Assad Gas Attack

An article on Quartz (link) began as follows:

In the aftermath of reports suggesting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had once again unleashed a deadly chemical weapon on civilians, at least one Western leader—embattled by human rights criticism at home—immediately responded with class and clarity. Issuing a bullish statement on Twitter, this leader called for a full investigation and declared, “there can be no future for Assad in a stable Syria.” 

That leader, of course, was British prime minister Theresa May. While usually one would expect such a strong statement to come from the US—the traditional leader of the free world—it was the leader of the UK who set the tone on Tuesday.

This nausea-inducing article was written by Max de Haldevang who reports on Quartz's global politics desk. His obsessions include Cities & Urban Development, and Global Corruption. He has reported in Mexico and London for Reuters, in Russia for The Moscow Times and worked for NBC at the Rio and Sochi Olympics. He speaks Russian and Spanish, and has degrees from Cambridge and Columbia. Source.

It's hard to stomach phrases like responded with class and clarity to describe someone like May and the traditional leader of the free world to describe a country like the United States. So who is Max de Haldevang, the author of such idiotic comments? Well, he's clearly not very old so we shouldn't be too hard on him. He's just trying to make his mark in the world of mainstream journalism. He's the guy on the right and looks like a teenager but must be older.

The article from where the photo was taken describes him as having been awarded a Reuters Fellowship from the Overseas Press Club Foundation at the Foundation’s 2015 Annual Scholar Awards Luncheon held at the Yale Club in New York City. The other guy in the photo is the Pulitzer-Prize winning David Rohde, now of Reuters. 

Further investigation shows that Rohde has more than a Pulitzer Prize as a claim to fame:

While in Afghanistan, Rohde was kidnapped by members of the Taliban in November 2008, but managed to escape in June 2009 after seven months in captivity. While he was in captivity, The New York Times collaborated with a number of media outlets, including al-Jazeera and Wikipedia, to remove news of the kidnapping from the public eye.

Rohde has reported on detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US government's roundup of Muslims following 9/11. While clearly mainstream, he seems to have a reasonable track record. Aspiring journalists like de Haldevang must establish their reputations in a very competitive arena. He was one of 15 aspiring foreign correspondents selected by a panel of leading journalists from a pool of 175 applicants from 50 different colleges and universities.

His LinkedIn account shows him as having finished a B.A. (Hons) in Modern Languages at Cambridge between 2009 and 2013. He's since completed an M.A. in Russian Studies at Columbia University 2014-2016. This would put him in his mid-twenties I guess. It's a pity talented individuals like him are forced into mainstream journalism where their motivation to delve behind the scenes of world events will be actively discouraged by those who decide whether stories will be published or not.

The real story about the alleged Assad gas attack is why he would have launched it at such an inopportune time. Here is a video in which Ron Paul discusses the event:

As for Theresa May, her barking about the need to remove Assad is no different from Tony Blair's barking about the need to remove Saddam Hussein before he could unleash his non-existent weapons of mass destruction. May has no class whatsoever. However, Reuters is head-quartered in London and maybe de Haldevang is hoping for a posting there. After all, following his Reuters Fellowship he was assigned to Mexico City. Maybe he's still there and his fatuous article for Quartz is a ploy to garner British friends in high places who will put in a good word for him at the Reuters desk in London.

Clif High versus the GoogleBeast

I've only recently stumbled across Clif High, his predictive linguistics and his ALTA reports. This is what he says about his predictive linguistics:

Predictive Linguistics is a field that I pioneered in 1993. The software and lexicon has been in continual change/update mode since. This is due to the constantly changing nature of language and human expression. Predictive Linguistics works to predict future language about (perhaps) future events, due to the nature of humans. It is my operating assumption that all humans are psychic, though the vast majority do nothing to cultivate it as a skill, and are likely unaware of it within themselves. In spite of this, universe and human nature has it that they 'leak' prescient information out continuously in their choice of language. My software processing collects these leaks and aggregates them against a model of a timeline and that information is provided in this report. The ALTA report is an interpretation of the asymmetric trends that are occurring even this instant as millions of humans are typing billions of words on the internet.

It's an intriguing idea but does it work? Well, I've read through his 2017 ALTA report and I'll wait and see how things pan out. Regardless of that however, his latest YouTube video about the way Google is surreptitiously undermining revenue to alternative news sites is quite illuminating. Of course, it's what we expect Google would be doing but it's interesting to have how it's doing it explained so clearly. He writes as an accompaniment to his video:

The masters of the big G spot have instructed the working metal heads in the bowels of the googlebeast to ratchet down the valves on alt media under the guise of a plan that we call here the 'golden showers' such that traffic dries up and we all blow our way into history. One of my thoughts, as this is all being done with algo's that have to work on linguistic structures, is to deliberately alter our own language patterns in videos and written material. Now, please note, this tactic is NOT trying to escape their algo, but rather, in a guerrilla 'fighter' fashion, we use this approach to derail the intent of the algo, and to co-opt it into 'being our bitch'. 

The Secret History of Britain

A friend put me onto Stephen Oppenheimer who has an alternative take on the history of British migration and settlement, namely that "everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands". Controversial stuff indeed. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

Stephen Oppenheimer (born 1947) is a British paediatrician, geneticist, and writer. He is a graduate of Green Templeton College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In addition to his work in medicine and tropical diseases, he has published popular works in the fields of genetics and human prehistory. This latter work has been the subject of a number of television and film projects.

Of interest are the books he has written:

• Eden in the East
• The Real Eve (documentary and US book title) / Out of Eden (UK book title)
• Origins of the British

I've downloaded from this site, a six page PDF file that summarises his views about the origins of the British and have placed it in my e-library. His books are not available in the local library; however, they are available on Amazon. If what he says is true, then it's another example of the falsification of history in which fictions turn into facts. Here is a quote from the PDF file:

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi," he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia. 

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German "Empire of the Celts" to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps. 

De Jubainville's Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. "Celt" is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless. 

I'll keep an eye out for any of his books and they certainly of interest to seekers of truth in history. Here is a YouTube video, divided into two parts, in which Stephen Oppenheimer is talking about the British migration:

Wikispooks and Anthony C. Sutton

Today I came across a site called WikiSpooks that was hosting three books by Anthony C. Sutton here. On the WikiSpooks website, it's claimed that:

People up to no good don't generally advertise the fact. Wicked deeds are done in secret, but for those which cannot be kept secret - such as assassinations or full scale wars - alternative explanations are concocted and aggressively promoted. Aware of this, WikiSpooks aims for a genuinely dispassionate analysis of what is going on in the world, refusing to blindly take the "official narratives" of nation states and powerful institutions at face value.

Further along in the site:

While commercially-controlled media generally present official narrative-friendly perspectives of events in inexplicable isolation, framing them psychologically for their own purposes, Wikispooks seeks to shine an unbiased light in dark places and so to establish and trace important connections between events based on objective evidence. Behind a range of distractions from sports to celebrity culture or even party politics ("...the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" as Frank Zappa once opined) lies a set of hidden truths, parts of a wholly unacknowledged reality which can be discerned behind the misinformation fog that aims to hide it. 

Source 

Sutton is an interesting character. As Wikipedia quotes him as saying: 

In a few words: there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all — perhaps 90–95 percent — came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In effect the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union. Its industrial and its military capabilities. This massive construction job has taken 50 years. Since the Revolution in 1917. It has been carried out through trade and the sale of plants, equipment and technical assistance.

I've downloaded his books now and added them to my library. There are YouTube videos available in which he talks about some the issues raised in his books. In the following embedded video, Sutton talks about Western involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution.

ZeroNet for Uncensorable Websites

Consonant with the theme of decentralisation via P2P and BitTorrent is ZeroNet which claims to offer "open, free and uncensorable websites, using Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent network".

I was first alerted to this idea via a Corbett Report video on YouTube that was uploaded on the 12th January 2017 but is dated March 28th 2014. The MeowBit.com website mentioned in this video hasn't been updated since that time and any YouTube videos also date to 2014. ZeroNet seems to have now taken over as the driving force behind the popularisation of this technology. 

AceLewis has a YouTube channel with many instructional videos, the most recent of which was posted only a month ago. I've linked to the website above. Here is the first in his series of instructional videos, titled Introduction to ZeroNet and posted 11 months ago:

However, after downloading ZeroNet to my Mac, it doesn't open even after I watched his instructional video and followed all the steps. I need to investigate further but I've made a start at least.

Bitchute: YouTube Alternative?

While I was watching the latest episode of mediamonarchy.com, mention was made of a new startup called bitchute as an alternative to YouTube. It is powered by WebTorrent and relies on P2P sharing on data instead of vast numbers of centralised servers. Here is what the site's founders have to say about how the idea came about:

Throughout 2015 and 2016 several prominent YouTubers reported a loss of video monetization when covering certain topics or for having particular opinions. YouTube claimed this was due to tighter enforcement of existing rules, even if true this will restrict the type of content that gets made and is a form of censorship. 

Here we believe people should be able to express their opinions and choose their topics. If existing services cannot allow that, then let's make some that will. The question is, how to disrupt a platform as well established as YouTube? It cannot be on their terms; we think we might have an answer, decentralization by torrents and tailored matchups for monetization. *More on the monetization to come soon. 

Rather than needing massive data centers with humongous bandwidth costs, torrents depend on many people sharing videos from their home computers. While this has been possible for many years through bit torrent, bit torrent applications have steep learning curves; this site aims to make the torrent experience seamless by working entirely in the web browser.

On the WebTorrent site, things are explained by its creator, Feross Aboukhadijeh, as follows:

What is WebTorrent? 

WebTorrent is the first torrent client that works in the browser. YEP, THAT'S RIGHT. THE BROWSER. 

It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required. 

Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer. 

Why is this cool? 

Imagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes. 

Browser-to-browser communication cuts out the middle-man and lets people communicate on their own terms. No more client/server – just a network of peers, all equal. WebTorrent is the first step in the journey to redecentralize the Web. 

In the following video, Feross explains how WebTorrent will work:

Finally, here's a Speaker Deck slide presentation about WebRTC from Feross:

Understanding our Past

This is an excellent video in which Graham Hancock expatiates on a number of different topics. I've only come to learn about him recently. The notes to the YouTube video describe him as follows:

Graham Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer and journalist. Hancock specialises in unconventional theories involving ancient civilisations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past. One of the main themes running through many of his books is a posited global connection with a "mother culture" from which he believes all ancient historical civilisations sprang.

One crucial point he makes is the importance of thinking for yourself. Don't accept what so-called authorities say about something. Years ago, he began to question the accepted narrative about ancient civilisations and has spent his subsequent years trying to find out the truth about the pyramids, the sphinx and other Egyptian structures. Mainstream historians, in his opinion, misrepresent the ancient past just as they misrepresent the recent past.

Here is the video: