Tuesday 23 April 2019




Hi Ed, Yes I am very familiar with that video by James Corbett. It's pure satire of course but very effective, I think it's ten years old at least. Some clever and brave people started questioning the official narrative from the start. The fact that no western government has challenged it, although they must be fully informed, implicates all of them in it. Am currently watching BBC 10 o'clock news coverage of the Sri Lankan outrage immediately followed by Pope and Queen. It has become its own death cult. The international hypocrisy is quite unbelievable as is the official story. Meanwhile in Ukraine a Jewish comedian has been elected president to join the Jewish prime minister. If it wasn't all so tragic it would be laughable.



Thanks for this Ed. I read the introduction and ran through the contents page and a few other snippets but not really my cup of tea, though I don't doubt for a moment that some of these terrible events are charged by and meant to evoke symbolic imagery and belief. We only have to consider the latest Sri Lankan outrages to realise that religion and violence are linked even if indirectly. We have Northern Ireland on our doorstep to remind us of that. But the relationship is not necessarily direct. Obviously many other social and political factors are thrown into the mix. As for the major 'terrorist events', promulgated and slavered over by the media, including our own BBC, I am quite sure these are planned and executed by the deep state to engender tension, deflect from current issues, influence elections and facilitate repression and control. Conversely I don't believe they are carried out by the individuals and groups they are actually blamed upon. Consequently all the subsequent investigations and declarations must be largely false and hypocritical diversions from the real motivation and perpetrators that in the confusion all disappear into the smoke or are flown out of the country in private jets!


Sorry to bore you with it all but I think it gives a clearer picture of my view than your depiction of it perhaps. As with the Sri Lankan outrage, unfortunately 'conspiracy' is an essential and unquestionable element. The only unanswered bit is "By whom?" and "For what?"


RECENT DEATH EVENTS:
Some given blanket media coverage, others hardly at all. See if you can spot which are which?


15.3.2019 - Fifty Muslim worshippers killed, fifty injured, in shooting incident at Christchurch mosques blamed on Australian Brenton Tarrant who apparently had links to British Intelligence. Security forces claim they were taken by surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings

15.4.2019 - Notre Dame fire. Blamed on renovation work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris_fire Reportedly 800 Christian churches have been attacked in France in past year alone! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SDuXYVmVQw

18.4.2019 - Journalist Lyra McKee shot dead during Derry rioting in N. Ireland.

21.4.2019 - Multiple bombing of Christian Churches in Sri Lanka. 360 killed, 500 injured. Coordinated operation blamed on ISIS! Written warnings went unheeded. Security forces claim they were taken by surprise.

53 Mosques and Churches Vandalized in Israel since 2009, but Only 9 Indictments Filed. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/53-mosques-churches-vandalized-in-israel-only-9-indictments-filed-1.5452856 Ateret Cohanim, a settler organization that aims to expel Muslims and Christians from Jerusalem, has, systematically acquired property in the Old City through a toxic mixture of intimidation and bribery—and occasionally violent occupation. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/08/dont-blame-the-orthodox-patriarchate-for-nasty-political-games-in-the-holy-land-israel-ateret-cohanim-settlers-azaria-knesset-rehavia/

21.4.2019 - Theresa May has offered support to persecuted Christians around the world. The Prime Minister condemned the persecution of Christians and said 'we must stand up for the right of everyone, no matter what their religion'. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6944513/Theresa-vows-crackdown-Christian-persecution-world.html

22.4.2019 - Thirty-two of  Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, a number of them juveniles when they were initially arrested, in mass execution for "adopting extremist terrorist ideologies and forming terrorist cells to corrupt and disrupt security as well as spread chaos and provoke sectarian strife." In western terms "taking part in peaceful protest."








"London held hostage by new death cult." by
Published on 21 Apr 2019


4/23/19 - ISIS Suspect Warned Of Sri Lanka Attacks, Smollett, Iran





Ambassador: US had no prior knowledge of Sri Lanka threat





A MUST READ:

Simultaneous Notre Dame/Al-Aqsa Fires: Coincidence or Conspiracy?
Sri Lankan Massacre Part of the Same Terror Campaign?

Tuesday 16 April 2019

The vocal remnants of English Tribalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywg03b574oQ


How the Edwardians Spoke

Published on 26 Oct 2016
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BBC Documentary. (Signed.)

The BBC regularly re-broadcasts Sign Language versions of their programmes, as seen here, late at night. It was, obviously, during this time that I happened across this documentary. As no un-signed version is available on YouTube, I assume those interested in the subject will agree that this video is better than nothing.

The sound of my Dorset/Somerset ancestors at 11:11!

Summer 2018




Published on 3 Dec 2018
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Monday 15 April 2019

An Audience with Neil Armstrong (2011 interview)






Published on 12 Nov 2018

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In this interview, the first man to walk on the moon gives a personal commentary on Apollo 11’s historic lunar landing along with his thoughts on leadership and taking risks to innovate for the future. Neil Armstrong is a household name, yet, in contrast to his crew-mate Buzz Aldrin, he has studiously stayed out of the spotlight in the decades since he walked on the Moon. He frequently passed on interview and advertising requests, all the while beating back unwelcome advances on his legacy. So it was a coup of sorts for Certified Practicing Accountants organization of Australia to score an extended interview with Armstrong, a connection that seems about as natural as a two-headed kangaroo. (CEO Alex Malley had developed the relationship, sharing his concerns about long-term strategic planning both in business and politics with Armstrong. The interview was a part of CPA Australia’s 125th anniversary celebration.) Armstrong shows flashes of the rationality and equanimity that made him an ideal astronaut candidate in the first place. He confesses that he gave Apollo 11 a 90% chance of returning home safely, but just a 50% chance of landing on the Moon successfully. He expresses a sense of fate about his dangerous work as a test pilot and astronaut, refusing to worry about future tasks because he figured something would go wrong first and he’d be otherwise engaged firing the ejection seat or scrambling to repair a valve. Of his time on the Moon’s surface: “we weren’t there to meditate, we were there to get things done.”


As a counter balance to this version of events - whether reliable or not - view the following presentation by Richard D Hall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB43e95ZtdY&fbclid=IwAR1eHpFJb3zZy5iW_Zs7SDuvCzkE01mS1wb61hCd6blzc2_tTU-Ye_qOSmk

Chew Valley School Visual Prospectus 2015

Thursday 11 April 2019

Julian Assange arrested & escorted out of Ecuadorian Embassy - RT specia...





440 years since this:
The Habeas Corpus Act 1679 is an Act of the Parliament of England (31 Cha. 2 c. 2) passed during the reign of King Charles II to define and strengthen the ancient prerogative writ of habeas corpus, whereby persons unlawfully detained can be ordered to be prosecuted before a court of law.  Progress?







The Age of Injustice
by Paul Craig Roberts
April 11, 2019, brought us a new word for Judas: Moreno—the puppet president of Ecuador who sold Julian Assange to Washington for his 30 pieces of silver.
This morning’s arrest of Assange inside the Ecudoran embassy in London is the first stage in Washington’s attempt to criminalize the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Washington’s man in Quito said he revoked Assange’s political asylum and Ecuadoran citizenship because Assange engaged in free speech.
As race and gender diverse police dragged Assange out of the embassy this morning, I reflected on the utter corruption of three governments—the U.S., the U.K., and Ecuador—and their institutions.
The British police showed no shame as they carted Assange from his embassy prison of the last seven years to a British jail as a way station on the way to an American one. If the British police had any integrity, the entire force would have called in sick.
If the British parliament had any integrity, they would have blocked London’s contribution to Washington’s upcoming show trial.
If the British had a prime minister instead of a Washington agent, Assange would have been released a long time ago, not held in de facto imprisonment until Washington found Moreno’s price.
If the Ecuadoran ambassador in London had any integrity, he would have publicly resigned rather than call in the police to take Assange. Is the ambassador so soulless that he can live with himself as the man who helped Moreno dishonor the reputation of Ecuador?
If the Anglo-American journalists had any integrity, they would be up in arms over the criminalization of their profession.
President Trump has survived a three-year ordeal similar to Assange’s seven-year ordeal. Trump knows how corrupt US intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) are. If Trump had any integrity, he would bring the shameful and embarrassing persecution of Assange to an immediate end by issuing a pre-trial pardon. This would also end the illegal re-imprisonment of Manning.
But integrity is not something that thrives in Washington, or in London, or in Quito.
When the Justice (sic) Department does not have a crime with which to charge its intended victim, the department trots out “conspiracy.” Assange is accused of being in a conspiracy with Manning to obtain and publicize secret government data, such as the film, which was already known to a Washington Post reporter who failed his newspaper and his profession by remaining silent, of U.S. soldiers committing extraordinary war crimes without remorse. As a U.S. soldier, it was actually Manning’s duty to report the crimes and the failure of U.S. troops to disobey unlawful orders. Manning was supposed to report the crimes to his superiors, not to the public, but he knew the military had already covered up the massacre of journalists and civilians and did not want another My Lai-type event on its hands.
I don’t believe the charge against Assange. If Wikileaks cracked the code for Manning, Wikileaks did not need Manning.
The alleged Grand Jury that allegedly produced the indictment was conducted in secret over many years as Washington searched for something that might be pinned on Assange. If there actually was a grand jury, the jurors were devoid of integrity, but how do we know there was a grand jury? 
Why should we believe anything Washington says after “Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people,” “Iranian nukes,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” “Russiagate,” and on and on ad infinitum. Why believe Washington is telling the truth this time?
As the grand jury was secret because of “national security,” will the trial also be secret and the evidence secret? Is what we have here a Star Chamber proceeding in which a person is indicted in secret and convicted in secret on secret evidence? This is the procedure used by tyrannical governments who have no case against the person they intend to destroy.
The governments in Washington, London, and Quito are so shameless that they do not mind demonstrating to the entire world their lawlessness and lack of integrity.
Perhaps the rest of the world is itself so shameless that there will be no adverse consequences for Washington, London, and Quito. On the other hand, perhaps the frameup of Assange, following the Russiagate hoax and the shameless attempt to overthrow democracy in Venezuela and install Washington’s agent as president of that country, will make it clear to all that “the free world” is led by a rogue and lawless government. Washington is speeding up the decline of its empire as Washington makes it clear that Washington is worthy of no respect.
No confidence that justice will be served can be placed in any American trial. In Assange’s trial justice is not possible. With Assange convicted by the media, even a jury convinced of his innocence will convict him rather than face denunciation for freeing a “Russian spy.”
Assange’s conviction will make it impossible for media to report leaked information that is unfavorable to the government. As the precedent expands, future prosecutors will claim the Assange case as a precedent for prosecuting critics of the government who will be charged with intended harm to the government. The age of justice and accountable government is being brought to an end.





JULIAN ASSANGE – VFP UK STATEMENT

British Veterans call on our government to respect the rights of journalists and whistle-blowers and refuse to extradite Julian Assange to the US.
We oppose the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States and are deeply concerned that journalism and whistleblowing is being criminalised by the US and actively supported by British authorities.  The indefinite detention of Chelsea Manning and the persecution of Reality Winner and John Kiriakou have demonstrated that a whistle blower will not receive a fair trial in the US court system. We believe the authorities are seeking a show trial for the purpose of revenge and to intimidate journalists.
The release of the Iraq War Logs and The Afghan War Diaries revealed the true human cost of our wars in the Middle East.  Wikileaks acted in the public interest by releasing these documents and Julian Assange, as a journalist, was right to publish in association with newspapers including The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel.  Without these documents, the public would have remained ignorant about the true number of civilian casualties and deaths, the torture and abuse of detainees, the killing of two Reuters journalists by US military personnel in helicopter gunships, the killing of Iraqi soldiers trying to surrender, and the abuses and civilian deaths caused by private military contractors.
VFP UK feel that the personal insults the judge made at Westminster Magistrates Court about Assange highlight a lack of fair and unbiased treatment.
We call on our government to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange to the US, and to respect the rights of whistle blowers and journalists.
Statement made and issued Fri 12 April 2019.


The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.
But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilisation”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.
Assange’s principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.
With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”. The Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.
But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”
These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive.  On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.
When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian calls truthful “things”, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?
What is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.
David McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and WilLeaks.”
Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.
In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.
Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.
The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”
What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?
In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.
She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.
“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”
And did.
The rest, she might have added, is history.
Top photo | Julian Assange gestures as he arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, after the WikiLeaks founder was arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police and taken into custody, April 11, 2019. Victoria Jones | PA via AP
John Pilger is an award-winning journalist. His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy).
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.