[Conservative Review] The president has been exonerated on allegations of Russian collusion, and now, as investigators and the media pick up the pieces on the long-running hoax, more attention has turned to the major players behind the operation, including former CIA chief and current NBC "analyst" John Brennan, who played an integral role in the launch of the unprecedented surveillance operation ‐ and the smear campaign thereafter ‐ against the president, members of the Trump campaign, and Trump-connected individuals.
Brennan’s personal role in the Trump-Russia collusion saga dates back to at least the summer of 2016 (and perhaps even earlier) when he met with a top British intelligence chief to discuss Trump’s supposed ties to the Russians. Around the time of that meeting, and following its conclusion, American and foreign spies began to make contact with members of the Trump campaign, with some claiming to have access to Russian secrets involving the Hillary Clinton campaign. Brennan later seemed to take credit and defend the espionage operation, which again, relied on the dossier to legitimize spying on Americans.
Brennan, as CIA director, reportedly inserted the Clinton-funded-and-manufactured Steele dossier into a draft version of the highly scandalous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference, which was published under the auspices of Donald Trump’s political opponents in early January 2017, just two weeks before President-elect Trump took office.
#4
How did this guy ever become Director of the CIA?
Bush 41 was a former Director with no apparent desire for a 2nd term. 42 appeared to have some rather deep agency connections. 42 was followed by 41 Junior, then 8 years of the mysterious late sleeper and fellow traveler Barry Soetoro. Soetoro was scheduled to be followed by Slick Willie's beloved wife.
Orange Man was an unplanned anomaly. The Deep State globalists are exceedingly unhappy.
None of this answers the ques at #3 directly, but it could provide some insights into who may have been in charge of the process.
BLUF:
[Red State] No one said anything about GCHQ, the claim was about MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. And no one said anything about "wire tapping," the charge is "spying." It would have been easier and more pointed to deny Johnson’s allegations, but they didn’t. Instead they are obfuscating the issue by trying to change the discussion from "spying" to "wire tapping."
This is a classic example of the non-denial denial.
The significant thing here, I believe, is that after two years of this nonsense, Trump undoubtedly knows a great deal of what happened. He’s going to London for a state visit in June and even Trump isn’t so gauche as to call out the Brits for their complicity in the collusion hoax without evidence. I take the tweet of Johnson’s interview as a signal that he does know and that he will want to talk to someone about it.
In the fullness of time, we are going to find that the odious toad-man, John Brennan, was the pivot man on this particular circle jerk. It is obvious that foreign intelligence services were enlisted to keep tabs on members of the Trump campaign. They were probably enlisted as plausible deniability so the NSA couldn’t be accused of surveillance of American citizens. It is equally obvious that foreign nationals, known to be intelligence assets, were aimed at members of the Trump campaign in an effort to create facts. And it serves the best interests of neither us nor the UK to pretend that this did not happen. Emphasis added.
[Dallas News, Wednesday, but linked to the Author's blog]
Before you buy into that stereotype that all older Americans are demented, helpless and lonely, check out these statistics. Not everybody is Hillary Clinton?
Ninety-seven percent of Americans over 65 are NOT in nursing homes. Here’s an even more interesting statistic ‐ ninety-one percent of Americans aged 85 and older are not in nursing homes. I am part of the 97% and hope to squeeze into the 91%.
Ninety percent of Americans aged 65 and older DO NOT have Alzheimer’s dementia. Ninety percent, folks. According to the American Medical Association, dementia rates continue to fall significantly. Interestingly, however, Americans’ anxiety about memory loss is increasing. I wonder if the media has something to do with that misconception?
Or possibly connected to the fact that more Americans have reached the age where dementia is a real possibility, even if a smaller percent actually experience it.
Over fifty percent of Americans aged 85 and older can go about their everyday activities without any help. Dressing, cooking, paying bills ‐ they are doing that just fine, thank you.
If most older Americans are not demented or helpless, surely they are at least suffering from loneliness and depression, right? Nope. Health-service company Cigna did a survey and found that the loneliest group is Generation Z, defined as ages 18 ‐ 22. The next largest group is composed of people aged 45-49; a whopping forty-three percent report being lonely. In contrast, only twenty-five percent of Americans over 70 say they are lonely. If you've been in a stable relationship for a number of years, that's a big help.
How about that secret conviction held by most that older people are an economic burden to the country and, by extension, to every one of us? Not true. People over 50 make up thirty-five percent of the population yet contribute forty-three percent of the total US GDP. That’s a $7.4 trillion contribution by that aged and decrepit over-50 group.
Workers 50-67 are generally in their peak earning years, just before they retire. The concern centers on the years after retirement, when they’re spending down their retirement savings.
If you find any of that surprising, then you might be suffering from ageism, which is the discrimination and stereotyping of people by age. Some interesting examples of late-term bloomers at link.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/25/2019 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11129 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
"Supposed to be".
According to whom?
I'm turning 70 shortly and think that getting old really sucks in some ways. No dementia but I have way more aches and pains than ever and don't have the energy I need to do half the things I want.
Not depressed and lonely just occasionally annoyed. Of course then there are the Democrats trying to ruin everything which is the worst of it.
#4
"Supposed to be" according to everything else I ever read.
At least, if I remember correctly.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/25/2019 8:57 Comments ||
Top||
#5
On Wednesday evening at 6pm a 101 year old, soon to be 102, walks into Bible study meeting when he is not running in a national track meet for the 100-105 age group.
He just turned over his oil investment portfolio to his decendents which he created himself and managed to make enough to be sitting on $4,000,000.00.
As a WW2 trainer of pilots, yet wanting to actually fly in combat but told they needed him to be a trainer instead, they finnally gave him the honor of being one of the pilots to fly a strata-fortress over Moscow and nuke it for many years until the went with a Ballistic delivery systems, sadly.
He encounters the same symptoms as everyone else but he says he works through them. He is very shy and a very good man but I would hate to be his enemy. At 101 he came charging out of the Wednesday night Bible study like he had an important appt and I accidently got into his path and it felt like I was about to get hit by a locomotive as I quickly got out of his flight path. He just sold his Camaro and that is a shame. I will never get to race him.
A few weeks ago I saw him approach a three flight set of stairs, look at them and determindly procede to climb them. The elevator he could have taken was near the stairs but that was not on his list of options at this geographical encounter. The man could still survive on a remote island by himself. Seriously.
If you are fortunate enough to witness this 101 year old go by a time or two, you realize he will not be stopped.
#7
Getting old sucks, but is preferable to the alternative.
Posted by: Regular joe ||
04/25/2019 9:54 Comments ||
Top||
#8
ninety-one percent of Americans aged 85 and older are not in nursing homes.
This is a bit misleading. "Nursing Homes" (AKA skilled nursing facilities) are at the most extreme end of the eldercare spectrum. Many more people are in assisted living facilities, and even more are in independent living (55+) communities with nurses etc. on staff.
Still the headline is correct. My grandfather died at 78. My parents survived into their 90's. My mother was in independent living at age 95.
It is great to see people in their 70's and 80's playing golf and swimming. A generation earlier they would have been dead.
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
04/25/2019 9:55 Comments ||
Top||
#11
re: #6 - I've out lived almost all my previous generations of relatives already. If I make the end of the year I'll have surpassed both mother and father; way past all grand parents there are only a couple of Aunts or Uncles that made 80.
[Time] Every morning, my Japanese wife Hiroko gets out of bed before dawn and boils hot water to make tea for her father. It hardly matters that he died six years ago. The household altar on which she also lays out his favorite snacks sits next to the boom box on which she’ll soon be blasting out Green Day’s "21st Century Breakdown." When she gets a day off from the Paul Smith store where she sells semipunk English fashions, she travels two hours‐each way‐by train to talk to her grandmother, who left this earth in 1979. Hiroko still remembers how whenever she kicked a chair as a little girl, her father told her to apologize. The chair had a soul and heart too, he reminded her. What had it done to harm her?
Some of this may sound strange to the fashion-mad kids in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. The ancient capitals around which Hiroko and I live, Nara and Kyoto, take Japan’s traditions more seriously than do the rebuilt cities of modern Japan. And Hiroko in her autumn years is certainly more diligent about honoring old customs than she might have been in her springtime years. Yet the fact remains: on arriving in Kyoto in 1987, from midtown Manhattan, I was struck most by the trendy girls in fishnet stockings, the ubiquitous burger joints, the sound of pinball racketing through fluorescent shopping arcades. After 32 years around my adopted home, I’m most startled by the resilience of everything that’s old.
Geopolitically, this hasn’t been a blessing. Japan regularly finishes close to the bottom in all of Asia‐far behind North Korea, Cambodia and Indonesia‐when it comes to English-language proficiency. At Princeton, where I’m teaching this month, the classrooms are full of students from Shanghai and Mumbai and Singapore; I have yet to encounter a single one from Japan. As the number of international visitors to Japan has surged, from 5 million in 2003 to 31 million last year‐the number may reach 40 million with the Tokyo Olympics next year‐the country is eager to make foreigners feel at home. Yet what draws us visitors to the island nation is not how familiar it feels but how distinct.
Many might say, in fact, that Japan has not strayed far from the hermit kingdom it remained for more than 200 years, when any citizen trying to leave the islands was executed. In recent years it’s found that marketing its past is almost its only way of fashioning a future, economically. After urbanist Richard Florida at the University of Toronto measured 45 countries for their closeness to tradition, modern-seeming Japan came out No. 1. Culturally, this makes for an evergreen advantage: the birthplace of sushi and manga and ramen is in no danger of being mistaken for anywhere else. In an age of global migration, the continuity of Japan has become selling point as well as affliction.
[DAWN] PANDEMONIUM gripped KP amidst a province-wide polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set... eradication drive, threatening to stop this critical campaign in its tracks ‐ which was ultimately the agenda of those who instigated the mass hysteria.
Thousands of children were rushed to hospitals by their panic-stricken parents on Monday after malicious rumours of adverse reactions to the oral polio vaccine were disseminated over community and mosque loudspeakers, and via WhatsApp and other social media platforms, and picked up and reported, uncritically and without verification, by sections of the mainstream media.
The fake news was soon exposed as a total, wilful fabrication in footage that soon emerged, but disinformation had already been spread, precisely because it fed into misconceptions about the OPV that have persisted despite the best efforts of public officials to dispel religious and medical concerns.
And though public officials scrambled to calm the public, holding a presser within hours of the emergent crisis, by then, far too much damage had already been done.
In Mashokhel, where the rumour mill apparently originated, the local health unit was torched by rioters, and across the province, streets and hospitals were overwhelmed by a terrified public.
In the days ahead, there may be severe short- and long-term repercussions. Only yesterday, a police ASI assigned to a polio team was killed on his way to report for duty, and two new cases of the polio virus were detected in the province.
That a few malevolent individuals could hijack the vaccination drive, thus undermining the effort, dedication and courage of polio workers, is proof of how tentative the gains have been in building public confidence in vaccinations.
There are already doubts about the extent of coverage this polio drive is able to achieve in the face of what has transpired.
The government must now examine measures to anticipate the possibility of fake news proliferating via social media, which can spread like wildfire in the absence of basic digital literacy among the masses.
The mainstream media, however, should have known better. For years, it has reported on the lives lost ‐ children who succumbed to the virus, and workers to the attacks of obscurantist elements ‐ and the disease burden on the country.
There must be a wholesale adoption of strict coverage protocols recognising the sensitivity, fragility and security concerns of the anti-polio campaign. This is a dire setback, but it must not be allowed to derail the fight to eradicate this crippling, deadly disease once and for all.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/25/2019 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[Jpost] The news article "PLO to discuss revoking recognition of Israel" (April 23) points out one of the key problems of the "peace process."
The crux of the dispute between the Arabs and Israel is Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), to which both sides feel they have a strong historical and legal claim. While Israel has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to compromise and come to a fair and equitable agreement, the Arabs are adamant that they will not compromise on a single inch of "their" territory.
They (the Arabs and much of the world) demand that Israel retreat fully to the narrow area within the 1948 ceasefire lines and admit thousands of people ‐ several generations of "refugees" and their descendants ‐ into the small area that would be left to Israel. In return, the Arabs claim they are prepared to recognize Israel and forswear violence.
Is this a good deal for Israel? Whatever precious land Israel relinquishes is gone forever, but with the stroke of a pen ‐ for any pretext or claimed grievance whatsoever‐ the other side can "revoke" its recognition of Israel and resume violence ‐ be it stabbings, firebombs, rocks on motorists, incendiary devices, rockets, storming the border, etc., and Israel will be in a critically weakened state and worse strategic position to defend itself.
As reflected in the results of the recent election, Israelis, including those on the Left, increasingly grasp the inherit imbalance and folly of the land-for-promises concept.
#1
I've got a gun says the Israeli and I am sitting on it. You lose, Loser. Come and make me move. Fight like an Arab. There is a reason why you are a Loser.
#2
Israel should have built nice towns in the Sinai, move the Palestinians there, then given it away to Egypt. Now there is no answer except, govern yourself peacefully for a decade and we'll talk. Until they can manage that the Palestinians cannot be trusted.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Conservative Review] The president has been exonerated on allegations of Russian collusion, and now, as investigators and the media pick up the pieces on the long-running hoax, more attention has turned to the major players behind the operation, including former CIA chief and current NBC "analyst" John Brennan, who played an integral role in the launch of the unprecedented surveillance operation ‐ and the smear campaign thereafter ‐ against the president, members of the Trump campaign, and Trump-connected individuals.
If most older Americans are not demented or helpless, surely they are at least suffering from loneliness and depression, right? Nope. Health-service company Cigna did a survey and found that the loneliest group is Generation Z, defined as ages 18 ‐ 22. The next largest group is composed of people aged 45-49; a whopping forty-three percent report being lonely. In contrast, only twenty-five percent of Americans over 70 say they are lonely.
