The Panama Papers are a good nomination, the "creepy" part being how quickly it all blew over. The story was squashed by the rich and powerful, especially in China where it was wiped off the Chinese internet. Business continued as usual with top politicians and their families worldwide evading the laws of their own nations.
an aside, I once recently wrote an email to Noam Chomsky. One of my questions was something like "do you think the relationship betweeen state and corporate entities has changed recently in comparison to the Vietnam era?".
The answer I received back was (something like) "Corporations have more power than ever. Read through the Panama Paper leaks and the surrounding news."
It was eye-opening just how far reaching that stuff goes, and for as little outrage as it generated. I totally agree with you.
I chaulk it up to the publics' 'outrage-fatigue' at the time. Or at least I hope that's why it got so little attention.
I'm not sure the Panama Papers are a particularly strong example of the thesis. Well into the 1950s, some corporations had the power to get small governments overthrown. If the worst thing a modern corporation can do is construct weird offshore entities to confuse tax collectors, we're doing pretty well.
I agree, I recently watched The Laundromat on Netflix and while it was entertaining due to sheer star power, the commentary on the Panama Papers sounded like it was written by a high schooler. It breathlessly mentioned how many corporations are headquartered in Delaware and the only reason it gave was tax avoidance, nevermind the fact that Delaware does actually have a state income tax, unlike that corporate tax haven Washington state, and nevermind the fact that Delaware's body of commercial law is world-renowned.
The plot points that were meant to evoke the most outrage were things that were already fraud or super sketchy, regardless of the tax shelter stuff. It's like, "Can you believe that someone would enter a contract and then not honor their side of the deal and then fly outside of the U.S.'s jurisdiction?!" And then they make it sound like it's a tax law issue and not a criminal getting on an airplane issue.
Well these days we have some black paramilitary companies that do some sadistic things even to their own contractors, but I guess "run of the mill" (not explicitly hired violence) companies like fruit companies don't really do that as much and of course IBM, Volkswagen, zeppelin, Merck, etc, Have some cagey histories too.
I’ve been thinking hard about it all and I realized how to stop it. Just like Google reviews can have a powerful impact on local businesses, we need a truly unbiased online review system for our politicians and corporations that shows which ones cater to lobbyists, etc. That’s why the rich buy and control media outlets, assassinate reporters, jail whistleblowers, etc. The hardest part will be keeping it unbiased and free of fake BS being peddled by various intelligence agencies and other groups.
Perhaps we should wait for future declassified material to discover if corporation lobbies weren't responsible for some recent coups around the world. In latin america big corporations aren't found of land redistribuction and policies against big plantations. If something changed since 1950s to avoid this kind of interference, I'm not aware.
The TPP had provisions that would have let tobacco companies sue countries that did anything to hurt their profits. The TPP had all sorts of insane pro corporate agreements that would have given them more power over smaller countries sovereign decisions.
The idea of companies suing countries isn't some new thing introduced by the TPP. Most countries allow it and it's generally seen as a good thing. The alternative would be that you can't sue the country; that is, that the people in power can make whatever unfair decisions they like and nobody can stop them.
Did you stop reading half way through the first sentence?
It is about suing countries because they do something that effects the profits of a company. An example is mandating graphic pictures on cigarette packaging.
I remember being surprised at how quickly the Panama papers blew over. Earlier this year I went and did some cursory reading on their contents, and it's doubly surprising. The lengths to which people will go are stunning, people who evidently have the ability to earn vast sums honestly, to keep a fraction of their earnings from the taxman.
I've seen rumors that the CIA was into this stuff for years and years. Being officially an intelligence agency, any useful information they can get is valuable to them, even if its only to confirm another source.
From what Ive seen and read elsewhere, the "remote viewing" that occult groups claim to be able to practice might be a smokescreen. The larger occult groups tend to keep very good independent historical records, and their "mediums" are just people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of this history. Thus, when intel agent So-and-So goes to The Society of Whatever-It-Is and consults them, the whole "remote viewing" thing is a way for one intel agency to protect thier real sources while giving out whatever info they see fit. This is just a theory of mine, but its more plausible than thier official explanation.
> MON: (Real time plus 22 minutes.)* Yes that would be correct.
... is this a serious interview? How does something like this even happen?
Edit:
> MON: (I think that he's losing his ability to move accurately, but he is attracted to things that are interesting, so we're going to go with his own, we're going to let him go ahead and explore what seems to be interesting to him rather than move on the targets indicated here.)*
Doesn't matter what I think; only thing which matters is if there is proof of such, or clues which lead to a hypothesis that such exists. Feel free to share such.
The way it went in history is that the US started with it to bait the USSR into spending money into a worthless project (which succeeded). Then, the US replied to that with "what if it is real?" There was still a lot of belief in "the paranormal" back then; nowadays we know much more about the techniques behind paranormal scam artists.
I've seen various documentaries on these programs (including about remote viewing and Ingo Swann [1], a scientologist), and from my memory the results of these programs were lackluster. Sure, there were some hits, as there are hits with cold reading and guessing.
The Afghanistan Papers[0] were published a few weeks ago and didn't get nearly as much traction as I hoped they would. A stunning documentation of the incompetence of America's strategy in the Middle East over the past two decades.
Maybe this is off topic, but am I the only one uncomfortable with the Post seeking names of interviewees?
> The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.
> ...
> The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.
One of the key problems identified by this report is that military and government officials didn't want to hear bad news. People on the ground felt like they had to paint an overly rosy picture. The SIGAR report seems like an attempt to address that by enabling them to speak anonymously, but the Post doesn't seem concerned that publicizing identities may hamstring such internal government investigations in the future.
Well, not everyone. There were protests throughout the length of the war. A lot of people looked at the history of US intervention, of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, and at the motivations of the people calling the shots, and said, from Day 1, "This is not going to work out." Aaron McGruder famously had their number, and reached out daily to Americans whose newspapers hadn't canceled publication of his strip (https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2016/12/13).
They were right, most Americans were wrong, and I don't know if we'll ever fully reckon with that fact.
On that note, I hope people are listening to Sarah Kendzior's work these days.
I was reviled for pointing out why the Afghanistan war was wrong and why it would fail. The American Military Enthusiast Complex was alive and well then and it's alive and well today, the day (s) after these revelations have come to pass.
> "Such a system depends for its effectiveness on two properties of electrical stimulation delivered to certain deep lying structures of the dog brain: the well-known reward effect, and a tendency for such stimulation to initiate and maintain locomotion in a direction which is accompanied by the continued delivery of stimulation.
> "Behavioral control was limited to distances of 100 to 200 yards, at most," they write in the letter
> The letter writer characterizes the work with remote-controlling dogs as a success, describing "a demonstrated procedure for controlling the free-field behaviors of an unrestrained dog."
That is pretty creepy. That is 1960s, and assuming CIA hasn't evolved a moral compass since, I imagine they might not have completely given up on the idea and it's interesting to think what it might look like today with all nano and wireless technology.
Military tech is not ahead of civilian tech except for a handful of things that are either useless (stealth aircraft) or illegal (weapons systems) for civilians. And even in those cases, most of the constituent parts of those systems are extremely obsolete by civilian standards.
The idea that the military has a vast arsenal of high tech gadgets and sci-fi weapons is a myth created by Hollywood.
The Afghanistan papers recently released are pretty damning. It was pretty obvious that we were bumbling around with no real plan or end goal in sight, but having the depths of that purposelessness laid out in stark relief is... wow.
What's more apparent is that the goals of the war in Afghanistan kept changing and became increasingly ill defined. Which is comical in like the cosmic sense, since American military doctrine has always held that the most important part of military strategy is to have a well defined, primary objective. As well, our greatest political thinkers like Kissinger have repeated ad nauseam that military force is a political tool to achieve political goals.
The irony is that Afghanistan is the biggest proof by example of our own foreign policy doctrine, by way of ignoring it entirely.
You lost me. There are gulfs of differing understanding that are just hard to cross and I just can't see across that one. War criminal. Can you see back? As weird from either side, I'm sure.
"Great" as in "prolific and influential" not as in "good."
Kissinger engineered our foreign policy for three decades, either directly, through mentorship, or through his writing and teaching. His voice is a powerful one, and if you are interested in contemporary geopolitics you should read his books and listen to his speeches. World Order is a fantastic text.
This was one of the major conclusions of James Mattis’ recently-published memoir. The civilian government is in charge of the military, but when they choose to deploy the military, it’s their job—not the military’s—to define the objective. They haven’t done a good job of that lately.
Includes the stuff of nightmares. Child abuse, satanic rituals. A “school” with underground tunnels. Fire alarm switch in classrooms for alerting other rooms.
> unsure if children had been kidnapped
> children were extremely hungry and urinated and defecated on the floor during questioning
> states they were under the control of the “Game Caller” in DC [name classified]
> each classroom has on/off fire alarm switch that was used to alert other classrooms.
> 45 foot tunnel under school connecting school with nearby triplex
You can’t make this stuff up. And that’s not even all of the disturbing things. Excuse the name in the link[1] but it’s a good break down.
And the worst part about all of this? The whole thing was closed down as it was “stepping on the CIA’s toes” — that’s right. Where are the children???
As far as anyone can tell, a lot of people did make up allegations strikingly similar to these [1], and the evidence that people can make stuff up without realizing it is fairly compelling [2] [3].
The other thing to bear in mind with stuff like this, the FBI investigates stuff all the time and it turns out there was nothing there. One of the more interesting examples is their investigation into the song Louie Louie:
This was the height of the Satanic Panic. Without the CIA papers it's hard to tell if this was another example of the FBI investigating what was ultimately nothing, some facts planted on purpose by the CIA, or what.
> Without the CIA papers it's hard to tell if this was another example of the FBI investigating what was ultimately nothing
I can't personally come to the same conclusion. This is a documented, declassified event of a pretty dark and unsettling case that was closed directly because it was a CIA operation. That's in the signed documents by the FBI, it's not a theory.
What types of CIA operation scenarios can happen here that make this less unsettling? A benevolent daycare operation for employees? What does the CIA do?
My impression is that they found out the CIA was already involved in some way and the FBI just closed the book to get out of their way.
The CIA's involvement could have been anything. Could have been an international cult they were looking into, an experiment to try and get kids to summon The Horned God, or a brainwashing experiment, or they could have been involved because some diplomat's kid was there and they wanted to influence them. My point is that without the CIA docs there's no way to tell what was really going on or how nefarious this really was.
When I see the CIA discussed in these terms, where people make all kinds of lawless and insane behavior out to be a routine matter of course, my first thought is "we should probably abolish the CIA, just to be safe."
The 'Satanic' part. It's a wild disservice to actual abuse victims to lump them in with absurd show trials where children were coached into testifying to being flushed down toilets into secret rooms that didn't exist.
There may be some of this going on, but the popular idea that childhood memories of sexual abuse are commonly "invented" or "confabulated" is in many cases itself a false notion, actively spread by paid defenders of men accused of child abuse. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation actually dissolved today. Good thread on its efforts to bend the discussion of childhood sexual abuse here: https://twitter.com/mike_salter/status/1211442594821001216
"FMSF catalyzed a 180 degree turn in global media coverage of childhood sexual abuse so that, by the mid-1990s, news stories about CSA focused predominantly on the threat of false allegations ... The notion that CSA memories are particularly untrustworthy has become a widespread 'common sense' that destabilizes police investigations and prosecutions, and obstructs access to healthcare and social supports."
While this may be true, all signs in the McMartin case point to the blatantly absurd testimony made by children at the time (for example, being taken away from school grounds during the day by a hot air balloon with nobody else noticing) as being coached rather than a result of false memories.
> 45 foot tunnel under school connecting school with nearby triplex
That didn't actually exist. Two separate excavations never found signs of anything under the school except for a small crawl space someone had dumped some trash into.
The mistake you're making here is assuming that all of the accusations in that report are corroborated. They aren't. Most of it is just a collection of claims made by assorted people, not anything to do with actually investigating those claims.
Can you provide the additional information? I'm going entirely off of the declassified FBI document (linked). Are you suggesting the documents are fake?
The papers detailing finding tunnels under the mcmartin preschool are not FBI papers but are taken from a book about the mcmartin trial by Ted Gunderson who is one of the primary proponents of the satanic ritual abuse theory. The investigation was funded by the families and none of the people involved are reputable. You can find another copy of the whole report here:
you will find the exact same pages as included in the finders fbi file. Even if you choose to believe the report, this demonstrates that it didn't actually have anything to do with the finders and in any case was not done for, or by, the fbi or police. it was (presumably) included in the file because it had similar claims to ones made against the finders.
I have read the entire finders fbi file. Repeatedly there are the fbi and police fielding claims that the finders were satanists, or that they were sexually abusing the children, but in every case they document they found no actual evidence of this.
the claim of an fbi cover-up was documented in the fbi file (that would be weird if you think about it) but this claim was made by a single junior member of the manhattan beach police, and is never repeated or corroborated anywhere.
the claim that the finders were tied up in the intelligence community seems to be based on uncorroborated claims as well. nothing in the document or linked resources supports it.
I hope you find this helpful, I had multiple of my friends bring up this fbi release as "proof" that SRA was real all along but after reading every page of the file I just don't think there's anything compelling in there.
The document contains a pretty detailed description of the findings of an excavation under the school which found a lot more than just a crawl space. So for the commonly accepted narrative to be true, that probably would have to have been fabricated. Unfortunately I can't find in the document who carried out the excavation and wrote the report.
> The contents of the “tunnels” further support the likelihood that Stickel had found an old trash pit. Stickel listed many objects that he found (pps. 54, 70, 75). These included sections of boards, wood fragments, a variety of metal objects, an inner tube, numerous bottles, TV antenna wire, tin cans, scissors, eye glasses, exposed film, cinder blocks, plywood, tar paper, roofing nails, four trash-filled pots (three of metal, one of crockery, the largest about fourteen inches tall, all in disrepair), a one-gallon glass food jar, 35 to 40 rusted tin can fragments, a crockery lid, an old medicine bottle, various glass fragments from a large jar, a small “pestle-like stone,” a rusted metal rod, and 60 to 70 rusted metal can fragments.
> More likely, however, is that the alarm switches were placed relatively high on the walls because staff did not want children to set off false fire alarms. The archeologist seems to have considered neither this ordinary reason that fire alarm switches had been placed relatively high on the wall, nor why the switches had been connected to a bell whose location was outside the preschool’s front office door where parents and others entering the building surely would have heard the alarm’s ring.
I'm suggesting that the document is full of a lot of bullshit, because it's a compilation of raw allegations from initial investigation, and a lot of those raw allegations are total nonsense.
What you are recalling is what was widely reported in mass media shortly after the McMartin story broke, a lot of which is contradicted by the FBI dump.
With these documents, who is "making up" the story? The FBI agents? The school administrators with tunnels, "fire alarms" and knobless, locked doors? The children being interviewed?
With regards to the last point, they include that the tunnel entrants and exits were as described by the children, suggesting they weren’t making it up.
> More likely, however, is that the alarm switches were placed relatively high on the walls because staff did not want children to set off false fire alarms. The archeologist seems to have considered neither this ordinary reason that fire alarm switches had been placed relatively high on the wall, nor why the switches had been connected to a bell whose location was outside the preschool’s front office door where parents and others entering the building surely would have heard the alarm’s ring.
This is absolutely unsettling. I thought this was one of the biggest drops of the decade. We know how corrupt the FBI and especially the CIA is, especially post-Epstein era. Who investigates the investigators? I would take anything the FBI concludes with a grain of salt.
In your words what are the politics involved with "the finders" declassified documents? I don't really see this as a partisan issue, though I suspect it's perceived that way (and would be my first explanation for why there's not a greater appetite from people getting the "truth" -- whatever that ends up being).
Affluent pedophile cult conspiracy theories have been a staple of fringe right-wing elements, and the militia movement for some time. Especially recently they've been associated with the populist wing of the Republican Party (pizzagate, Alex Jones).
Given those associations, and the surreal nature of the claims, it's hard not to blame a lot of liberal-leaning people for reflexively dismissing them.
But Epstein's recent death, and the facts surrounding his case seem to indicate that many of those theories once readily dismissed as the product of fevered minds may actualy need to be reevaluated, even if they only contain a kernel of the truth individually.
For some reason his description of the fate of Finland particularly shocked me - the US would have completely destroyed this country (along with at least 100 million Western Europeans) in a "general war".
Wiki:
The China Cables are a small cache of secret Chinese government documents contained in a telegram, 4 bulletins and one court document from 2017. The cables were leaked by exiled Uighurs to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and published on November 24, 2019. The telegram details the first known operations manual for running the 1,300 to 1,400 mass internment camps of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, which China denied until 2018 and since calls re-education camps.
I wonder how they get into the camps? Very strict laws targeting them? The Uighurs did commit terrorist attacks but I don't think millions of people were involved?
AFAIR: The cables have a few partial answers to your question: There is a centralized system that can give detainment orders. (supposedly a Blackbox to the People at least who follow its orders with boots on the ground)
One day apparently it spat out 24k names. They managed to imprison about 9k the following day.
Naturally the government know quite a few things about what you’re up to and this is a factor.
Going to the mosque is a supposedly the easy way in. Not sure in what xinjiang city the mosques are still accessible. All I could find was locked down ones with all kinds of barricades and monitoring devices.. I would be surprised if there was in Xinjiang unlike eat china anyone left who would dare to go to a mosque.
Some of the detainees are used by the state as force labor and leased out to companies. It’s speculated that this demand also can causes mass detainment.
One in every 5 or 6 Uighurs could be in a camp right now
Yet maybe only 1 in 1e-07 Uighur might have done so called "terror", these however are in jail or dead, not in a camp.
The "camps" are not part of the Penal system in China. Camp is not for the radical. [0]
Merly handsome former goat farmers who operated little blue cell phone stores in the city and love to drink tea or maybe sell steamed food to others who operate little blue cellphone stores.
A few hands full of the maybe ~100 terrorists (2019-1992 that i could find documented in 15 min) either did not survive camputere or were legally convicted by the authorities and executed or are in inside the penal system, some forever.
(the ~21Mil Xinjiangies are 48% Uyghurs and 41% Han)
More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Quanguo
Chen Quanguo is a Chinese politician and current Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and a member of the 19th Politburo of the Communist Party of China..
The concentration camps of North Korea can be seen on Google Maps. Surely, the US government is aware of them as well, given the high quality of their satellites [1]. Hence, I'd assume if these "internment camps" are viewable from outside, then the US government knows about them as well.
And we sit idly by and do nothing. Yet companies and famous people have the gall to publicly criticize in the most damning terms the United States while meekly saying not a word against the almighty CCP.
Meanwhile the ones who aren’t detained are held in check by the threat of detention. Uighur women whose husbands are detained are forced to accept CCP men into their homes and share their beds with them.
Page 155 of that Hitler psychological analysis performed by the OSS in 1943:
> "8. Hitler might commit suicide. This is the most plausible outcome. Not only has he frequently threatened to commit suicide, but from what we know of his psychology it is the most likely possibility. It is probably true that he has an inordinate fear of death, but being an hysteric he could undoubtedly screw himself up into the super-man character and perform the deed. In all probability, however, it would not be a simple suicide. He has much too much of the dramatic for that and since immortality is one of his dominant motives we can imagine that he would stage the most dramatic and effective death scene he could possibly think of..."
Apart from that, the way he committed suicide actually wasn't dramatic:
"The will was a short document stating that they had chosen death over capitulation, and that they were to be cremated [..]" [1] which is how it happened.
Their operating premise was to assume that Germany would suffer successive defeats. They theorized specifically about what might happen to Hitler as the war unfolded and Germany shrank, to prepare counter-propaganda efforts. The list is a mixed bag.
1. Dies of natural causes - "remote possibility." Best outcome if he died of a common disease to break 'the myth of his super-natural origins.'
2. Seeks asylum - "extremely unlikely." They suspected he'd restrain himself from escaping.
3. Killed in battle - "real possibility."
4. Assassinated - "undesirable" because of martyrdom.
5. Goes insane - "has many characteristics which border on the schizophrenic."
6. Seized in revolt - "unlikely"
7. Captured - "most unlikely possibility of all."
8. Commits suicide - "most plausible."
Some smart people there, but they're not fortune tellers and didn't claim to be.
You're right. What I found fascinating is how these guys theorized their way into the ballpark of what happened. They proposed eight possible future outcomes as the war unfolded and to their credit listed this one as the most likely one.
Though to be fair, the passage in context didn't so much as predict suicide but warned about a staged suicide's propagandizing impact on future generations.
There was a lot of weird, now-discredited crap in that profile TBH. The part where Hitler’s grandmother was a maidservant to “Baron Rothschild” who secretly fathered Alois Hitler was mostly bizarre and unsubstantiated gossip. But the fact remains that psychology was at the time (and remains today) a very immature science, so combining that method with source data collected through the fog of war by a spy agency is bound to go down a few weird directions.
It talks about how CIA/MI5 killed UN Secretary General in the 60s, but uncovers/interviews people involved with 'SAIMR' a secretive institution rumored to be under the UK, which was using HIV as a means for achieving white-supremacy in apartheid South Africa by maliciously infecting the black population.
The reviews often dismiss this as 'satirical fiction', but quite frankly I don't buy that. It's just insane how little we know about the evil forces that the state wrests... and even the though of an organized racial genocide so many years after WWII is just insane.
