, showed that VOM chief Tom White died from a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs.

The quick cover-up of the case can be interpreted either in VOM’s favor (the charges were false and concocted to destroy the organization, so there was no evidence) or against it (the charges were true but hushed up to save VOM).

White took his life before a warrant had been issued, suggesting that he had been tipped off in advance, presumably by Tom Holland, the police-chief.

Holland himself  is facing two cases of discrimination.

He has been ranked 14 among America’s top 100 worst bosses.

Oddly, he was brought into the Bartlesville Police Dept. to clean it up. It had a bad reputation for corruption.

This is significant because city documents show that VOM was on the receiving end of a corrupt subsidy via tax-payers for  improvements that the city had asked it to perform.

There are other questions.

According to its 2008 income tax returns, VOM has gross receipts of over $44,000,000, but spent only around $9 million for services directed for persecuted Christians, which is its stated mission as a non-profit.

That mission is what earns it tax-exempt status from the government.

VOM’s director at the time of the 2008 returns earned a six-figure salary ($140000/year).

Total salaries at VOM in 2008 amounted to over $2,000,000.

One of  VOM’s principals in 2008 turns out to  have been convicted twice for embezzlement.

(I am not naming him or linking the article, since I haven’t researched this personally).

As the Bible says,

Put not your trust in princes nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help…

 

Mark Ames: Ties between Soros, Snowden, Greenwald, Ukrainian Nazis

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Mark Ames separates himself from the pack of craven journalists to point out that George Soros is aiding the Ukrainian neo-Nazi coup and he’s also behind Snowden’s treasure-trove of NSA secrets:

Some­how, the same bil­lion­aire who co-financed the “coup” in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclu­sive access to the NSA secrets—and very few in the inde­pen­dent media dare voice a skep­ti­cal word about it.

Lila: Actually, Mr. Ames, there are at least a few of us who have been skeptical of Snowden from the start and have pointed out the tell-tale connections between Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, George Soros and the world of “hacktivism” and  IP-socialism….. with few giving us credit for it.

I have questioned the Snowden story since June 2013 and Assange since 2009. Search this blog.

In the larger sense, this is a prob­lem of 21st cen­tury Amer­i­can inequal­ity, of life in a billionaire-dominated era.

Lila: Well go get a job and write on the side, beholden to no one.

It is a prob­lem we all have to con­tend with—PandoDaily’s 18-plus investors include a gag­gle of Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aires like Marc Andreessen (who serves on the board of eBay, chaired by Pierre Omid­yar) and Peter Thiel (whose pol­i­tics I’ve inves­ti­gated, and described as repug­nant.) But what is more imme­di­ately alarm­ing is what makes Omid­yar dif­fer­ent. Unlike other bil­lion­aires, Omid­yar has gar­nered noth­ing but uncrit­i­cal, fawn­ing press cov­er­age, par­tic­u­larly from those he has hired. By acquir­ing a “dream team” of what remains of inde­pen­dent media — Green­wald, Jeremy Scahill, Wheeler, my for­mer part­ner Matt Taibbi — not to men­tion press “crit­ics” like Jay Rosen — he buys both silence and fawn­ing press.

Lila: That tells you what Taibbi and the rest were all about…..which is what I said from the start. Check out my comments about Taibbi, plagiarism and revisionism.

.Both are incred­i­bly use­ful: Silence, an absence of jour­nal­is­tic curios­ity about Omidyar’s activ­i­ties over­seas and at home, has been pur­chased for the price of what­ever his cur­rent all-star indie cast cur­rently costs him. As an added bonus, that same invest­ment buys silence from expo­nen­tially larger num­bers of des­per­ately under­paid inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists hop­ing to some­day be on his pay­roll, and the under­funded media watch­dogs that sur­vive on Omid­yar Net­work grants. And it also buys laugh­able fluff from the likes of Scahill who also boasted to the Daily Beast of his boss’ close involve­ment in the day to day run­ning of First Look. “[Omid­yar] strikes me as always sort of polit­i­cal, but I think that the NSA story and the expand­ing wars put pol­i­tics for him into a much more promi­nent place in his exis­tence. This is not a side project that he is doing. Pierre writes more on our inter­nal mes­sag­ing than any­one else. And he is not micro­manag­ing. This guy has a vision. And his vision is to con­front what he sees as an assault on the pri­vacy of Americans.”

Highly “rational” leftist debates history

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In response to a post by Bionic Mosquito at EPJ about the actual violence of anarchists in Spain in the 1930s a gentleman of the name Philip Martin claimed that BM’s linking of anarchist violence to Marx was untenable and tantamount to faulting Jesus for Timothy McVeigh or the Inquisition.
  Martin then claimed that the facts did not support BM’s argument, which he (BM) had supported with reference to literature rather than journalism.
Martin’s post exhibited several logical as well as historical errors, which, I tried rather mildly to set aright:

@Martin

Novels are excellent and often more insightful than what paid hacks and party flacks will write.
In any case, journalists do describe the anarchists as violent.

Even anarchists admit it:

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/durruti.html

“Here the anarchists, ‘socialists’, Stalinists and the neo-Trotskyists worked together. Moreover, many of the workers attacked their old enemy, the Catholic Church, and convents and some churches were burned down; a few nuns said they had been raped and the Bishop’s Palace and much of the University of Oviedo was destroyed. Several unpopular priests were shot.”

Is Hugh Thomas a good enough expert for you? Read his account.

Having been caught out on the facts, Martin tried to rephrase:

Philip Martin May 22, 2014 at 4:26 PM

Even Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, mentions the violence visited upon the clergy class at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. I was not denying that historical event, only questioning the usefulness of using a work of fiction to analyse the complex interplay between less than tight-knit groups orchestrating a revolution. As John Howard (above) notes, religion is, or rather, can be the handmaiden of tyranny. While it’s certainly not justifiable, I can understand the anarchists, and other revolutionaries, at the time punishing the clergy-class after their stalwart defence (aided by Rome, no doubt) of the monarchy and the coup–that is to say, the dictator Franco.

To this vague folderol, I again came back with specifics:

Lila Rajiva May 22, 2014 at 5:04 PM

@Wrong again?
Authoritarianism (not the same as authority) is greatly to be preferred to totalitarianism and has historically been a bulwark against it
Will Grigg:

http://www.advancedchristianity.com/pages/mpc/docs/francisco_franco.pdf

 

This led to an outburst from the “rationalist”  against religious “hocus-pocus”:

Philip MartinMay 22, 2014 at 6:00 PM

It’s difficult to comment on this sort of stupidity. Please talk to a Catalan about Franco before you continue passing off shit articles–based solely in religious hocus pocus–about how he saved anyone. Calling Franco a savior is a new, lower, level of idiocy.

 

The two posts in which I rebutted Martin were not published (as of posting).

But from memory, let me recap what I said.
I argued the following:

1. I hadn’t called Franco a savior. Martin had.
2. I knew many Spaniards and they all felt the same way about Franco.
3. I had used logic and evidence to present my case and had been met with ad hominem, proving BM’s point.

I then cited more sources, including this one:

http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays/EPrize_Franco.pdf