Author Archives: Lila

Establishment Alternatives Defend Hersh

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Michael Rozeff, who believes Hersh is accurate on the Bin Laden story, claims support from four journalists.

He says generalized skepticism about government accounts is not good enough to discount the possibility of a 2011 killing, instead of the rumored 2001 killing.

Fair enough.

However, the problem for me at least is not generalized skepticism of government accounts.

My problem is generalized skepticism of alternative media mouth-pieces attacking the government’s account – I don’t place much stock in the high-profile  Mr. Hersh and his ilk.

Unlike Mr. Roberts, I don’t believe in the theory of a 2001 killing of Obama; but I also don’t believe the government’s OR Hersh’s version.

Until I study the matter at first hand, I refuse to take any account at face-value. The only thing I do believe is that there is no end to the depth and complexity of Anglo-Zionist propaganda and that anyone who goes by party-line, confession, or ideology of any kind, will not be able to untangle the web.

High-profile journalists are suspects numero uno when it comes to intelligence/CIA propaganda.

As I said, Douglas Valentine, Ann Williamson, Paul Craig Roberts, James Petras and the less-known but insightful  Scott Creighton – between them encompassing every side of the alternative spectrum – have expressed cynicism/skepticism about Hersh.

The media fanfare over Hersh’s revelations is itself a giveaway.

Now Rozeff comes up with 4 voices in support of Hersh.

Three of them published their  support on Counterpunch, which has, sorry to say, often retailed disinformation about 9/11 by none other than Alexander Cockburn.  One is published at The Nation, another establishment leftist rag that carries disinformation all the time.

Before he died, I got to know Cockburn a  little bit, with some exchanges over the phone and email. I liked the guy. He said nice things about my writing. I am grateful for that.  I also appreciated his support of India and his love of Indian culture. His Catholic background and his sharp, curious brain made him a different kind of lefty.

But lefty he was….a true believer in feminism, the state, and “the people.”

And on at least two occasions known to me a guy who retailed government spin.

One was on 9/11. The other was on the child-sex abuse scandals of the 1990s.

The latter was a personal disappointment to me, because I relied on his word and his opinion, as an elder statesman on the subject of propaganda and the CIA.

I found later he was wrong on both subjects, but not because he was mistaken.  It was because he was misleading.

I suspected a tie to the CIA. That was confirmed to me later by a senior libertarian writer who ought to know.

So, yes, Cockburn was a good guy on a number of things. A funny, insightful, even great writer.

But he also retailed spin when he felt he had to. I can’t make a judgment about why he did it. I’m just saying he did it.

So Cockburn supporting Hersh is like, well, the Washington Post echoing the New York Times.

Journalist two:

Justin Raimondo supports Hersh.

Well, he also uncritically supported Gore Vidal, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, about whose bona fides there are persistent serious questions that have never been answered.  If you believe in the official Snowden-Assange story, I assure you, the tooth-fairy will be visiting soon……followed by some property in the Florida panhandle.

Raimondo, alas, is still an establishment alternative.  I have nothing clear-cut against him, but I find his judgment questionable on some things.

The other writers who support Hersh, Michael Brenner and Greg Grandin, are both professors – of international relations and of history – who write for the establishment alternatives – places like The Nation and TomDispatch, whose contributors often overlap.  Both are the usual East Coast left-liberal academic, part of the mandarin industry.  I have zero trust in them.
But no need to worry about Raimondo, Cockburn and the rest. Mr. Hersh can be judged from his own words, no less (Note: this is not an endorsement of the site on which I found Hersh’ words)

Seymour Hersh has admitted that he’s nothing but a liar. It’s okay tho, he only lies when he gives $15, 000 college campus speeches or gives talks for the ACLU and that sort of thing, he assures us he never lies in print (a liar who says ‘believe me’…funny.)

In a recent interview, Hersh said the following in regards to his fibbing:

“Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people…I can?t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.?

and when Hersh changes names, dates, places, and the like:

?I defend that totally…I find that totally not inconsistent with anything I do professionally. I?m just communicating another reality that I know, that for a lot of reasons having to do with, basically, someone else?s ass, I?m not writing about it.?

Hersh is merely “communicating another reality” that he knows of?! Outrageous. It’s okay tho, he still stands by his practice of lying in speeches and on talk shows and such, he just promises he never lies in print (whew, and thought we were dealing with a FULL time liar here, as long as he’s only a liar 80% of the time, it’s okay I guess.)

Hersh puts it out on the table, and in doing so he let’s us all know that nothing he says can be trusted.”

So here we have a guy who makes up names and events to convey his own reality (kind of like Rumsfeld?). A guy who rides entirely on reputation for his credibility since many of his lengthy pieces contain nothing more than a single anonymous source.  A guy whom one investigative journalist told me actually squashed an important expose (of George Soros) by a colleague and then plagiarized the material.  And people take him at face-value as more credible than “the government.”

When will boobus libertarianus wake up to the fact that the “media” and the “alternative press” ARE  the government? Often they are more the government than the “government.”

But that might require something a little bit more than slogans and herd behaviour.

It might involve – heaven forfend- a little critical thinking.…

 

 

 

 

Doug Valentine: Woodward, Hersh, CIA-connected

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In an interview with Suzan Mazur at Scoop.com, Douglas Valentine, an authority on CIA programs, mentions Seymour Hersh as a CIA-connected journalist.

In fact, just looking at the sites and the writers touting Hersh on the Bin Laden story will give you a good general idea about the level of complicity of American activists/alternative media in the propagandizing of the public:

Douglas  Valentine:

To answer your question about the connections between the CIA and the media and new media – I’d say they’re tighter than ever. It has to do with the centralization of wealth and influence. News organizations used to be a lot of independent owners of news outlets. There’s now less and less of that.

It goes hand in hand with the consolidation of capital in the United States. The media’s in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and those people are closer and closer to the imperial interests of the United States abroad. Their interests are now more in tune with the interests of the CIA. And they’re more likely to skew, without even being agents of the CIA.

So you don’t have to rely on the old boy system anymore; accommodating the CIA is built into the system because of the consolidation of capital.

It’s been reported that the CIA writes for Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. So establishing and corroborating sources is more important now than ever. Also, since Watergate and Deep Throat, there’s a tendency on the part of CIA-connected journalists like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh to use anonymous sources. Just another sign of how incestuous it is between the media and the CIA.”

In addition to Douglas Valentine, writers as far apart as James Petras, Paul Craig Roberts, and Ann Williamson, have all questioned Hersh’s veracity.

In “Language of Empire,” I noted discrepancies in Hersh’s reporting and my suspicion that he was an outlet for disinformation.

Is the Osama Bin Laden story disinformation?

Frankly, I don’t know.  I’m not sure I care.

What I do care about is the uncritical way the alternative media trumpets “name” journalists, even when they don’t source.

Don’t they realize how easy it is for the intelligence services to feed them stories through established journalists?

Or do they just not care?

Why is it I get the feeling that a lot of the alternative media is in it for money and Google hits, not for actually finding out the truth.

It is just tamasha.  Or a form of preening.

Anyway, here is another site, a conservative, one,  where Hersh is proved to have lied…and then proved to have lied about his lie…

Seymour Hersh made some startling claims to a Pakistani paper called The Nation, basically claiming that Dick Cheney (and Israel of course) runs a secret death squad that was responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

When it became apparent that the statements made their way to people that knew they were a lie Seymour released this statement:

US journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday contradicted news reports being published in South Asia that quote him as saying a special death squad made by former US vice president Dick Cheney had killed Benazir Bhutto. The award-winning journalist described as complete madness the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal the new commander of US army in Afghanistan  had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief.

Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto, Hersh said. I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say anything remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet.

He said Gen McChrystal had run a special forces unit that engaged in high value target activity, but while I have been critical of some of that unit activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state. He regretted that none of the publications had contacted him before carrying the report. This is another example of blogs going bonkers with misleading and fabricated stories and professional journalists repeating such rumours without doing their job  and that is to verify such rumours. staff report.

The problem is that’s a lie. Legal Insurrection has video of Hersh making these very claims on Marxist shill Amy Goodman’s dreadful Democracy Now! program.

Isn’t libel illegal?”

Ancient Indian Civilization Minimized By West?

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Vedanet.com:

1) India had the largest and most continuous of all the civilizations of the ancient world starting by at least 3000 BCE  (Lila: New research in the Saraswati valley confirms a dating to at least 7,500 BC or 8000 BC and most likely much earlier), with a much more extensive urban civilization than Egypt or Sumeria of the same time periods. Yet its role as a source of civilization has largely been ignored by the historical biases of the West.

2) The Vedic Literature is the ancient world’s largest, with its many thousands of pages dwarfing what little the rest of the world has been able to preserve. This literature reflects profound spiritual concepts, skill in mathematics, astronomy and medicine, special knowledge of language and grammar and other hallmarks of a great civilization. It cannot be attributed to nomads and barbarians or to the short space of a few centuries.

3) The ancient Indian literature, the world’s largest, and ancient Indian archaeology, also the ancient world’s largest, must be connected. We can no longer accept the idea of Ancient India without a literature and Vedic literature reflecting no real culture or civilization. Vedic literature and its symbolism is clearly reflected in Harappan archaeology and its artifacts.

4) Southeast Asia, which included South India, was the home of most human populations, which migrated after the end of the Ice Age, when the water released by melting glaciers, flooded the region around ten thousand years ago. Southeast Asia, not the Middle East, is the likely cradle not only of populations, but culture and agriculture as well.

5) The Sarasvati River, the dominant river in India in the post-Ice Age era, after 8000 BCE, and the main site of urban ruins in ancient India, is well described in Vedic texts. It ceased to flow around 1900 BCE, making the Vedic culture older than this date. All stages of the development and drying up of the Sarasvati can be found in Vedic texts down to the Mahabharata, showing that the Vedic people were along the river at all phases.

6) There is no scientific or archaeological basis for any Aryan or Dravidian race, which are now discredited concepts. No Aryan skeletal remains have ever been found in India apart from the existing populations in the country going back to prehistoric times. There is no archaeological evidence of any Aryan invasion or migration into India but only the continuity of the same populations in the region and their cultural changes. This requires that we give up these old ideas and look at the data afresh apart from them.

7) Connections between Indian languages and those of Europe and Central Asia, which can be found relative to both Sanskritic and Dravidian languages, are more likely traceable to a northwest movement out of India after the end of the Ice Age. The late ancient Aryan and Dravidian migrations, postulated to have taken place c. 1500 BCE into India from Central Asia of western linguistic theories occur too late, after populations and cultures were already formed, to result in the great changes attributed to them. Besides no records of such proposed migrations/invasions have yet to be found. Archaeology, literature and science, including genetics, all contradict it.

8) Vedic spirituality of ritual, mantra, yoga and meditation, based on an understanding of the dharmic nature of all life, created the foundation for the great spiritual traditions of India emphasizing individual experience of the Divine and spiritual practice over outer dogmas and beliefs. Such a spiritual ethos is the fruit of a great and mature ancient civilization.

9) The Hindu view of time, as through the Hindu Yuga theory, that connects human history with natural history of tens of thousands of years marked by periodic cataclysms makes sense relative to new scientific discoveries relative to natural history through genetics and climate changes.

10) This ancient, eternal Vedic culture is still relevant to the world today and lives on in the great ashrams, temples and spiritual practices of India. Reclaiming this ancient spiritual heritage of India and spreading it throughout the world is one of the greatest needs of the coming planetary age, in which we must go beyond the boundaries of creedal boundaries and materialistic values.”

State U. Prof. Requires Erotic Final Exams

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Yet another example of the waste of good money known as higher education (h/t Lew Rockwell):

For most students, there is nothing more stressful than a final exam.

But now imagine that to pass the exam, you have to be naked in a candlelit classroom. Not only in front of your whole class, but also in front of your professor.

At the University of California, San Diego, this naked final exam is in fact a course requirement for a class in the visual arts department.

But nudity isn’t enough for the students of the upper-level course, as they must also perform ‘a gesture that traces, outlines or speaks about your ‘erotic self(s)’, according to the course syllabus. “

Seymour Hersh Propagates Disinformation

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Paul Craig Roberts on the latest story about the Bin Laden killing from Seymour Hersh:

In my opinion, Washington’s disinformation agencies have finally managed to deceive Seymour Hersh with a concocted “inside story” that saves Washington’s claim of having murdered bin Laden by proving that the US government is an extraordinary liar and violator of law.

Hersh’s story does prove that the US government is a liar, but it does not prove that a
SEAL team murdered Osama bin Laden.”

Seymour Hersh has long been suspected (for eg. by James Petras, but also here,  here and now, here)  of retailing sophisticated disinformation behind the facade of investigative reporting.

Of course, “investigative journalism” itself is a concept that deserves thorough deconstruction.

 

 

 

AIDS: The Bio-Weapon Theory

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Dr. Alan Cantwell, via Biblebelievers.org:

The Gay Hepatitis-B Vaccine Experiment

” A “cohort” of over a thousand young gays was injected with the vaccine at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan during the period November 1978 to October 1979.1 Similar gay experiments were conducted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis, and Chicago, beginning in 1980.2 The AIDS epidemic broke out shortly thereafter.

The experiment was run by Wolf Szmuness, a Polish Jew born in 1919. He was a young medical student in eastern Poland when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. His entire family perished in the Holocaust. When Poland was partitioned, Szmuness was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia.

After the war, he was allowed to finish medical school in Tomsk in central Russia. He married a Russian woman, had a daughter, and in 1959 was allowed to return to Poland where he became an expert in hepatitis.

According to June Goodfield’s account of his life in Quest for the Killers, Szmuness defected from Poland with his family in 1969, arriving penniless in New York with $15 in his pocket.3 Through scientific connections he found work as a laboratory technician at the New York Blood Center. Within a few years he was given his own lab at the center and was also appointed Professor of Public Health at Columbia University. By the mid-1970s, Szmuness was a world authority on hepatitis, and was invited back to Moscow in 1975 to give a scientific presentation. As a defector he was terrified to set foot back in the Soviet Union, but his colleagues assured him he would have the full protection of the U.S. State Department. His return to Russia was a scientific triumph.

In the late 1970s, Wolf Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars to undertake the most important mission of his life: the Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment. Szmuness specifically wanted to use gay men to avoid “serious legal and logistical problems.”4 For his study he did not want monogamous men, nor men with lovers. He chose only healthy, young, responsible, intelligent, and primarily white homosexuals. The experiment was costly and he didn’t want any uncooperative or hard-to-find gays messing up his experiment. Involved in the experiment were the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Abbott Laboratories, and Merck, Sharp & Dohme. Szmuness’ experiment was hugely successful, and his vaccine was hailed as having tremendous global implications.

The Gay Plague

The links of the gay experiment to the outbreak of AIDS are obvious to anyone who wants to see the connection. Three months after the experiment began, the first cases of AIDS reported to the CDC appeared in young gay men in Manhattan in 1979. The first San Francisco AIDS case appeared in that city in September 1980, six months after the Hepatitis-B experiment started there.5 In June 1981 the AIDS epidemic became “official.”

Were gay men given experimental vaccines contaminated with the AIDS virus? The government says no, but government agencies have a long history of covert and unethical medical experimentation, particularly with minorities. Was it simply a quirk of nature that a virus “out of Africa” would suddenly decimate the most hated minority in America?

Why did the U.S. government choose Wolf Szmuness, a Soviet-trained doctor and a recent American immigrant to head this dangerous experiment? Goodfield, who has written the definitive account of the Hepatitis-B experiment, claims Szmuness has a painful life. Confined as a political prisoner in Siberia during World War II, he was repeatedly interrogated and beaten by the Russian KGB for refusing to cooperate in spy activities. When he could not be broken, they warned him: “Say nothing of this to anyone, but remember. We will reach you anywhere in the world. No matter where you go, no matter where you try to hide, you will never be out of our grasp.”6

The experimental Hepatitis-B vaccine was primarily manufactured by Merck. However, during the experiment Szmuness was concerned about possible vaccine contamination. Goodfield writes, “This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck’s.”7

After the Hepatitis-B experiment ended, Szmuness insisted that all thirteen thousand blood specimens donated by gay men be retained at the Blood Center for future use. Due to space requirements, it is highly unusual for any laboratory to retain so many old blood specimens. However, several years later when this blood was retested for the presence of HIV antibodies, government epidemiologists were able to detect the “introduction” and the spread of HIV into the gay community.

When asked why he was keeping so many vials of blood, Szmuness replied, “Because one day another disease may erupt and we’ll need this material.“8 A few months after the Hepatitis-B experiment began at the Center, the first AIDS cases began to appear in gay men living in Manhattan. And the retesting of gay blood at the Blood Center proved that HIV was first introduced into the gay population of New York City sometime around 1978-1979, the same year Szmuness’ gay Hepatitis-B experiment began.9

Was Szmuness psychic in his prediction that a new disease would appear in the gay community? Or did he actually know or suspect that a new, deadly virus was being introduced into the gay volunteers? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions can only be surmised. In June 1982 Szmuness died of lung cancer. In his eulogy, Aaron Kellner of the Blood Center wrote: “It is the rare physician who, like Wolf Szmuness, is given the grace to touch the lives of billions of people; those living on this planet and generations yet unborn.”10

The African Origin of AIDS

Was HIV introduced into millions of Africans in the late 1970s during the smallpox vaccine eradication programs sponsored by the World Health Organisation? It is known that animal and human cells harbor all sorts of viruses, including viruses not yet discovered, and animal tissue cell cultures are often used in the manufacture of viral vaccines. Therefore, the possibility of vaccine contamination with an animal virus is a constant danger in the manufacture of vaccines.

Despite the most meticulous precautions in production, contaminating animal viruses are known to survive the vaccine process. For example, during the 1950s, millions of people were injected with polio vaccines contaminated with “SV-40”, a cancer-causing green monkey virus. Such vaccine contamination problems are largely kept hidden from the public. Yet in spite of the known danger, drug companies and physicians always pooh-pooh any suggestion that AIDS could have arisen from animal virus-contaminated vaccines. Animal cancer viruses are also contained in fetal calf serum, a serum commonly used as a laboratory nutrient to feed animal and human tissue cell cultures. Viruses in calf serum can be carried over as contaminants into the final vaccine product.

The problem of vaccine contamination by fetal calf serum and its relationship to AIDS is the subject of a letter by J. Grote (“Bovine visna virus and the origin of the AIDS epidemic”) published in the Journal of the Royal (London) Society of Medicine in October 1988. Grote discounts the green monkey theory and questions whether bovine visna contamination of laboratory-used fetal bovine serum could cause AIDS. Bovine visna virus is similar in appearance to HIV. Grote, a London-based AIDS researcher, writes:

The seriousness of this becomes apparent when we consider the manufacture of vaccines requires the growth of virus in cell cultures using fetal calf serum in the growth medium. The contamination of vaccines with adventitious viruses has been of concern for many years and the presence of virus-like structures in ‘virus-screened’ bovine serum has been reported. It seems absolutely vital that all vaccines are screened for HIV prior to use and that bovine visna virus is further investigated as to its relationship to HIV and its possible causal role in progression towards AIDS.

Millions of African blacks are reportedly infected with HIV. This large number could never have been infected by the simple act of a monkey virus “jumping” over to infect one African in the late 1970s. If that were the case, why don’t we now have millions of AIDS cases in the U.S.? One logical explanation for the millions of Africans infected is that the vaccines used in the World Health Organisation’s mass inoculation programs were contaminated. Was the contamination accidental or deliberate? It is well-known in vaccine circles that the vaccinia (cowpox) virus used in the manufacture of the smallpox vaccine works well in genetic engineering. Charles Pillar and Keith Yamamoto, authors of Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technology, state: “Researchers have been able to splice genes coding for the surface coats of other viruses, such as influenza, hepatitis, and rabies into vaccinia virus DNA. The result: a ‘broad spectrum’ vaccine with a coat of many colors.”11

In 1985, the Russians caused an international furore by claiming that AIDS was caused by experiments carried out in the USA as part of the development of new biological weapons. Responding to this Soviet accusation, Pillar and Yamamoto admit that “although no evidence has been presented to support this claim, manipulating genes to defeat the body’s immune system is quite feasible.”12

In Magic Shots, Allan Chase claims that during the years 1966-1977, the WHO utilised “200,000 people in forty countries — most of them nondoctors trained by seven hundred doctors and health professionals from over seventy participating countries — spent $300 million, and used forty million bifurcated vaccinating needles to administer 24,000 million (2.4 billion) doses of smallpox vaccine.”13

On May 11, 1987, The London Times, one of the world’s most respected newspapers, published a front-page story entitled “Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus.” The story suggests that African AIDS is a direct outgrowth of the WHO smallpox eradication program. The smallpox vaccine allegedly awakened a “dormant” AIDS virus infection in the black population. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, was quoted as saying, “The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV (the AIDS virus).” The Times story is one of the most important stories ever printed on the AIDS epidemic; yet the story was killed and never appeared in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine.

Despite covert human experimentation, vaccine contamination problems, and the genetic engineering of new and highly dangerous viruses, the medical establishment ignores the AIDS bio-warfare issue. For example, in the prestigious British Medical Journal (May 13, 1989), Myra McClure and Thomas Schultz wrote a paper on the “Origin of HIV” and quickly disposed of the idea that AIDS is connected to germ warfare. They simply state: “Lack of supporting evidence precludes serious discussion of such a bizarre hypothesis. This review deals with the theories on the origin of HIV that are scientifically plausible.”

Thus, medical science ignores evidence suggesting AIDS originated as a secret experiment. Most physicians and microbiologists steadfastly hold on to the illogical and improbable green monkey theory of AIDS. And the major media remain silent, often dismissing the bio-warfare theory as communist propaganda of the most malicious sort. Forgotten is the connection between the National Academy of Sciences and the military bio-warfare establishment in the development of biological weapons for mass killings.”

Rehab, Not Rescue, Is “New Model” Of Disaster Assistance

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Reader Anil Nauriya, an advocate at the Supreme Court of India, writes to this blog that recent humanitarian efforts follow a  disturbing new model of “rehabilitation” of  the area rather than the old one of rescuing victims.

Taken together with military involvement in disasters and drills that forecast yet do not avert disasters, the implications of the model are nothing short of sinister:

Rescue versus Relief and Rehabilitation?

In recent years there is a new trend noticeable with international disaster-related work.
This is that within a few days of rescue work, the agencies involved say that there is now no hope of finding survivors and that attention must now shift to rehabilitation work.
Thus they quickly create an “either-or” between rescue and rehabilitation.
In the case of Nepal it was reported 7 days after the disaster that the international norm for rescue operations is only seven days and the rescue operations in Nepal were accordingly being wound down.
The fact is that human beings, especially in the Third World, evidently have greater endurance and stamina.
This is why it has been found in quakes in Turkey, Iraq and Iran – and I have definite memories of this — that survivors, including old women, have been rescued alive from under the debris even after 40+ and even 50+ days. In addition, some people under the debris still manage to find a source of water (say some leak somewhere) or something edible.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that attempts at rescue must not be abandoned in a hurry, especially in a Third World country like Nepal. Imagine the plight of someone who may be lying somewhere hoping one day to be rescued but the search for whom may have been abandoned only because the international norm does not provide for it.
Unfortunately, Western norms for Rescue missions do not factor in these aspects. This is also because Rescue is more expensive, requiring drilling machinery and highly trained experts and engineers. Relief and Rehabilitation, are, by comparison, less burdensome tasks [ though still major ones] and with varied time horizons, some immediate and some spread over a period. The cost-benefit approach and outlook have no doubt influenced international norms on disaster response. In the process, Rescue operations get boxed into an unduly short window of time.
So I hope the word will spread in Nepal and wherever such disasters occur: “Don’t give up on Rescue!”

Anil Nauriya

Unusual Military Drills Suggest Conflict Anticipated

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There seem to be a number of larger-than- usual or otherwise exceptional drills being held the world over, besides routine exercises.

1. AMERICAS

USA – JADE HELM15

(July 15 – September 15).  Involves 10 states (raised from 9 and 7). Involves elite special forces troops and a variety of domestic law enforcement agencies. Approximately 1,200 personnel in one state alone. Much larger and more widespread than any recent military drill in the US.

CANADA –

MAPLE CARAVAN (March 17 – April 18)

MAPLE RESOLVE (April 20 –  May 23)

Maple Resolve involves 4,500 military personnel from Canada, the US, and the UK and is said to be the largest Canadian drill this year. Maple Resolve 14 involved 5000 personnel.

2. EUROPE – NATO

NOBLE JUMP 2015

1500 troops take part in  a drill for NATO’s rapid response force, April 7- April 9.

SIIL-2015 (Hedgehog) – Estonia’s largest ever military drill. Involves 13,000 personnel. Involves forces from the US, the UK, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands. Ends May 15.

ZAIBO KIRTIS (Lightning Strike). Lithuania’s largest ever national drill. Involves 3000 personnel. Mobilization and cybersecurity were important concerns.

DYNAMIC MONGOOSE  –  Norway is hosting military drills involving 10 NATO countries and Sweden. They involve 5000 service men and focus on simulated submarine hunts and radar and sonar technology.

LOCKED SHIELDS 2015

Major NATO cyber-defense drill involving 17 nations in Estonia, involving 400 computer experts, in late 2014.

3. EURASIA

Russia put her Northern Fleet on full alert in mid- March 2015. In response to NATO and Eastern European exercises on her borders, Russia., the fleet launched exercises involving 38,000 troops, 41 ships, 15 submarines, and 110 aircraft.

Russia and China are holding joint exercises in the Mediterranean in mid-May, involving 9 ships. The exercises are said to be modest in size but they are the first between the two countries and the farthest ever from home for China.

4. ASIA

OPERATION FOAL EAGLE 2015 –

South Korean and US marines practicing amphibious beach assaults, along with air and sea operations, from March  2 – April 24, 2015. Involves 12,500 US troops and 200,000 South Korean troops.

US-PHILIPPINE balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) drill, starting April 20.  Involves 11,000 US and Philippine personnel and 61 Australian troops and is the largest such drill in 15 years.

Japan and the Philippines will hold joint maritime security exercises for the first time in the South China Sea on May 12 for two hours. 90% of the South China Sea is owned by China and China’s increasing power could threaten international waters through which Japanese trade has to pass.

In April, Pakistan and Russia announced that they would be beginning joint military drills for the first time ever.

 

US Military Ran Two Drills For Nepal Disaster

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The US Military Knew The Nepal Earthquake Was Coming:

“Eight months ago, Marines and other American personnel were in Nepal alongside troops and civilians from around 20 other countries, all responding to a fake earthquake…….

The underlying story for the training program—nicknamed Pacific Endeavor 2014—describes the current, real situation almost to the letter.

The mock quake had a registered magnitude of 8.2, knocking out roads, bridges, power lines and sewage systems, official briefings explained. Aftershocks caused even more damage and delayed first responders.

A week after this fictional disaster occurred, emergency personnel had identified nearly 6,000 of the nearly 14,000 dead, according to one of the updates event organizers handed out during the sessions. “Morgues are not accepting bodies due to insufficient space.”

“Sixty percent of buildings in densely built-up areas are destroyed or unsafe,” a mock situation report added. More than a half a million simulated people were homeless.

In the real Nepal, more than 7,000 people have died and more than 14,000 have been injured in the actual earthquake. The disaster has forced more than three million Nepalis from their homes……

The Pacific Endeavor scenario has turned out to be almost disturbingly prescient.

The Pentagon didn’t just just randomly decide on this particular mock disaster storyline. For more than a decade, the international community has worried about what would happen to the mountainous South Asian country after a major seismic event.

In the last hundred years, earthquakes in Nepal have killed more than 27,000 people, Nepali authorities explained as American officers developed the final training plan. Over the past four decades, the same number of people died in more than 15,000 recorded natural disasters?—?including quakes and floods.

In 2012, the United Nations Development Program ranked Nepal 11th in nations at risk for major quakes, the representatives from Kathmandu pointed out in their briefing slides. “[The] World Bank … classifies Nepal as one of the global ‘hot-spots’ for natural disasters.”

Most notably, the Bihar-Nepal Earthquake destroyed a fifth of all buildings in the Kathmandu Valley and razed a quarter of the structures in the capital in 1934. In 1997, the U.S. Agency for International Development had even funded a study to see just how bad the situation would be if a similar seismic shock hit the country.

Two years later, California-based nonprofit GeoHazards International concluded that 40,000 people would die and nearly a million would be displaced by a equally massive earthquake…….

In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Army’s main headquarters for the Pacific region held two separate disaster preparedness drills of their own in Nepal. And along with the Marines, the Air Force participated in the 2014 iteration of Pacific Endeavor..”

SSPX Maligns Pope Over Arati Ceremony

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There was a photo being circulated on the web supposedly showing the Pope receiving the mark of worship of Shiva on his forehead.

The original source for the story is the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX)

according to this Catholic site, which analyzes rumors/falsehoods it says are being put out by ultra-traditionalists and sedevacantists.

This particular story (about the Pope receiving a mark from a Shiva temple) seems to be spurious, if not a malicious hoax:

Someone in the schismatic group the Society of St. Pius X told me that when the pope was in India he had his forehead anointed by a Hindu “priestess of Shiva” and that there is a photo to prove it. Is this true?

There is a photo of the Pope having his forehead anointed by an Indian woman, but she was a Catholic, not a Hindu priestess! She was giving the Pope a traditional Indian form of greeting known as Aarti, which has no more religious significance than a handshake does in Western culture.

A letter dated November 22, 1994, from the Pontifical Council for Social Communications explains the custom and its role in Indian society:

Indian Catholics . . . use Aarti when a child returns home after receiving First Holy Communion and when a newly married couple are received by their respective families. Nowadays, Aarti is often performed to greet the principal celebrant at an important liturgical event, as it was on the occasion shown in the photograph. On such occasions, Aarti is usually offered by a Catholic married lady and certainly not by a “priestess of Shiva” as has been alleged.

The letter, by Archbishop John P. Foley, went on to note: “Use of the Aarti ceremonial by Indian Catholics is no more the worship of a heathen deity than is the decoration of a Christmas tree by American Christians a return to the pagan rituals of Northern Europe.”

Your friend in the Society of St. Pius X should check his facts before spreading such malicious gossip about the Holy Father (cf. Acts 23:1-5).