he Academy Awards are a myopic establishment dog and pony show that ignores artistic greatness in favor of the status quo. I’ve come up with a better alternative.
The cinematic cretins at the Academy Awards have consistently gotten things wrong over the years with their insipid choices inspired by political correctness, social cowardice and an appallingly pedestrian taste in film.
It is for this reason that I have taken it upon myself to create an alternative to the Oscars. Being that I’m a nice Irish-American lad I have named my alternative movie awards The Mickeys.
So here are the winners of the newest, most prestigious and illustrious (non-existent) awards in cinema… The Mickey Awards!
Best Supporting Actress
In the Academy Awards’ usual inept fashion, they will reward Laura Dern for her strained turn as a lawyer in the ever dreadful and contrived Marriage Story.
Dern doesn’t make the cut for the Mickeys though, as the nominees are Margaret Qualley and Margot Robbie (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), Park So-dam and Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite) and Zhao Shuhzhen (The Farewell).
The Mickey goes to… Margot Robbie for her effervescent and luminous performance as Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
The pussy hat contingent complained this film was misogynistic because Robbie’s Tate had a paucity of dialogue, but it’s a testament to her talent and skill that she was able to convey an affecting story with more than just words.
Best Supporting Actor
Brad Pitt is a shoe-in to win this award at the Oscars for his performance as stuntman Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
Pitt does give a great ‘movie star’ performance as Booth, and earns a Mickey nomination along with Joe Pesci and Al Pacino (The Irishman), Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man in San Francisco), Sam Rockwell (Jojo Rabbit) and Son Kang-ho (Parasite).
The Mickey goes to… Al Pacino in The Irishman. Pacino has become a sort of parody of himself in his later years, but his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa was a perfect manifestation of self-defeating tenacity and combustibility that is one of the highlights of his superb career.
Best Actress
Renee Zellweger’s near universally unseen performance as Judy Garland in Judy is a sure thing to win the Oscar over a conveniently thin field.
Admittedly, it’s slim pickings in Best Actress, but after considerable contemplation…
Pugh is on her way to becoming a movie star and her Mickey will no doubt only accelerate her ascent.
Best Actor
A plethora of formidable actors inhabit the nominations for the Best Actor Mickey.
Leonardo DiCaprio gave the best performance of his career as struggling actor Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
Joaquin Phoenix was transcendent as a tortured clown in Joker.
And Brad Pitt graduated from being a pretty boy to being a true thespian with his sensational and complex work in the terrific Ad Astra.
The Mickey goes to… Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix is a lock to win the Best Actor Oscar, which just goes to show that a broken clock can be right twice a day. Phoenix’s work in The Master (2013) was a gargantuan evolutionary leap for the craft of acting, and his performance in Joker is a powerful continuation of that evolution.
Best Director
The Oscars in all their flaccidity are going to award Sam Mendes for the technologically complex but dramatically mundane 1917. The Mickeys will make no such cowardly maneuver.
The Mickey nominees for Best Director are…
Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), Martin Scorsese (The Irishman), Todd Phillips (Joker), Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), James Grey (Ad Astra) and Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life).
And the Mickey goes to… Bong Joon-ho. All of the nominees did extraordinary work but Bong’s direction of Parasite was exquisite. Parasite is an intoxicatingly detailed, precise, and specific master class in the art and craft of film directing.
Best Picture
Some of the Oscar nominees in this category are the pathetically pandering Little Women, the vacuous Jojo Rabbit, the aggressively fraudulent and narcissistically awful Marriage Story, with the predictable winner being the banal 1917.
Despite those lowlights, 2019 was a fantastic year for cinema filled with a bevy of quality films like Ford v Ferrari, Ad Astra, High Life, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and A Hidden Life, among many others. But the nominees for the Mickey are…
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood– A fork in the eye of woke Hollywood, this film may be the very best of Tarantino’s career as it is chock full of outstanding performances and crackling dialogue.
Joker – The fact that Todd Phillips, the guy whose previous claim to fame was making The Hangover movies, made the dramatically electrifying Joker is one of the great miracles of modern cinema.
The Irishman– Martin Scorsese turned the story of a mafia hitman’s regrets into a surprisingly poignant and existentially insightful referendum on his own spectacular career.
Parasite– A startlingly original film and one of the most entertaining and interesting dramatic investigations of class struggle and social structure to come along in ages.
And the Mickey goes to… Joker.
Jokeris a deeply profound and insightful film that eloquently and artistically expresses the palpable sense of despair and rage that permeates the consciousness and animates the intentions of the dispossessed in society. Disguising this sentiment within the cloak of comic book intellectual property was a stroke of genius.
The elites loathed Joker because it didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, but rather had the temerity to speak the ugly, unvarnished, and unnerving truth.
For its efforts, Joker made over a billion dollars… and now it earns the equivalent of that in prestige with the coveted Mickey Award for Best Picture.
Thus concludes The Mickey Awards… and unlike the Oscars, we didn’t run for four hours or contain sanctimonious speeches by people receiving $210,000 swag bags.
Sadly, the truth is that we have become a raging “idiocracy” where people can’t seem to do much of anything right. At one time we were a shining example to the rest of the world, but today we are a horde of entertainment-addicted zombies that never learned what it means to grow up and act like adults. For example, just consider what is happening at one of our most prestigious universities…
Students at Yale University are being encouraged to participate in a variety of programs offered by the Chaplain’s Office, including a weekly “Cookies and Coloring” hour and a campus “Bouncy Castle” during nice weather.
The rest of the world is laughing at us. After what just took place in Iowa, we certainly do not have any right to lecture other nations about how to run their elections. It was a dumpster fire of epic proportions, and the entire globe is talking about it. Apparently the Democrats have decided to run their elections the same way that they run their cities. The Iowa Democratic Party had just one job to do, and they failed in spectacular fashion. Collecting voting results and reporting them to the public shouldn’t be complicated, but these days incompetence has become the norm. From one end of the country to the other it seems like people are competing to see who can be the most incompetent, and our population is becoming more “dumbed down” with each passing day.
The debacle in Iowa is being blamed on a faulty app, and I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, just about everything that we put on our phones and computers these days must be constantly “fixed” or “patched” due to endless errors.
This app that the Democrats were using did not have to be complicated. It simply needed to accurately relay data from the precincts to the Iowa Democratic Party, but thanks to “a coding error” that did not happen…
Due to a coding error, the app, created by a company called Shadow Inc., wasn’t reporting the correct data, according to the Iowa Democratic Party. The error resulted in the Democrats delaying all public reporting of the results of Monday’s caucuses, and has sown chaos and confusion in a hotly contested and deeply important primary.
After all of the hot air that the Democrats have been blowing around about “the integrity of our elections”, you would think that they would have their act together for the 2020 election.
But instead they just showed the rest of the world what not to do.
And it isn’t as if this was a complete surprise. According to CNN, it was clear well in advance that the app “was not working properly”…
Precinct captains from across Iowa began realizing days before the caucuses that the app was not working properly. Some complained to their county party leadership, others said nothing and hoped it would work at the needed moment and some just planned to call in their results, as has been done in the past. And most county party chairs openly worried about the lack of training on the reporting system.
Only a quarter of nearly 1,700 precinct chairs even successfully downloaded the app, according to a Democrat familiar with the matter.
“I couldn’t get it to work,” said Jane Podgorniak, the Worth County party chair. “I tried and tried.”
There never was any training for the precinct chairs, and there was mass confusion among local party officials. In Polk County, the chairman of the Democratic Party told his precinct chairs to simply call in the results, but that didn’t work either. The following comes from the New York Times…
So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Iowa’s most populous county, Polk, instructed his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done. But during Monday night’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Hold times stretched past 90 minutes. And when Mr. Bagniewski had his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person she was turned away without explanation.
Some precinct chairs were on hold with headquarters for two or three hours on Monday night, and it is still not clear why Iowa Democratic Party officials were not more responsive.
Needless to say, this was a complete and utter embarrassment for the national Democratic Party, and DNC Chair Tom Perez is pledging that such a debacle will never happen again…
“What happened last night should never happen again,” Perez wrote in the statement. “We have staff working around the clock to assist the Iowa Democratic Party to ensure that all votes are counted. It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately. It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process. The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong.”
Hopefully they can get their issues ironed out, but the truth is that the Democratic Party has a long history of complete and utter incompetence.
Of course the Republican Party is not much better. In fact, I could tell you stories about Republicans in my area that would make your hair stand on end.
Sadly, the truth is that we have become a raging “idiocracy” where people can’t seem to do much of anything right. At one time we were a shining example to the rest of the world, but today we are a horde of entertainment-addicted zombies that never learned what it means to grow up and act like adults. For example, just consider what is happening at one of our most prestigious universities…
Students at Yale University are being encouraged to participate in a variety of programs offered by the Chaplain’s Office, including a weekly “Cookies and Coloring” hour and a campus “Bouncy Castle” during nice weather.
The children’s activities are promoted as opportunities for adult students to relieve anxiety and disconnect from technology at the Ivy League institution.
The more mindless our entertainment, the more we like it. The number of alcohol-related deaths has doubled over the past 20 years, the suicide rate has soared to a record high, and we are taking more legal and illegal drugs than ever before. And in just about every category of immorality that you can possibly imagine we are either leading the world or we are in very close contention for the top spot. We are a complete and utter mess, and we on a road that inevitably leads to national ruin.
Of course if anyone dares to offend our snowflake sensibilities by confronting us with the truth, many of us instantly melt down and start throwing a temper tantrum.
Needless to say, what I have just said does not apply to everyone. But overall our society is rapidly degenerating all around us, and our nation has no future if we stay on this path.
When demand is high and supply is low, high prices and profits attract providers. “Let’s face it: the private sector came in because the public sector failed,” Dipak Gyawali, a political economist and former water minister told the NYT. “And until you clean up government’s act, nothing will change.
The difference? Tanker men are delivering, the state is not.
Increasing numbers of Americans are losing sleep about the climate and agitating that healthcare is a human right. Residents of Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, want government to provide clean water, and again the rallying cry is that water is a human right.
But the water disasters in Flint and Newark are miniscule compared to what’s going on in Nepal. In a massive story, the New York Times documents the trials and tribulations of people in Kathmandu, who have given up on their government providing water.
Nepal doesn’t qualify as anyone’s Galt’s Gulch, but, with government failing to deliver something as vital to life as water, entrepreneurs have stepped in.
The government’s proposed solution to these grave water shortages, the Melamchi project, has turned into a four-decade-long fiasco of almost unrivaled incompetence. First proposed in the 1970s and begun in 2000, this scheme to divert a mountain river from the Himalayas has been so delayed that the water it will bring—170 million liters a day in its first phase—is already insufficient to cover half of Kathmandu’s needs. It’s not a good plan, anyway, experts say. The pipeline network is so riddled with holes that “you could have Lake Baikal on the other end and it still wouldn’t be enough,” Mr. Gyawali said.
The result is four hundred competing water delivery trucks, in some cases running nineteen hours continuously in order to satisfy demand. Meanwhile the government has thrown up its hands:
The pressure is so weak that many households capture no more than 250 liters on each occasion. For these people and the roughly 30 percent of residents who receive nothing at all, tankers tide them over until the next pipeline flow. Officials recognize it’s a crisis, but say the solution is out of their hands.
Of course there is plenty of complaining. When demand is high and supply is low, high prices and profits attract providers. “Let’s face it: the private sector came in because the public sector failed,” Dipak Gyawali, a political economist and former water minister told the NYT. “And until you clean up government’s act, nothing will change. The tankers are just a symptom.”
Krishna Hari Thapa has been delivering water for a decade and says that “the number of tankers at his spring has increased from around 30 to over 80 a day.” Although the spring water has been reduced to a trickle, he won’t stop. “The money is too good,” writes the NYT’s Peter Schwartzstein. Besides, as Mr. Thapa says, “Where else would people get water?”
Mr. Schwartzstein tries his best to make the tanker men the enemy, from the article’s title, “Merchants of Thirst,” to quoting landlady Dharaman Lama, who claims,
They’re all thieves, rotten thieves, who should be hanged. It’s disgusting what they do to us.
What the truck men do is invest capital, work hard, and supply something vital. “The city depends on us,” said Maheswar Dahal, a businessman who owns six trucks in Kathmandu’s Jorpati district.
There would be disaster if we didn’t do our work.
So where the state has failed, private enterprise has stepped into the breach. Profits will make that happen. High cost makes customers more careful with how much they use. Nobody is wasting water in Kathmandu. “Before, I didn’t think about how often I could shower or when I can clean the house,” said Laxmi Magar, a housewife and mother of six. “But now that water is so expensive I watch every drop.”
Tanker water costs ten times more than government-supplied pipeline water, according to a World Resources Institute study. In Mumbai, the cost is fifty-two times more, according to Schwartzstein. Water seems like something you would always buy in bulk; however, for some that’s not possible. During the dry season, as you would expect, “The tankers raise their rates accordingly,” writes Schwartzstein. “And because many of these areas have narrow, tuk-tuk-wide streets sprawled across steep hills that often turn to mush in the monsoon, the bigger trucks can’t get through, meaning residents have to buy in smaller sums from middlemen at grossly inflated prices.”
Does the tanker business have a future? Likely, it will boom in Southeast Asia and beyond. Schwartzstein explains,
The urban population of South Asia alone is projected to almost triple to 1.2 billion by 2050, and as infrastructure decays and cities continue to sprawl into areas that aren’t served at all, tankers are well-placed to absorb some of the shortfall. Up to 1.9 billion city dwellers might experience seasonal water shortages by midcentury, according to the World Bank.
A water delivery boom seems unlikely as you pour a glass of aqua from your first-world tap. But, water shortages are not new, and tanker men (and presumably women) have come to the rescue before:
When severe drought emptied Cape Town’s reservoirs in 2017 and 2018, wealthy residents sidestepped restrictions by buying extra water from informal operators. When Chennai, one of India’s largest cities, almost ran dry amid weak rains this summer, over 5000 private tankers ferried in water from outside. As these shocks intensify and affect more cities, the tanker men look set for boom times.
Sunita Suwal told the Times, “The state fails us. The tanker men rob us. They all just want to make money from us. Really, what’s the difference?”
The difference? Tanker men are delivering, the state is not.
In responding to an attack on a media venue about which I care a lot, this Canadian from Alberta Canada is being pulled into the swamp. I find myself showering repeatedly to try to wash away the scum from the quagmire created by CNN and the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. These media operations have decided to band together as protagonists in a smear campaign aimed at discrediting American Herald Tribune.
AHT is a news site that I helped get off the ground beginning in 2015 when I agreed to become Editor in Chief of the small but exceptionally lively Internet publication. In wrongfully accusing AHT, CNN and Washington Post are adding to the scale of a wide constituency that is coming to the conclusion that these media operations are serial manufacturers of fake news.
In doing research into the antics of the two media ventures I came across the story of a well-publicized move by a member of the Tennessee Legislature to have CNN and Washington Post legally reprimanded. Representative Micah Van Huss formulated a resolution asserting “the State of Tennessee recognizes CNN and Washington Post as fake news and part of the media wing of the Democratic Party.” The text of Resolution 779 continues,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we condemn them [CNN and Washington Post] for denigrating our citizens and implying they are weak-minded followers instead of people exercising their rights that our veterans paid for with their blood.
I see something new in this formal enactment in a US Legislature of such severe animosity to mainstream media. New too is the decision to divide mainstream venues in the United States into partisan publicity networks closely connected to one of the two major political parties. These developments have ominous implications.
In prior times it seemed that a major function of mass communications in the USA was to create and marshal popular support for the invasions of foreign countries. These days the agenda has widened to include preparing the conceptual ground for civil war within the United States.
The promotion of the conditions for civil war are unfolding concurrently with a new stage of the campaign to pull the United States into war with Iran. This agenda was advanced in the opening days of the 2020s when Donald Trump shocked the world by immediately claiming credit for the grotesque drone assassination in Baghdad of top officials in both the Iraqi and Iranian governments. The assassinations extended to members of the entourage travelling with them.
This graphic proof that US Commander In Chief, Donald Trump, had gone rogue was followed by perhaps the largest, most solemn, most public and most extended funeral I can remember. As the funeral procession went between eight cities in Iraq and Iran, there was a huge outpouring of heart-felt emotion as people turned out by the millions to commemorate the life and martyrdom of General Qassem Soleimani.
*(The funeral procession of Qasem Soleimani in Tehran.)
Soon after the funeral the Facebook Corporation provided one of the indicators that the US war machine was being revved up by dehumanizing the possible future targets of mass murder by the US Armed Forces. Those who follow the machinations of Facebook closely will understand the social media giant has been successfully recruited as an instrument of militarized propaganda for the Israeli and US governments.
The Facebook crew removed posts that in words or in pictures expressed grief for the loss of General Soleimani or expressed any sort of positive recognition of the values he embodied throughout his life. In a world of many armed forces and many career soldiers, it seemed for a brief moment that a wide diversity of people on all sides of numerous military divisions could agree on something. Many individuals found in the persona of the departed Qassem Soleimani an embodiment of the universal qualities residing in martial dignity and steadfastness.
Facebook is setting very menacing precedents with its decision to censor the opinions of the great mass of humanity who laments the outcome of the Baghdad drone assassinations. In order to justify its actions the officers of Facebook invoked the pseudo-laws of the post-9/11 era. They argued that Facebook was acting in conformity with Donald Trump’s very political move to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.
As is now becoming clear, this designation amounted to a virtual Declaration of War on Iran. The “unprecedented” move to declare the armed forces of another country as terrorists came as part of Donald Trump’s obsequious effort to help Benjamin Netanyahu win re-election in Israel. The designation came days before the Israeli vote of April 2019. As he faced the Israeli electorate, Netanyahu sent out a tweet in Hebrew thanking Trump for “acceding to another one of my important requests.”
The Attack on AHT as Part of the Promotion of a US War with Iran
There can be no doubt about the underlying causes of the decision of CNN and Washington Post to put so much of their severely overstretched journalistic capital on the line in attempting to demonize American Herald Tribune. Like Facebook’s decision to prohibit anything but Trump-supporting characterizations of General Soleimani’s life and death, the attacks on AHT are all about preparing the conceptual terrain for a US-Iran war. It is all about socializing the audiences of mainstream media to support raining death and destruction down on Iran’s 80 million people.
Here is how the Washington Post followed up on the original smear job introduced by the CNN’s notorious “disinformation reporter.”
CNN reported last month on American Herald Tribune, a self-professed “genuinely independent online media outlet” that cybersecurity experts have determined is part of a far-reaching Iranian influence campaign. The strategy is simple: create a network of inauthentic news sites, then enlist associated accounts on popular platforms to spread the stories not only here but also in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
American Herald Tribune’s modus operandi matches what we’ve already learned about online disinformation: Adversaries “launder” their campaigns through sympathetic citizens of target countries, or just citizens they offer money to — from authors on propagandistic or outright deceptive news sites to run-of-the-mill social media users. The byline on the KKK story, for instance, belongs to a man from Salem, Ore., who told CNN he believes the site is run by a man named Sam who lives in Brazil.
In those travels I developed friendships and collegial relations with some Iranian people including fellow academics. This experience is reflected in the wide range of AHT’s content created by correspondents coming from many perspectives and from many different lands all over the world.
I proudly affirm that AHT is opposed to any US-led war with Iran. For those seeking to avoid the scourge of war, the pursuit of peace obviously favors dialogue and exchange rather than animosity and sword-rattling. AHT intends to continue favoring dialogue and exchange.
None of these subjects are fairly or honestly addressed in the alarmist Washington Post smear piece. Rather the author representing the Washington Post’s Iranophobic Editorial Board rattles off jargon paraphrasing a deeply flawed study that provides no evidence whatsoever for the extravagant claims being irresponsibly asserted.
The basis for the Washington Post’s claim goes back to a glossy document put together in Milpitas California by an organization named Fire Eye. Fire Eye’s CEO is Kevin Mandia who cryptically describes his company’s specialty as the defense against “cyberattacks.”
The title of the Fire Eye report is Suspected Iranian Influence Operation: Leveraging Inauthentic News Sites and Social Media Aimed at U.S., U.K., Other Audiences. No specific individuals have permitted their names to appear as authors. Thus no one takes specific responsibility for the report’s contents, an understandable absence given the shoddy quality of the study.
There is absolutely no information given about the funders of the report. Why? What is there to hide? Did CNN or the Washington Post or a subsidiary company help fund the study? Did the Israeli or US government have a role? The question of the sponsorship of such an investigation is crucial to an assessment of its credibility. Everything points to the fact that there is apparently much about the origins and genesis of this mysterious study that is being kept under lock and key.
There is no clear explanation or justification of the methodology used. There are no specific references to other studies of a similar nature except for vague references to the Democratic Party’s hunt for Russian influences on US politics. There are no scholarly references nor is there a bibliography.
I did not see anywhere in the anonymously authored document a single reference to American Herald Tribune. Not one. Instead the report is organized as individual studies devoting a few pages including screen shots to several sites. These sites are Liberty Front Press, US Journal, Real Progressive Front, British Left, Critics Chronicle and Instituto Manquehue. Before doing research for this essay I had not heard of any of these sites. When I looked them up on Internet search engines, I found in several places adjacent to the named sites results linking to the Fire Eye document.
My biggest criticism concerning the supposed “research” done by CNN and Washington Post in preparing their respective smears, is that their reporters did not attempt to contact the Editor In Chief of AHT, namely me. Instead of doing due diligence in a case like this one, the protagonists of the smear campaign used a report that seemed to depend more on lawyers and weasel words than on any genuine analysis of the topic.
The very first sentence indicates, “Fire Eye has identified a suspected operation that appears to originate from Iran. (my italics). The unnamed authors report that they “assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates with Iran actors.” Why “moderate confidence”? What this qualification apparently means, is that “some possibility remains that this activity could originate from elsewhere [than Iran].”
I’m not really sure what the unnamed authors mean when they refer to “this activity.” What activity? Who do they mean when they refer to “Iran actors.” Is it the implication of the Fire Eye report than any Iranian person who publishes something on the Internet is doing something subversive? Are war obsessions already so advanced in the fervid imaginations of the authors of the Fire Eye, CNN and Washington Post pieces that they imagine that it is verboten for an Iranian to express himself or herself on the Internet?
So in the final analysis Fire Eye comes up with nothing that goes beyond the level of “suspicion.” My response to Fire Eye’s suspicion is to hold a mirror up to this group. If there is any party in this fiasco that falls under a cloud of deserved suspicion, it is the people at Fire Eye. This suspicion extends to those in mainstream media who report Fire Eyes “suspicions” as gospel fact. Such a failure of honest reporting, I should think, meets any reasonable criterion of fake news.
Following the Real Stories in the Face of Specious Attacks
The preoccupation of CNN and the Washington Post with stick handling for the discredited Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and with advancing the Zionist agenda of war with Iran has had serious deleterious effects on the quality of their news reporting. At exactly the same time that the Washington Post was intent on drawing a specious connection linking American Herald Tribune to the Fire Eye report, it remained mum on a very significant breaking news that remains extremely germane to mounting US-Iranian tensions.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are reported by Iranian, Russian and Italian sources to have shot down a very advanced US Air Force jet containing highly sophisticated spy and communications features. The high-tech aircraft was a Bombardier/Northrop Grumman E-11-A whose still-smoldering burned-out hulk was filmed in Ghazni province in Afghanistan. Some reports indicate the CIA’s most prominent figure in the Middle East, Mike de Andrea, was among the casualties. Other reports indicate the Mike de Andrea had a lead hand in the drone strikes that dramatically advanced the agenda of a full-fledged Iran-US war in the opening days of the 2020s.
Yet another possibility is that such reports concerning de Andrea’s role in the assassination of General Soleimani have been introduced to divert attention away from other possible scenarios. Much depends on getting at the truth of what really happened in the hours, days and weeks leading up to the most destabilizing drone strike in history.
Whatever the reality of the situation, reporting on the episode called attention to the many hundreds of murders by drone conducted by de Andrea in the course of an exceptionally violent career of murder and torture conducted largely outside the parameters of international criminal law. Readers who would like to see how the American Herald Tribune is covering this fast-breaking story are encouraged to check out the essay of Dr. Philip Giraldi, a former high-ranking CIA official who publishes regularly in AHT.
We at AHT are proud to publish much of the cutting-edge and courageous journalism by Philip Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest. Dr. Giraldi stands at the front of a long list of contributors at all stages of their journalistic careers. The essays of writers hosted at AHT will definitely bring readers much closer to the truth than the blatant and laughable propaganda at CNN and the Washington Post.
So rather than blame a justice system which let a killer walk free, she blamed all straight men.
Did Florida run out of actual criminals?? Heaven forbid that two consenting adults trade labor for money without the government’s approval.
Channeling Hillary-And the government considers anything about the Coronavirus that doesn’t come directly from government sources “false information”.
You would no longer have the option of sitting out if you don’t like the candidates.And that’s what this bill ignores. Not voting IS voting. It is making a statement that there is no one WORTH voting for.
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
Feminist group thinks heterosexual relationships are “violent” and should be banned
The “Federation des Femmes du Quebec” is a Canadian feminist group that receives $120,000 of taxpayer funding each year.
And the Federation’s President recently took to Twitter to declare:
“Heterosexual couple relationships are really violent. In addition, the vast majority are relationships based on religion. It may be time to have a conversation about their ban and abolition.” (Translated from French.)
After a backlash, she walked back her statement and apologized.
She explained that her Tweets were an emotional reaction to the news that a man who had murdered his girlfriend was released on parole and killed another 22 year old woman.
So rather than blame a justice system which let a killer walk free, she blamed all straight men.
It’s illegal for Chinese to criticize their government’s pitiful Coronavirus response
China recently sent out an “Announcement on the Special Control of Rumors Related to New Coronavirus Pneumonia.”
The announcement reminds citizens that it is illegal to spread false information or induce panic online. And the government considers anything about the Coronavirus that doesn’t come directly from government sources “false information”.
Anyone who violates this ban and shares what the government considers rumors about the outbreak could face up to seven years in prison.
China has also made clear that the government considers criticizing their response to the Coronavirus outbreak a violation of the law.
Already China arrested dozens of social media users for spreading “false information without verification.”
This is all made even more absurd by China’s terrible response to the outbreak. Instead of tackling the issue head-on, they tried to hide it for over a month. Hundreds of people have now died, and more than 20,000 have been infected.
Yet China’s government is still more concerned about keeping information from spreading rather than keeping the disease from spreading.
About 64% of California voters participated in the 2018 midterm elections.
That’s actually a pretty high turnout as these things go. But not good enough for California.
A state Senator introduced a bill this week to make it mandatory for registered voters to participate in every single election.
You would no longer have the option of sitting out if you don’t like the candidates.
And that’s what this bill ignores. Not voting IS voting. It is making a statement that there is no one WORTH voting for.
The timing of the bill looks kind of silly too… I mean politicians can’t even design an app that functions properly to count votes. It’s been nearly a week and the Iowa votes haven’t been fully counted yet.
And at the same time, they want to force everyone into this flawed system.
In summary, Hermes accurately nails how climate activists use non-white people as human shields for their arguments, but her own inherent racism towards white people also shines through given the fact that most of this took place in Berlin, which is still 71 per cent ethnic German.
Or, more honestly, “No one paid special attention to me because of my skin color on an issue totally unrelated to it. So I walked away.”
A Filipino climate activist wrote an article for VICE saying that she left the environmental movement because it was too “white.”
Those awful white people and their…trying to save the planet!
“The climate movement is overwhelmingly white. So I walked away,” explains Karin Louise Hermes, accusing her fellow tree huggers of exploiting her for ‘woke’ token diversity points.
“After a while I realized I would only be called upon when climate organizations needed an inspiring story or a “diverse” voice, contacts for a campaign, or to participate in a workshop for “fun” when everyone else on the (all-white) project was getting paid,” she complains.
Hermes’ main bone of contention appears to be that her white comrades didn’t adequately embrace the notion of intersectionality, which basically means using climate change alarmism as a vehicle to push all your other demented far-left political demands.
“Anti-racism and anti-capitalism need to be made part of organizing,” claims Hermes.
“If “Green” policies fail to consider anti-racism and migrant rights, how is any person of colour supposed to feel voting for them or organizing in the same spaces?”
Hermes apparently made activist leaders uncomfortable by drawing attention to their lack of diversity.
“Whenever I would question the whiteness of these spaces and how strategies didn’t take race into account, I would be met with uncomfortable silences,” she writes, asserting that the mostly white activist leaders were not paying enough attention to what “whiteness, capitalism, and inequality have to do with climate change.”
In what was actually a fairly good point, Hermes also highlights how eco-warriors push veganism as a solution yet refuse to acknowledge “how people have been killed after protesting against the sourcing of plant-based foods like palm oil on Indigenous lands.”
In summary, Hermes accurately nails how climate activists use non-white people as human shields for their arguments, but her own inherent racism towards white people also shines through given the fact that most of this took place in Berlin, which is still 71 per cent ethnic German.
Respondents on Twitter also had some fun on the thread.
As a cis gendered hetero white man, I’m doing my part by not joining the climate movement.
She has since walked back her embarrassing flub by claiming she meant Milton Friedman but this explanation does not wipe out her error. She would never make the equivalent when referencing a communist. That is you are never going to hear AOC call Karl Marx, Groucho Max.
Others were traditional welfare state redistributionists. Bergoglio was among this group.
Since then, the percentage of world’s poor has been reduced to under 10%. The Bookings Institution, a Keynesian, middle-of-the-road think tank, recently announced this.
This is what the present world economy is delivering. But the Pope doesn’t see it this way. He thinks the world needs a new taxation system and a new ethic.
This week, the Pope called for international economic redistribution. I have reprinted his speech here.
Liberation theology was popular with a hard core of far-Left Catholic priests in Latin America from the mid-1960’s until December 25, 1991. A few of them were outright Marxists. They believed in armed revolution against the state. The Pope, then Father Bergoglio, , criticized this interpretation of Christianity.
Others were traditional welfare state redistributionists. Bergoglio was among this group. With the disintegration of the Soviet economy in the late 1980’s, followed by Gorbachev’s announcement of the suicide of the USSR on December 25, 1991, liberation theology ceased to be the latest and the greatest. It became passé overnight. It began to fade.
Bergoglio was the head of the Jesuit order in Argentina in the mid-1970’s. A decade earlier, the Jesuits had been a formidable force for theological conservatism within the Catholic Church. Then, within ten years, the Jesuits moved to the left theologically and politically. They abandoned four centuries of tradition in a decade. The story of this astounding transformation is recorded in Malachi Martin’s book, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church (1987). Martin was appalled by the change. In contrast, Garry Wills applauded it in his book, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (1972), which I reviewed in The Wall Street Journal.
From the foundation of the Jesuits in the mid-16th century until about 1965, the Jesuit order had been militant in its defense of the papacy. Pope Paul VI (1963-78) radicalized the Jesuits. He was the most theologically liberal Pope in history. He was also the most radical in terms of his social views. Pope Francis is extending his legacy after a four-decade gap. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the most conservative Pope since Pius XII, who died in 1958. That was a gap of almost five decades. He was a staunch opponent of liberation theology. The magnitude of this change is conveyed in the new Netflix movie, The Two Popes. The dialogue is fictional, but the theological confrontation was real. To get some idea of the change, imagine Calvin Coolidge deciding that the best person to follow him as President would be Franklin Roosevelt.
THE POPE’S CALL TO ACTION
This week, the Pope called for international economic redistribution. I have reprinted his speech here.
Last June, the Vatican posted his statement on the need to care for the poor. In that statement, he did not mention the need for state action. I have posted it here. In terms of traditional Catholic views on voluntary charity, there was nothing new in the presentation from a theological standpoint. But his language and his rhetoric was clearly that of liberation theology.
We can build any number of walls and close our doors in the vain effort to feel secure in our wealth, at the expense of those left outside. It will not be that way for ever. The “day of the Lord”, as described by the prophets (cf. Am 5:18; Is 2-5; Jl 1-3), will destroy the barriers created between nations and replace the arrogance of the few with the solidarity of many. The marginalization painfully experienced by millions of persons cannot go on for long. Their cry is growing louder and embraces the entire earth. In the words of Father Primo Mazzolari: “the poor are a constant protest against our injustices; the poor are a powder keg. If it is set on fire, the world will explode”.
This statement was issued to promote the Church’s World Day of the Poor: November 17. Why his statement was published five months early, I do not know.
His latest declaration reveals his commitment to a non-Marxist, meaning non-revolutionary, form of liberation theology. It is also consistent with what is sometimes called the new social gospel, best represented in the United States by political activist Jim Wallis. I devote a department to his theology and his tax-exempt political mobilization. It is here. The Pope has a lot more followers than Jim Wallis does. But his rhetoric is the same.
Structures of sin today include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development; tax havens for private and corporate profits; and, of course, the possibility of corruption by some of the world’s largest corporations, not infrequently in line with some ruling political sector.Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to finance health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts, thus preventing the possibility of dignified and sustained development for all social actors.
Impoverished people in heavily indebted countries are suffering from overwhelming tax burdens and cuts in social services as their governments pay off insensitive and unsustainable debts. In fact, public debt incurred, in not a few cases to promote and encourage a country’s economic and productive development, can become a factor that damages and harms the social fabric. When it ends up being directed towards another purpose.
THE ELIMINATION OF POVERTY
One of the most astounding facts of the last two decades is the dramatic reduction in life-threatening poverty around the world. Nothing like this has ever taken place in man’s history. It is becoming a well-known phenomenon because of the remarkable 2007 TED talk video by Swedish statistician Hans Rosling.
Since then, the percentage of world’s poor has been reduced to under 10%. The Bookings Institution, a Keynesian, middle-of-the-road think tank, recently announced this.
Looking at poverty trends worldwide, World Data Lab now estimates that on New Year’s Day 2019, just under 600 million people across the world (excluding Syria) will live in extreme poverty. By 2030, this figure is expected to fall to some 436 million.The good news is that 2019 will start with the lowest prevalence of extreme poverty ever recorded in human history—less than 8 percent. In all likelihood, this level will set the “ceiling” for a new era of even lower single-digit global poverty rates for the foreseeable future.
This is what the present world economy is delivering. But the Pope doesn’t see it this way. He thinks the world needs a new taxation system and a new ethic.
You, who have so kindly gathered here, are the world’s financial leaders and economic specialists. Together with your colleagues, you help set global tax rules, inform the global public about our economic condition, and advise the world’s governments on budgets. They know first-hand what the injustices of our current global economy are, or the injustices of individual countries.Let us work together to end these injustices. When the multilateral credit agencies advise the different nations, it is important to take into account the high concepts of fiscal justice, responsible public budgets in their indebtedness and, above all, the effective and leading promotion of the poorest in the social network. Remind them of their responsibility to provide development assistance to impoverished nations and debt relief for heavily indebted nations. Remind them of the imperative to stop man-made climate change, as all nations have promised, so that we do not destroy the foundations of our Common House.
The Pope’s mindset was formed by 1975. His worldview has not changed. His rhetoric has not changed. Meanwhile, the world is getting steadily richer. The poor are steadily getting richer.
While I don’t have a biblical passage to support the following, I recommend to Pope Francis a familiar slogan in American life: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
THE BIBLE PROMOTES CAPITALISM
For over half a century, I have been arguing that the system of property rights mandated by the commandment against theft (Exodus 20:15) and also by the Mosaic laws defending private property inevitably produce a free market society when they are widely respected by the public and defended by civil government. In turn, free market society inevitably increases per capita wealth. I have defended this position in 31 volumes of economic commentaries on the Bible. I have defended it in four volumes of detailed economic analysis.
The Pope does not believe that biblical law and biblical ethics promote a private property social order which in turn produces capitalism. The theologians in Salamanca, Spain, argued that this was the case back in the 1500’s. But the Pope either is unaware of this or does not believe what the school of Salamanca taught.
I hope that a future Pope spends his years as a priest, a bishop, and a cardinal reading and re-reading the economics books written by members of the school of Salamanca. Even better, maybe he will read my books. I can always hope. After all, I’m postmillennial.
We are sure this is all just a coincidence – Wuhan epicenter… Only P4 facility in China… A lab investigating bats infected with genetically engineered Coronavirus… Coronavirus infected Bats… Chimeric bio-engineered viruses…. and that is probably why The White House is now asking authorities to investigate the source of the disease.
Of course, when Zero Hedge suggested the same thing, highlighting key personnel in the Wuhan lab that were publicly acknowledged as responsible for that research, we were immediately banned by Twitter. We look forward to reading Buzzfeed’s article decrying The White House for daring to ask questions about the origin of this deadly pandemic.
A week ago, we published details that raised questions about the source of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, specifically questioning the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market as a fabricated farce.
The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan’s Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China’s only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying “the world’s most dangerous pathogens.”
At the time we summarized the series of dots and asked “real reporters” to connect them:
One of China’s top virology and immunology experts was and still works at China’s top-rated biohazard lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have affectionately called the real Umbrella Corp.
Since 2009, Peng has been the leading Chinese scientist researching the immune mechanism of bats carrying and transmitting lethal viruses in the world.
His primary field of study is researching how and why bats can be infected with some of the most nightmarish viruses in the world including Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus, and not get sick.
He was genetically engineering various immune pathways (such as the STING pathway in bats) to make the bats more or less susceptible to infection, in the process potentially creating a highly resistant mutant superbug.
As part of his studies, Peng also researched mutant Coronavirus strains that overcame the natural immunity of some bats; these are “superbug” Coronavirus strains, which are resistant to any natural immune pathway, and now appear to be out in the wild.
As of mid-November, his lab was actively hiring inexperienced post-docs to help conduct his research into super-Coronaviruses and bat infections.
Peng’s work on virology and bat immunology has received support from the National “You Qing” Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Of course, that is all ancient history and Zero Hedge was permanently banned from Twitter for raising such a conspiracy theory about a publicly-searchable person working a publicly-searchable place.
But, bygones being bygones, we moved on… until today when no lesser entity than The White House began asking questions about the origin of the deadly coronavirus.
As ABC News reports, the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in a letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, requested that scientific experts “rapidly” look into the origins of the virus in order to address both the current spread and “to inform future outbreak preparation and better understand animal/human and environmental transmission aspects of coronaviruses.”
Specifically, ABC News’ Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease about concerns that stem from misinformation online that the novel coronavirus could have been engineered or deliberately released.
“There’s always that concern,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
“And one of the things that people are doing right now is very carefully looking at sequences to see if there’s even any possibility much less likelihood that that’s going on. And you could ultimately determine that. So people are looking at it, but right now, the focus is on what are we going to do about what we have.”
The White House has good reason to question the official story as expert virologist Dr. James Lyons-Weiler of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, showed and explained how the coronavirus’ genetic sequence – which has been publicly released by China – contains a unique “middle fragment” encoding a SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) spike protein that appears, according to his genomic analysis, to have been inserted into the 2019-nCoV virus using “pShuttle” technology. This technique can only be done in a lab, as it has never occurred naturally in nature.
“This isn’t a ‘conspiracy theory’, it is a scientific, medical theory,” says Del Bigtree, the Emmy-winning producer and founder of non-profit Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).
“Its foundation is based on sound science, logic, and research, and the mainstream media needs to be asked whether it is going to pursue this link to SARS instead of trying to censor anyone who is trying to pursue truth via scientific fact.”
One additional, major reason we suspect this line of logical reasoning could be correct – as conspiratorial as it may seem – is that Chinese authorities have launched a full-scale crusade to disprove the fact that this deadly virus was man-made.
“Conspiracy theorists don’t believe in science. I hope that the national professional department will investigate and give us an innocence,” Shi Zhengli, a director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the only P4 level biosafety laboratory in China – responded to Caixin on February 4.
Faced with external doubts and accusations, on February 2nd, Shi Zhengli responded angrily in the WeChat circle of friends:
“The new coronavirus in 2019 is a punishment for uncivilized living habits of human beings by nature. It doesn’t matter. I advise those who believe and spread rumours of bad media, believe in the so-called academic analysis that Indian scholars do not rely on, and close your mouth. “
Additionally, as The Washington Times reports,one ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is the that false rumors since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons…
The National Association of Manufacturers has announced that Ivanka Trump will be the inaugural recipient of the association’s Alexander Hamilton Award.
“Ivanka Trump embodies the collaborative spirit and relentless drive needed to solve manufacturers’ most pressing challenge—the workforce crisis. Like no one in government has ever done, she has provided singular leadership and shown an unwavering commitment to modern manufacturing in America. The Alexander Hamilton Award honors leaders who have made exceptional contributions to growing manufacturing in the United States and to empowering more Americans with high-tech, high-paying modern manufacturing jobs,” said NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons. “For her work bringing together leaders of industry, government and academia to put in-demand careers within reach for all Americans, Ivanka stands out as the perfect choice for this award.”
From the NAM press release:
“As advances in technology and automation change the national economy, so too must the country’s education and job training systems change to prepare Americans for the emerging industries of the future, including advanced manufacturing,” said Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump. “America is home to the best workforce in the world, but the skills of today do not mirror those of tomorrow. I am committed to ensuring our workforce is equipped with the skills they need to seize the vast opportunities that lie ahead.”
In other words, she has no understanding with regard to how the economics of the labor market work. No Ivanka guidance is needed, the free markets can handle it. She is a playing technocratic role, to interfere with free markets, and the crony elite is happy to use her and abuse her, and “help” her with her shallow interventions.
Ivanka Trump, will deliver the keynote address at a Dubai summit next week and will meet with Mideast leaders, White House officials said.
Ivanka Trump will speak about opportunities for women in business at the Global Women’s Forum and a regional summit for the World Bank’s Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative in Dubai Feb. 14 to 17, the officials said. They said the leaders she’ll meet haven’t been finalized.
