Independent journalist Robert Inkalesh has made a great new documentary about the annexation of the West Bank and the end of the mirage of the two-state solution. It includes interviews with Ahed Tamimi, Jana Jihad, Issa Amro and others.
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Charlie Savage, NYT, CIA Climb Down From Russia Bounties Hoax
The headline blares that it’s a big “administration” conspiracy to play up doubts and play down proofs of the bounties plot, but the text itself reveals that it’s the National Intelligence Council that did the new review and that even the CIA, the agency out in front on this story, has only “medium” or “moderate” confidence on the reality of the plot. Meanwhile DoD and NSA both still say they give it low confidence and cannot verify.
You gotta appreciate the desperate spin of the Times reporters and their editors here:
“A memo produced in recent days by the office of the nation’s top intelligence official acknowledged that the C.I.A. and top counterterrorism officials have assessed that Russia appears to have offered bounties to kill American and coalition troops in Afghanistan, but emphasized uncertainties and gaps in evidence, according to three officials.”
Oh how cynical of the National Intelligence Council to “emphasize” doubts instead of running with wild unverified claims! Their anonymous sources assure us that the memo “was intended to bolster the Trump administration’s attempts to justify its inaction” over the alleged Russian interference. But intelligence officials tell the New York Times lots of things.
I buried the lead nearly as badly as they did, but here it is before they go meandering off saying nothing and refusing to acknowledge the importance of the following admission:
“The memo said that the C.I.A. and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with medium confidence — meaning credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty — that a unit of the Russian military intelligence service, known as the G.R.U., offered the bounties, according to two of the officials briefed on its contents.
“But other parts of the intelligence community — including the National Security Agency, which favors electronic surveillance intelligence — said they did not have information to support that conclusion at the same level, therefore expressing lower confidence in the conclusion, according to the two officials. A third official familiar with the memo did not describe the precise confidence levels, but also said the C.I.A.’s was higher than other agencies.”
So Charlie Savage admits that his whole stupid story is based on a medium-confidence conclusion of the CIA against the views of the NSA and DoD. I wonder if he noticed the same people gave the story to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post at the same time as an obvious attempt to use their stenography in a plot to prevent Trump from considering an “early” withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And then check out this from Scott Ritter’s piece at ConsortiumNews.com:
“’Afghan officials said prizes of as much as $100,000 per killed soldier were offered for American and coalition targets,’ the Times reported. And yet, when Rukmini Callimachi, a member of the reporting team breaking the story, appeared on MSNBC to elaborate further, she noted that ‘the funds were being sent from Russia regardless of whether the Taliban followed through with killing soldiers or not. There was no report back to the GRU about casualties. The money continued to flow.’
“There is just one problem — that’s not how bounties work.”
…And they will keep on jerking that rusty old chain.
New SARS-CoV-2 Variant: More Infectious – Less Lethal
Genetic and Engineering News: A new variant of SARS-CoV-2 designated D614G is displacing the original variant D614 in all geographic regions. The new variant has been shown in laboratory studies to be more infectious but less lethal than the original D614 variant.
“The laboratory results were detailed in an article that appeared in the journal Cell, in an article titled, “Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus.” Besides addressing the question of infectivity, the article presents geographic information about the rise of the new variant, G614, and the relative decline of the previously dominant variant, D614, across the globe.”
This may explain why most patients only get a mild version, or no symptoms at all. This is good news, hopefully this new variant will out-compete the D614 variant. This would mean that more people become infected with a mild case which should lead to more rapid immunity in the population.
“The virus doesn’t ‘want’ to be more lethal. It ‘wants’ to be more transmissible,” Saphire explained. “A virus ‘wants’ you to help it spread copies of itself. It ‘wants’ you to go to work and school and social gatherings and transmit it to new hosts. Of course, a virus is inanimate—it doesn’t ‘want’ anything. But a surviving virus is one that disseminates further and more efficiently. A virus that kills its host rapidly doesn’t go as far—think of cases of Ebola. A virus that lets its host go about their business will disseminate better—like with the common cold.”
Cops Kill Man
Well, first they entrapped him on some drug bullshit.
Then they killed him. Unarmed, no chance.
Then they got away with it.
Thank Goodness for Matt Taibbi
What this society needs is men and women who can write:
It’s the Fourth of July, and revolution is in the air. Only in America would it look like this: an elite-sponsored Maoist revolt, couched as a Black liberation movement whose canonical texts are a corporate consultant’s white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong.
Much of America has watched in quizzical silence in recent weeks as crowds declared war on an increasingly incoherent succession of historical symbols. Maybe you nodded as Confederate general Albert Pike was toppled or even when Christopher Columbus was beheaded, but it got a little weird when George Washington was emblazoned with “Fuck Cops” and set on fire, or when they went after Ulysses S. Grant, abolitionist Colonel Hans Christian Heg, “Forward,” (a seven-foot-tall female figure meant to symbolize progress), the Portland, Oregon “Elk statue,” or my personal favorite, the former slave Miguel de Cervantes, whose cheerful creations Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were apparently mistaken for reals and had their eyes lashed red in San Francisco.
Was a What the Fuck? too much to ask? It was!
Hydroxychloroquine Works
Democrats across America will be sad to hear the news that fewer people are dying from the Covid due to the use of Hydroxychloroquine.
They will not, however, question how wrong and smug they are and have been on this topic.
Abolish the CDC, Zika Example
From the Post:
Four years before the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fumbled the nation’s chance to begin effective early testing for the novel coronavirus, the agency similarly mishandled its efforts to detect another dreaded pathogen.
Amid a feared outbreak of the newly emerged Zika virus, senior CDC officials in 2016 sidelined an effective test for it — and instead directed public health laboratories nationwide to use a more complicated test that failed about one-third of the time.
Cops Kill Man
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