Blood pressure medication could be an effective tool for reducing cardiovascular risk

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Aug 31 2020

Blood pressure medication can prevent heart attacks and strokes - even in people with normal blood pressure. That's the finding of late breaking research presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2020.

Greater drops in blood pressure with medication lead to greater reductions in the risk of heart attacks and strokes. This holds true regardless of the starting blood pressure level, in people who previously had a heart attack or stroke, and in people who have never had heart disease."

Professor Kazem Rahimi, Principal Investigator, University of Oxford, UK

"The fact that the relative effects are similar for everyone does not mean that everyone should be treated," he added. "This decision will depend on an individual's likelihood of suffering cardiovascular disease in the future - there are a number of risk calculators health professionals can use. Other factors to consider are the potential for side effects and the cost of treatment."

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There has been controversy about whether pharmacological blood pressure lowering is equally beneficial in people with versus without a prior heart attack or stroke, and when blood pressure is below the threshold for hypertension (typically 140/90 mmHg). Evidence from previous studies has been inconclusive, leading to contradictory treatment recommendations around the world.

This was the largest - and most detailed - study ever conducted to examine these questions. The researchers combined data on individuals who had participated in a randomized clinical trial and conducted a meta-analysis. The study included 348,854 participants from 48 trials.

Participants were divided into two groups: those with a prior diagnosis of cardiovascular disease and those without. Each group was divided into seven subgroups based on systolic blood pressure at study entry (less than 120, 120-129, 130-139, 140-149, 150-159, 160-169, 170 and above mmHg).

Over an average four years of follow-up, each 5 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure lowered the relative risk of major cardiovascular events by about 10%. The risks for stroke, ischaemic heart disease, heart failure and death from cardiovascular disease were reduced by 13%, 7% and 14% and 5%, respectively.

Neither the presence of cardiovascular disease nor the level of blood pressure at study entry modified the effect of treatment.

Professor Rahimi said: "The decision to prescribe blood pressure medication should not be based simply on a prior diagnosis of cardiovascular disease or an individual's current blood pressure. Rather, blood pressure medication should be viewed as an effective tool for reducing cardiovascular risk when an individual's probability of having a heart attack or stroke is elevated."

Source:

European Society of Cardiology (ESC)

Law created in wake of 9/11 drives powers behind COVID-19 research, medical trials

By Dan Ashley & Tim Didion

Monday, August 31, 2020 

The historic attacks of September 11 may seem to have little in common with the COVID-19 crisis. But 9/11, and the mysterious Anthrax attacks that followed, triggered a series of emergency laws that wield critical power today.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- For months the Trump administration has turned to an arsenal of special emergency powers to battle COVID-19, even releasing some drugs on a trial basis.

Now in an interview with the "Financial Times," FDA head Dr. Stephen Hahn is quoted as saying they would consider possibly using them again, to approve an early release of a coronavirus vaccine. But to understand where that power comes from, you have to turn the clock back to another major American crisis.

The historic attacks of September 11 may seem to have little in common with the COVID-19 crisis. But 9/11, and the mysterious Anthrax attacks that followed, triggered a series of emergency laws that wield critical power today.

"There was considerable concern in the Bush administration that we would be attacked again," says retired Rear Admiral, USPHS, Kenneth Bernard, M.D.

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Dr. Bernard helped head up a special bioterrorism team in the wake of 9/11. Their mission resulted in a wide ranging law called the BioShield act of 2004. Among their first priorities was to create a pipeline of vaccines as quickly as possible.

"Of course it sped things up, because the biggest impediments to moving a new product to the market are the testing for the safety and the efficacy," explains Dr. Bernard.

First, millions of federal dollars poured into a market-fund for vaccine development. Pharmaceutical companies were ultimately granted protection from most liability, in follow-up legislation. And the Secretary of Health and Human Services along with the FDA were given special authority to speed the release of promising drugs and vaccines before the normal course of clinical trial, using a device known as an E.U.A., or emergency use authorization.

"The Emergency Use Authorization gave the government the ability to declare a health emergency or a need for that product that was more important than the full licensure process," says Dr. Bernard.

And flashing forward, that fast track power may be even more critical today. The BioShield powers and those of related bills are now the legal driver for much of the government's emergency Covid 19 response. The Federal funding system kick started a race for a Covid vaccine that's proceeding at an unprecedented pace. And Golden Gate University Law professor Kathleen Morris says it's also empowered federal agencies.

"In many ways, it's like a lot of laws where congress delegates broad authority to a federal agency, to solve a specialized problem," says professor Morris.

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But the Trump administration has wielded other BioShield powers early and often with some mixed results. An emergency use authorization for the drug Hydroxychloriquin, touted by the President, was ultimately reversed. While another for the use of convalescent blood plasma was ultimately approved after a back and forth over the scientific data. And now come published reports that the administration may consider a fast track release of a vaccine, possibly before the November election. While the BioShield laws do provide emergency power, professor Morris says oversight responsibility ultimately rests with Congress.


"And that if someone starts to act in bad faith, congress will step and do something about it," she explains.

Dr. Bernard says he's proud of what BioShield has accomplished in the decades since 911, and in battling the COVID-19 crisis. He's also hopeful that the checks and balances in place will ensure its used responsibly in the weeks and months ahead.

"Scientists reaching out from everywhere, giving counter arguments when they think that the national leadership has gone off line, especially on the science," he points out.

Protecting a set of powers that may be needed to protect America again in the future.

Trump Is a Coward
Biden calls the president weak on crime, Russia, and the coronavirus. Trump proves him right.

By WILLIAM SALETAN AUG 31, 2020





One of Donald Trump’s biggest frauds is that he’s a strong leader. He says he’s tough on China, tough on borders, and tough on looters and anarchists. But when toughness really counts, he’s craven. He sucks up to Vladimir Putin, writes love letters to Kim Jong-un, begs Xi Jinping for help in getting reelected, and causes thousands of deaths by refusing to face a catastrophic virus. On Monday, Joe Biden launched a frontal assault on Trump’s cowardice. And Trump, in a press conference afterward, validated Biden’s indictment.

Trump thinks the recent wave of violence in certain cities—some of it related to protests against shootings by police—can help him change the subject from COVID to law and order. Biden, speaking in Pittsburgh, directly addressed that issue. “If Donald Trump wants to ask the question, ‘Who will keep you safer as president?’, let’s answer that question,” said Biden. “When I was vice president, violent crime fell 15 percent … The murder rate is up 26 percent across the nation this year under Donald Trump.”

Biden argued that in street clashes between left- and right-wing extremists, real political courage consists of standing up to the miscreants on your own side. Trump hasn’t just failed that test, Biden said; he’s ducked it. “He’s got no problem with right-wing militia, white supremacists, and vigilantes with assault weapons, often better armed than the police,” said Biden. Trump’s “failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is.”

Biden coupled this attack with a scathing assessment of Trump’s appeasement of Russia. “The Kremlin has put bounties on the heads of American soldiers,” said Biden. But “instead of telling Vladimir Putin … that there’d be a heavy price to pay if they dare touch an American soldier, this president doesn’t even bring up the subject in his multiple phone calls with Putin.” Biden also pointed to reports that “Russian forces just attacked American troops in Syria, injuring our service members. Did you hear the president say a single word? Did he lift one finger? Never before has an American president played such a subservient role to a Russian leader. It’s not only dangerous. It’s humiliating.”
Above all, Biden lambasted Trump for shrinking from his duties.

Trump has surrendered to the novel coronavirus as well, Biden noted. The former vice president likened the disease to a wartime adversary, noting that it had killed more Americans than “every war since Korea combined.” He observed that COVID’s death toll dwarfs the current threat from street violence. “More cops have died from COVID this year than have been killed on patrol,” said Biden. While hyping manageable threats, Trump ignores the big one.

Above all, Biden lambasted Trump for shrinking from his duties. Images of urban violence in Trump’s ads, Biden noted, “are images of Donald Trump’s America today. He keeps telling you if only he was president, it wouldn’t happen. … He is president.” This flight from responsibility—running away from bad news in Syria and Afghanistan, blaming violence on mayors, abandoning governors to deal with COVID on their own—defines Trump’s failure as a leader. He is, in Biden’s words, “a bystander in his own presidency.”

Against this cowardice, Biden promised to govern the country with backbone. He rebuked left-wing vandals who abuse the protest movement. “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting,” Biden declared. “It’s lawlessness … And those who do it should be prosecuted.” He mocked Trump’s simultaneous caricatures of him as an establishment dinosaur and a communist stooge. “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” he joked.

But Biden also argued that to lead with strength, a president must do more than bluster. He must listen and heal. The reason Trump can’t extinguish racial unrest, said Biden, is that “he refuses to even acknowledge that there’s a racial justice problem.” And the reason Trump can’t get aid to people whose livelihoods have been wrecked by COVID is that he can’t “pull together the leaders in Congress.” Biden contrasted Trump’s insecurity and rigidity with his own record of bringing people together: police; nonwhite communities; and lawmakers, mayors, and governors from opposing parties.

At a press conference hours after Biden spoke, Trump vindicated Biden’s criticisms of him. The president disowned responsibility for the violence in cities, calling them “Democrat-run.” When a reporter asked Trump why he wasn’t meeting with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot in the back seven times by police last week, the president said it wasn’t safe, because the family wanted its attorney to join the conversation by phone. “I thought it would be better not to do anything where there are lawyers involved,” he pleaded.

Another reporter asked Trump why he hadn’t said anything about his fans who drove trucks through Portland on Saturday, firing paintballs and pepper spray at adversaries and bystanders. “That was a peaceful protest,” Trump said of the truck caravan, and “paint is not bullets.” When a third reporter asked about Kyle Rittenhouse, the white vigilante who shot two people to death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Trump defended the shooter. “He was trying to get away from them,” said Trump. “They very violently attacked him.” If Rittenhouse hadn’t shot them, Trump argued, “he probably would have been killed.”

Trump is a coward. He hides from COVID. He refuses to confront Putin about the alleged bounties. He refuses to criticize assailants and killers who support him. He won’t even talk to a Black family about a loved one shot by police. He’s afraid of the family’s lawyer. Lots of people are cowards, but you can’t give them this kind of responsibility. When the president is a coward, people die.

A look deep inside latest pro-Trump Christian conspiracy theory that’s eating America


Published August 31, 2020 By Salon

Des Moines, Iowa / USA - January 14, 2020:

 Donald Trump supporter at Drake University in Des Moines

outside the Democratic Debate


In the previous two installments of this series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Donald Trump supporters known as “QAnon.” According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by Trump’s mortal enemies. Not surprisingly, none of the so-called “evidence” provided by my friend proved any such thing. Onward from there we go …


Fun with Adrenochrome!

The second link my friend sent me, entitled “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” was posted by a QAnon advocate who calls himself Vinctum. On Twitter, Vinctum describes himself as a “Red Pilled Armenian bloke from the Netherlands that’s into Personal Growth, Spirituality, Psychology, and Conspiracy facts.” Though he joined Twitter as recently as January of 2020, he already has more than 3,000 followers. His YouTube channel has considerably more: 181,000 followers.

“ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep” is a nearly 15-minute video that contains almost no facts whatsoever. It’s as if someone read and reread John W. DeCamp’s 1992 true-crime book “The Franklin Cover-Up,” which revolves around reportage about an alleged pedophile ring operated by prominent Republicans like Nebraska businessman Lawrence E. King Jr. (a crime ring that reportedly overlapped with Iran-Contra money-laundering schemes operating out of the Reagan-Bush White House), and decided to toss these scandalous rumors into a giant blender mixed with 100% pure gonzo jabberwocky — but this time around, Democrats are now the evil, mustache-twirling villains at the center of the soap opera. As with so many of QAnon’s claims, elements of past conspiracy theories have been distorted and flipped, always in favor of Republicans. Any allegations that reflect badly on Republicans are conveniently left out of the retelling.




According to “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” Hollywood performers such as Patton Oswalt, Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Hanks torture children on a regular basis in order to maintain healthy, moisturized skin. Of course, it’s just not possible to maintain a superior level of skin care without extracting Adrenochrome from naked, prepubescent bodies writhing in pain on a subterranean obsidian altar built at the feet of an enormous statue built in honor of Baphomet, the great goat-headed god. Vinctum draws passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” to make his case, but can’t even quote Thompson correctly, and even misspells his last name. (Is proper spelling really so much to ask? After all, Thompson’s name is emblazoned on the front cover.) I doubt this poor fellow has ever read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from cover to cover, despite the fact that it’s a very short book and shouldn’t take this “bloke” more than a couple of hours to get through it. He doesn’t even seem to understand that the book is meant to be humorous.

In 2017, a year after Trump’s election, I published a novel entitled “Until the Last Dog Dies,” which was about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. After wading through hours of this humorless QAnon material, in which even the most innocuous Disney cartoons are flensed of fun and replaced with dark speculations about the demonic symbols hovering like unholy specters over Uncle Walt’s films, I’m beginning to think that my novel was far more prescient that I could have imagined. For example, did you know that Illuminati Satanists inserted the subliminal word “SEX” into the animated film version of “The Lion King” in order to pervert the minds of children around the world? After all, what could be more demonic than the word “SEX”? (Isn’t it odd that these Christians are so concerned about the word “SEX” allegedly appearing for less than half a second in a Disney film, but don’t care at all that their president cheated on his wife with a porn actress? I don’t care what Trump does in his private life, or who he does it with, but this dichotomy seems to be a prime example of what psychologists call “compartmentalization.”)

Vinctum’s only source to back up his peculiar claims that Adrenochrome is being extracted from living human beings is in fact Hunter S. Thompson, but he never bothers to explain how this scenario might work in the real world. What was the source of Thompson’s knowledge? Is Vinctum suggesting that Thompson was a member of the Satanic Illuminati, and that’s how he knew about Adrenochrome being harvested from humans? Vinctum never bothers to clarify. He just floats a spooky suggestion, and allows the viewers to use what little imagination they have to reach their own ill-informed conclusions.

Because I’ve always been something of a masochist (as my friend Damien once told me, back in high school, “You’re never bored when you’re a masochist”), I went to the trouble of following some of the links that Vinctum flashes on the screen while he’s droning on and on. From these links, I learned that Oswalt, the Emmy-winning comedian and actor (who, coincidentally, has been an outspoken critic of President Trump’s policies) is in fact a sadistic pedophile who spends his free time hunting down innocent children at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. In the weird, wild mythology of QAnon, Comet Ping Pong is the equivalent of Mordor, the home base of arch-villain Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

On the surface a modestly upscale pizza joint in a residential Washington neighborhood, Comet Ping Pong is in reality the ultimate abattoir of evil in which Hillary Clinton and former White House chief of staff John Podesta are alleged to have tortured uncountable children to satiate their heady lust for young, nubile flesh. What was the evidence for Oswalt being a pedophile, you ask? Other than some doctored photos placing him at Comet Ping Pong, nothing. Needless to say, even if Oswalt had visited Comet Ping Pong, there would still be no evidence that the man’s a pedophile. I’ve not seen a single shred of evidence that links Comet Ping Pong to any criminal activity whatsoever, much less an international sex ring. And you know what? No one else has either. If those who devoutly believe they’ve seen such evidence would only pause a moment, take a step back from their own biases, and try to peer through the layers and layers of obfuscation QAnon has placed in front of their eyes, perhaps they would be able to see reality as it actually exists rather than the cheap illusion QAnon wishes them to see.

* * *

Not only does QAnon remind me of Salem witch hunters and New Age UFO cultists, but this brand new religion also resembles L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. At a backyard barbecue in Venice, California, 20 years ago, I met a fellow who had been a member of Scientology for 10 years until he finally woke up to the fact that he was being played for a fool and decided to turn the tables on them. This man spoke to me for a long time about what it was like living at the large Scientology compound in Riverside, east of Los Angeles. He did hard manual labor, like digging ditches in the desert soil, for 10 cents a day. If he came down with an illness, church officials made him work anyway.

Everyone at the compound had been so thoroughly brainwashed that if you ever questioned the word of L. Ron Hubbard, even for a second, your knee-jerk response was to turn that doubt back on yourself. For example, let’s say you suddenly found yourself entertaining a pernicious thought like, “Hey, is it possible that L. Ron Hubbard’s a liar?” Immediately, you would then think, “Wait a minute… what have I done wrong that I would even be thinking such a thing? Am I a liar? What have I lied about recently? Oh, yes, I did tell a white lie about something, didn’t I, just the other day? So that explains it! Now I understand why I’m doubting the great LRH. I’m so relieved! There’s nothing wrong with Ron. There’s just something wrong with me …”

QAnon’s followers rely on this same psychological safety mechanism on a daily basis. Since 2017, not one of QAnon’s major predictions have come true. For example, QAnon insisted that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, would team up with Trump to expose the “deep state.” In the first week of November, 2017, QAnon announced that Trump would declare “a state of temporary military control” within “the next several days.” By 2020, Hillary Clinton and her Satanic minions were supposed to be in prison. Despite the fact that none of these events have occurred, QAnon never once lost any followers. Instead, these followers have grown even more obsessive and loyal. QAnon’s acolytes said, “Wait a minute, QAnon’s not wrong. We simply misinterpreted his predictions. We’re the ones who are wrong! There’s something wrong with us. We need to continue studying the posts until we come up with the correct interpretation….”

Like Hubbard, QAnon has based his/her/their entire cosmology on past sources without ever acknowledging them. After all, the Great Godhead doesn’t need “sources,” does He? In the late 1980s, a former Scientologist named Bent Corydon broke away from the Church of Scientology and wrote a scathing book about his experiences entitled “L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?”, in which he revealed that Hubbard drew most of his ideas from philosopher Alfred Korzybski, author of “Science and Sanity,” and occultist Aleister Crowley, author of “The Book of Lies” and other tomes about ceremonial magic (or “magick,” Crowley’s preferred spelling). When Hubbard’s documented ties to occult organizations — e.g., Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis in Pasadena, California — became publicly known, Hubbard explained that he had been infiltrating the organization on the behalf of the United States military. Most of his followers believed him.

This same “the Great One can do no wrong” attitude is prevalent among QAnon’s followers. If a video was released tomorrow that depicted Donald Trump having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking victims, Trump would calmly approach his podium and say, “I had to do that in order to fully infiltrate the sick perverts who are secretly in control of this country!” and almost every single one of QAnon’s followers would enthusiastically agree.


“Out of Shadows”

In the Christian world of QAnon, Democrats and Satanists are the same.

The hatred that Christians harbor against Satanists has always baffled me. After all, they share the same beliefs. Both groups ostensibly believe in the existence of the same mythological entities. A Christian and a Satanist would naturally have far more in common than a Christian and a Buddhist. A Buddhist doesn’t even believe in Satan. The respective belief systems of Christians and Satanists are branches of the same cosmology.

Perhaps this is why QAnon’s “Christian Patriot” followers appear to spend the majority of their day dwelling on Satanism, the main topic of a thinly disguised QAnon recruitment video entitled “Out of Shadows” which features conspiratorial ruminations by a former Hollywood stuntman named Mike Smith. The third link my friend sent me led to this video, a feature-length YouTube “documentary” that took the internet by storm in April. As of this week, this video had received more than 18 million views. It’s a peculiar film, as it does indeed contain some accurate and vital information.

Of course, the most effective forms of disinformation must include some accurate and vital information, otherwise the lies won’t be accepted so easily. The former Scientologist I met at that backyard barbecue told me that he wouldn’t have pursued Dianetics at all if not for the fact that his earliest encounters with Hubbard’s teachings led to many lifelong anxieties being cured. He felt he had taken away some useful teachings from Hubbard. It’s only after Scientology gets you hooked on the brain entrainment methods that do work, only after you’ve invested so much of your life into their coffers, that they start dumping the really insane nonsense on you.

“Out of Shadows” follows the same pattern. The “documentary” begins by sharing accurate but little known information about Hollywood’s intersection with the CIA. I applaud the filmmakers for bringing to light the fact that the entertainment most of us imbibe so unthinkingly often carries with it a hidden political agenda. This has been true of Hollywood films going at least as far back as World War II, and no doubt even earlier. I myself have written a book that touches on some of these same issues, though my approach to the material is radically different. My forthcoming book, “Hollywood Haunts the World,” is backed up with genuine evidence from the first page to the last.

About 20 minutes into its running time, after dealing with the potentially dangerous intersection between Hollywood and the U.S. intelligence community, “Out of Shadows” abandons any pretense of objectivity when it presents a montage of various news reporters repeating the same words (“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” being the most memorable refrain), not bothering to mention the fact that this mimicry was the result of a pro-Trump campaign initiated by the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2018.

This is from Timothy Burke’s March 31, 2018, Deadspin article, “How America’s Largest Local TV Owner Turned Its News Anchors Into Soldiers in Trump’s War on the Media“:

Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.

Stelter’s CNN article, published a few weeks earlier, offers further context, observing that at the time, the FCC was reviewing Sinclair’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media and that “Sinclair critics — Democratic lawmakers and some of the company’s Republican rivals — have alleged that the FCC has given Sinclair preferential treatment.” The scripted promos sent to all Sinclair stations, Stelter wrote, “show how the company wants to position itself in local markets from coast to coast”:

The instructions to local stations say that the promos “should play using news time, not commercial time …. Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written …. This copy has been thoroughly tested and speaks to our Journalistic Responsibility as advocates to seek the truth on behalf of the audience.”

The promos begin with one or two anchors introducing themselves and saying “I’m [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I’m [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”

Then the media bashing begins.

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script says. “More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’ … This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

The fact that the filmmakers present this montage in “Out of Shadows” with no context whatsoever, then spend the rest of the “documentary” promulgating far-right conspiracy theories, is extremely disingenuous, to say the least. Ironically, the main message of “Out of Shadows” could be summarized as a call to question authority because what we see in the media is driven by a hidden agenda. Unbeknownst to most of the people who saw it, “Out of Shadows” is a perfect example of that very manipulation.

Among corporations and intelligence agencies — not to mention certain high-profile political figures — it’s standard operating procedure to accuse your opponents of offenses you yourself are committing. The filmmakers of “Out of Shadows” take this tactic to heart. This is a consistent strategy used by the QAnon cultists, as when they fret about “black hats” locking helpless children in cages — despite the fact that the only government agents known to have committed such acts against children (i.e., immigrant children) are the Homeland Security agents carrying out the policies of Donald Trump, the very man QAnon claims is working hard behind the scenes to free abused children from subterranean cages. (In a world that still contained nuance and humor, I suppose one might call this “irony.” In our current situation, however, we’ll just have to call it a “fact” and leave it at that.)

After the montage, the filmmakers present genuine information about such insidious U.S. intelligence programs as MK-ULTRA and Operation Paperclip. Veteran conspiracy theorists will find no surprises here, but this might be educational for viewers who have never been exposed to this information. The filmmakers use the CIA’s longstanding involvement with mind control programs to segue awkwardly into a six-minute segment about the late Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, co-author of an infamous 1981 military paper about the future of psychological warfare operations entitled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory,” in which Aquino and his collaborators offer up such blatantly authoritarian statements as the following:


In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe — neither through the primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.

These media are, of course, the electronic media — television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasters make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have but the courage and the integrity to guide civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then devise moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.

MindWar must target all participants if it is to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people ….

In case it’s not obvious, that last sentence is a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. After all, is there an agreed upon definition of “enemy propaganda?” Who decides what “enemy propaganda” is and what isn’t?

Aquino’s story will be old news to viewers well-versed in these areas, but the vast majority of those who saw this video had probably never heard of him, nor had known that a High Priest of a Satanic church called the Temple of Set had served as a U.S. intelligence officer in Special Forces, Psychological Operations for many years. The filmmakers imply that Aquino’s existence is some deep, dark secret of the U.S. military, when in fact the lieutenant colonel flaunted his Satanic affiliations for decades. He even appeared on a 1988 episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show alongside his wife, Lilith.

Keep in mind that the documentary began with the intent to prove that Hollywood is a propaganda tool. So why spend so much time talking about an oddball military officer who published a disturbing paper nearly 40 years ago? Other than his brief appearance with Oprah, Aquino had no known connections to Hollywood.

From Aquino, we then segue back to more or less accurate information about MK-ULTRA, interspersed with wrongheaded analyses of supposed Satanic symbols embedded in pop culture that harken back to the height of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s. Perhaps you remember such delightfully stupid moments in American history as when Procter & Gamble was accused of slipping demonic symbols into their “man in the moon” logo (devil horns hidden atop Moon Man’s head, three sixes in the curlicues of Moon Man’s beard, and — choke! gasp! — 13 stars twinkling in the background), and when televangelists insisted that Mighty Mouse was imbibing the devil’s drug, cocaine, because he was seen sniffing an animated flower in a single frame of a Ralph Bakshi Saturday morning cartoon.

The filmmakers of “Out of Shadows” seem particularly bothered by innocuous music videos featuring the likes of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. In the case of the latter, the documentary suggests that only the complex machinations of dark and sinister forces could explain Perry’s rise to superstardom after abandoning her original Christian gospel orientation and reshaping herself into a double-platinum pop star. It doesn’t occur to the filmmakers for even a moment that Perry’s decision might have been influenced by the simple fact that the marketplace for a Christian gospel singer isn’t nearly as large as that of a scantily clad, quirky pop singer. (Apparently, this is one of those rare instances in which faith in the fairness of free-market economics has failed the conservative Christian community.)

Most of what these people perceive to be “Satanic symbols” are nothing of the kind. In “Hollywood Haunts the World,” I deal with the plethora of esoteric symbolism woven into numerous films, from Victor Sjöström’s “The Phantom Carriage” in 1921 all the way to Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” in 2020. Very few of these hermetic films could be described as “Satanic” in nature. In my first book, “Cryptoscatology,” when commenting on Alex Jones’ 2000 documentary, “Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove,” I wrote that Jones’ biggest weakness was the typical “Christian tendency to confuse paganism with Satanism.”

Indeed, Christians often confuse hermeticism with Satanism. They confuse esotericism with Satanism. They confuse Freemasonry with Satanism. They confuse spiritualism with Satanism. They confuse Mormonism with Satanism. They confuse homosexuality with Satanism. They confuse Dungeons & Dragons and Procter & Gamble and Mighty Mouse and comic books and pop music and cocaine with Satanism. When anything that is other or different or unfamiliar is confused with Satanism, you’re going to experience a great deal of bewilderment. And then you panic and begin making YouTube documentaries that end up containing about 15% truth and 85% disinformation. That vitally important 15% keeps a lot of eyes on the screen for the duration of the documentary. But that 85% is the real reason you made it, isn’t it?

While suffering through this 118-minute piece of QAnon propaganda disguised as anti-Hollywood/anti-government propaganda, I was struck by the fact that I could easily make the filmmakers’ case for them far better than they were doing themselves. If they really wanted to connect government conspiracies to Satanism, why not go beyond Aquino? Why not mention Louis Tackwood, for example?

What follows are relevant passages from Alex Constantine’s 1993 book, “Blood, Carnage, and the Agent Provocateur”:

In 1971, Lee Smith, an ex-convict from the California Men’s Colony, testified before Congress that he’d been paid to foment prison unrest. He’d been instructed by authorities to blame “Marxist revolutionary forces” for stirring up the violence. Afterward, conditions at the penal colony worsened ….

[Louis] Tackwood, who’d been recruited by [the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section] to provoke prison riots, blew the whistle in 1971, charging that the secret LAPD unit had been “set up on the same basis as the CIA” ….

Tackwood pulled LAPD skeletons out of the closet with the publication of “The Glass House Tapes” in 1973, including the disclosure that the department had about 125 provocateurs on the payroll. Some in the press, not many, asked questions. Liberal community groups in Los Angeles, discovering they’d been infiltrated, sued the LAPD. CCS [Criminal Conspiracy Section], the secret police unit, was disbanded, its spies and provocateurs reassigned. In its place evolved the OCID [Organized Crime Intelligence Division], which incidentally maintains no files on organized crime. The OCID does, however, keep extensive files on local politicians and private citizens ….

One of the most controversial aspects of “The Glass House Tapes” was Tackwood’s claim that the Los Angeles Police Department, in concert with various U.S. intelligence agencies, was using Satanic cults in California for the purposes of blackmailing and brainwashing high-profile initiates. I find it ironic that this scenario has now been embraced by the right wing, when back in the early 1970s the only people talking about this were far-left radicals like the members of the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee, with whom Tackwood collaborated on “The Glass House Tapes.” Subsequent nonfiction books like Walter Bowart’s 1978 “Operation Mind Control,” Maury Terry’s 1987 “The Ultimate Evil” and John W. DeCamp’s aforementioned 1992 “The Franklin Cover-Up” explore similar themes in far greater depth, so why are none of them mentioned in “Out of Shadows”?

The same is true of MK-ULTRA and Project Paperclip. Why don’t the filmmakers cite such well-researched books as Gordon Thomas’ “Journey Into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers” or Christopher Simpson’s “Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effect on the Cold War“? If the main purpose of this documentary were to inform the public about these topics, books such as these would be mentioned. That’s the type of move that encourages the viewer to pursue further research once the documentary has been seen. As I’ve mentioned before, William Cooper did this on his “Hour of the Time” radio show almost every episode.

At one point in “Out of Shadows,” Mike Smith says:

Let’s take the word “Hollywood.” Where does that come from? Well, “Hollywood” comes from the holly tree. The ancient druids back in the day used to take the holly tree, make wands to weave spells, cast spells, or channel spells. And when they needed help, they would consult the Magis or the “mediums” of the day to help channel their spells to the population. Well, cut to today. What do we have in our houses? We have these black boxes. What are they called? TVs. But if you stop and you say the word “television,” [you get] “tell a vision.” You turn on that television, and what do you get? What’s the first thing that pops up? A list of “channels.” And when you turn on those “channels,” what’s on those “channels”? Programming! They’re programming you. They’ve been programming you your whole life. You don’t even know it!

Jordan Maxwell, who’s been delivering lectures about occult symbolism for decades, said these same exact words to me in Mesquite, Nevada, in the summer of 1999. I first heard Maxwell make this observation during a radio interview on KPFK in Los Angeles in 1993. And yet Smith doesn’t bother to cite Maxwell. Neither do the filmmakers credit him at the end.

In the 1970s, the muckraking journalist Mae Brussell (who’s often referred to as “the Queen of Conspiracies”) began dedicating many episodes of her underground radio show “Conspiracy: Dialogue” to what she called Operation Chaos, an alleged CIA plot to destabilize the anti-war movement of the 1960s by assassinating various influential rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.

Alex Constantine, a writer heavily influenced by Brussell, published a book in 2000 entitled “The Covert War Against Rock” that expands on Brussell’s theory at great length. By contrast, former CIA agent Kevin Shipp uses “Out of Shadows” as a platform to flip Brussell’s theory, conveniently leaving the CIA out of the equation and implying that such ’60s and ’70s rock icons as Morrison and Frank Zappa were not victims of COINTELPRO-style surveillance and harassment, but were instead the conspirators themselves. Here are Shipp’s own words:

It’s odd because, in Laurel Canyon, so many of the soon-to-be-stars there — their parents were either in the military industrial complex or intelligence or the Pentagon. In Frank Zappa’s case, his dad was working at Edgewood Arsenal where they were doing biochem studies, psychotropics, exposing U.S. troops to VX nerve gas and other things. The family kept gas masks in their house. He grew up with that in case there was an accident. And Edgewood Arsenal was doing very similar, related MK-Ultra projects on U.S. troops. The Gulf of Tonkin is another prime example. The commander of the Gulf fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin — his son was Jim Morrison. They claimed the USS Maddox was attacked by Vietnamese vessels. It was never attacked. As a matter of fact, they put ghost ships on the radar to make it look like they were Vietnamese ships. The Maddox was never attacked. It was an actual, literal “false flag” to enable the U.S. to declare war on Vietnam. So Jim Morrison’s dad was involved in the false flag of the Gulf of Tonkin.

After presenting information that seems to link MK-Ultra mind control experiments with the unlikely notion that the intelligence community was the main influencer behind the 1960s counterculture movement, we get Shipp’s implication that Morrison and Zappa were somehow brainwashed by their military parents to become rock stars and thereby create a generation of freako-pervo-weirdos. Shipp’s not the first person to suggest something like this. Perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, for example, was convinced that the Beatles were formed by British MI6 intelligence agents to influence American teenagers to experiment with psychedelic drugs. (In my experience, American teenagers don’t need British intelligence agents to indulge in illicit substances.)

If you think we’ve now reached the nadir of absurdity, you’re quite wrong. Numerous QAnon followers — far more than you could imagine — are convinced that Hillary Clinton was assassinated long ago and replaced with a clone, which is clearly a recapitulation of the conspiracy theory introduced to the world by Dr. Peter Beter on May 28, 1979. Beter insisted that President Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger, among several other key American politicians and military leaders, had been murdered by the Soviet Union and replaced with what he called “organic robotoids.” By carefully analyzing news footage, Beter claimed he could tell you the approximate time and place the real Carter was offed and switched with his robot clone. Beter’s special “audio letter” containing this startling announcement is archived on YouTube.

In 1992, a right-wing group called “Police Against the New World Order” — a loose-knit conglomeration of active and retired police officers, National Guard members and military officers — published a saddle-stitched, 76-page booklet entitled “Operation Vampire Killer 2000,” whose main purpose was to warn fellow law enforcement officers (as well as private citizens) of ongoing attempts by “New World Order” globalists to “overthrow the Constitutional Republic of these United States of America” by fomenting various crises that would lead to the establishment of martial law. Here’s a direct quote from the booklet: “Aided by their controlled media, and NWO government-paid agitators/’leaders’ on both sides, the goal is to frighten Americans, of all colors, into accepting Martial Law.”

The group was led by a retired Phoenix police officer named Jack McLamb. Whether his views were right or wrong, sane or paranoid, it’s clear from reading his booklet that McLamb’s intent was to warn the citizens of the United States against encroaching fascism.

QAnon has borrowed much from “Operation Vampire Killer 2000” while also managing to stand the original message completely on its head. Instead of warning against martial law, QAnon is urging people to welcome it with open arms.

In May of 2019, Michael Swanson of WallStreetWindow.com (author of “The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963“) interviewed journalist Pearse Redmond about the beginnings of the QAnon phenomena. Here’s Redmond:

[Early on] QAnon was advocating for a military takeover of the country, and martial law being enforced everywhere, and that this was actually a good thing. We shouldn’t really worry if Trump declares martial law and the military takes over policing, setting up camps to intern dissidents and whatnot. That was actually okay, and we should support Trump when he does that. So that was one of the early warning signs for me. Not to fully go the tinfoil hat conspiracy [route] that they’re preparing us for this, but just that [QAnon was] once again acclimating people to that [idea], making it seem that it wasn’t such a big deal, and at the same time sucking in a lot of conspiracy people who were warning about that very thing ten to fifteen years ago, particularly the more right-leaning [conspiracy theorists warning us against] FEMA camps [being set up] everywhere, and now they were [saying], “Oh no, the FEMA camps are good because we won’t be in them! It’ll just be the Democrats!” And that’s a very interesting technique — or experiment — to see if you could do that. QAnon was pushing this idea that [former national security adviser] John Bolton was a good guy, that he wasn’t a part of the Deep State or the Washington elite, that bombing and invading Iran was actually a good thing, and that we should all advocate for that. So, once again, [QAnon was] converting a lot of the alternative conspiracy people who have been — rightfully — questioning what’s going on in Iran and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and suddenly turning them around and getting them to advocate invading Iran and taking their oil and whatnot. So this is really, really strange and disturbing — the speed that these people all dropped [their former convictions and began advocating for] things they were previously against. Instantly, in the course of a few weeks, they had reversed course and basically just became Trump Republicans, advocating that anything Trump says is good.

Louis Tackwood, Alex Constantine, Walter Bowart, Maury Terry, John W. DeCamp, Gordon Thomas, Christopher Simpson, Jordan Maxwell, Mae Brussell, Lyndon LaRouche, Dr. Peter Beter, Jack McLamb. Work plundered from all the above researchers has been stitched together by QAnon into a weird, sprawling patchwork quilt of conspiracies. That the original researchers are never cited by QAnon suggests that the purpose of Q — and particularly of the “Out of Shadows” documentary — is not to inform. It’s to disinform.

That’s why there are only four specific sources cited throughout “Out of Shadows”: the aforementioned former Hollywood stunt man named Mike Smith, who admits that his supposed information was gleaned from too much time spent surfing the internet while convalescing from a work-related injury, which means that his experiences in the film industry are irrelevant in the context of this film; a still active stunt man named Brad Martin; a “former” CIA operative named Kevin Shipp; and a journalist named Liz Crokin. That’s it. Instead of interviewing a university professor like Christopher Simpson about Project Paperclip, they use accurate information only to drive home the real point: Believe in the theories of QAnon. And what’s the inevitable result of accepting QAnon’s theories into your heart?

Voting for Donald Trump.

CAPITALIST PATRIOTISM
IS LOYALTY TO PROFIT
Warren Buffett invests $6bn in Japan's five biggest trading houses

The 90-year-old US business tycoon hopes for ‘opportunities of mutual benefit’

Mark Sweney
Tue 1 Sep 2020 
 

Warren Buffett’s move was well received in the Japanese market, pushing shares in the five trading companies up by between 6% in Itochu and 14% in Marubeni. Photograph: Nati Harnik/AP

Warren Buffett has invested $6bn in Japan’s five biggest trading houses, giant conglomerates involved in everything from importing food and textiles to the technology and manufacturing industries, as he looks to diversify beyond the US.

The surprise move by Buffett, who has just turned 90, means he is one of the biggest shareholders in Mitsubishi Corp, Mitsui & Co, Itochu Corp, Sumitomo Corp and Marubeni Corp.

Buffett’s investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, has taken a 5% stake in each of the “sogo shosha”, or general trading companies, that play a vital role in the Japanese economy and are increasingly becoming global players.

“The five major trading companies have many joint ventures throughout the world and are likely to have more of these partnerships,” Buffett said. “I hope that in the future there may be opportunities of mutual benefit.”


The stakes, which have been bought through the subsidiary National Indemnity, are worth more than $6.3bn (£4.7bn) combined. Berkshire intends to remain a key investor for the long term, potentially increasing its holding in any of the five trading houses, whose shares have fallen steeply during the pandemic, to 9.9%. The stakes have been built over the past year through regular purchases on the Tokyo stock exchange but have only just been disclosed.

The move was well received in the Japanese market, pushing shares in the five trading companies up by between 6% in Itochu and 14% in Marubeni. However, some analysts were surprised at the move, given that trading houses have not historically been considered winning investments.

Their cheap valuation may have been an attraction,” said Norihiro Fujito, the chief investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in Tokyo. “But it is un-Buffett-like to buy into all five companies rather than selecting a few.”


Japan has struggled economically, making it a prime target for investors seeking discounted stocks. Speculation that Buffett was looking there peaked last September, when his company raised $4bn in a yen bond issue. It was the largest ever by a non-Japanese institution. Berkshire Hathaway said it had 625.5bn yen of yen-denominated bonds outstanding.

The investment will help reduce Berkshire’s dependence on the US economy, which in the last quarter contracted by the most in at least 73 years. Berkshire Hathaway owns more than 90 businesses outright and has investments in dozens more, all mostly US, from American Express and Coca-Cola to Bank of America and a $125bn stake in Apple.

Many of its businesses have taken a hit during the coronavirus pandemic, including the aircraft parts maker Precision Castparts. Last month the company cut 10,000 staff, about 30% of its global workforce, and Berkshire Hathaway took a near-$10bn writedown on Precision Castparts’ assets.

BACKGROUNDER 

The Forgotten Conflict That Is Threatening Energy Markets

By Cyril Widdershoven - Jul 19, 2020

One of the world’s forgotten conflicts is now making headlines again. In the last week, the military conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has reignited, with the two nations having already been engaged in a military confrontation for decades. Nagorno Karabach, an Armenian enclave inside of Azerbaijan, is one of the main underlying factors for the conflict, but the growing rivalry between Russia and Turkey is also playing a part. More than 16 soldiers have been killed in the most recent round of fighting. Both sides are accusing each other of aggression and military action. The use of full scale armed forces and drones have been involved, killing several soldiers on both sides and reportedly an Azerbaijani general. The current outbreak of fighting has been the deadliest since the “April War” of 2016. While most clashes normally occur in and around the Armenian controlled Nagorno-Karabakh region, the current clashes are on the international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The international community is urging both sides to end the clashes. The United States, European Union, and the OSCE Minsk Group are trying to defuse the situation. While it remains unclear what reignited the conflict, it seems that Armenia played a large role in increasing tensions. Armenia recently constructed a new military outpost, which could have given Armenian armed forces a tactical advantage and tempted Azerbaijan to strike. At the same time, Azerbaijan is being buoyed by strong support from Ankara and may have wanted to test Russia’s support for Armenia. Remarkably, Armenia has called upon the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), of which Armenia is a member, to intervene. The CSTO’s response, from Yerevan’s point of view, however, is lacking. As of July 14, the CSTO has only called for a normalization of the situation on the border, not implying that it would provide military support for Armenia. The lack of vocal support from Moscow for Armenia is improving Azerbaijan’s position in the conflict. There is, however, a risk that the conflict will escalate to involve both Russia and Turkey.


While the military conflict may be drawing the majority of media attention, there is also an energy aspect to this conflict.


The military conflict gets full attention but another issue is a major threat to energy markets. The Caucasus is a major oil and gas transfer chokepoint, on which involves Russia, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Central Asian countries. Energy market observers should be concerned about the proximity of the current military clashes to the Baku-Turkey oil and gas pipeline systems.





Threats to these important oil and gas pipelines, which not only connect the Central Asian producers to the global markets but also stabilize the region due to growth potential and revenues, are already significant. Gazprom Armenia, a subsidiary of Russia’s energy giant Gazprom, stated on July 14 that gas pipelines had been damaged near the border of Azerbaijan. Increased military action on both sides will only increase the danger to existing regional oil and gas infrastructure. Turkey will be hit hard if this conflict does escalate as it is largely dependent on oil and gas from the region.


Related: Second Wave Of COVID-19 Won’t Crush Oil Prices








Regional analysts are already assessing the possibility that the current flare up may have been instigated by Russia. The Tovuz region where the fighting is taking place is particularly close to Azerbaijan's crucial South Caucasia pipeline (SCP). The SCP channels natural gas to Turkey's TANAP pipeline and is a key component of Ankara's efforts to decrease its dependence on Russian energy. For years, Turkey has been trying to diversify its energy imports, but Ankara is still heavily dependent on Moscow. Russian gas is twice as expensive for Turkey than it is for most European customers, which is why Ankara is so desperate to move away from Russia gas. By getting Azerbaijani gas via TANAP, Turkey has been able to significantly reduce its costs. The Azeri-Turkish partnership could deepen further as a new opportunity arises in 2021, when a major gas deal between Turkey and Russia is up for renewal. Those discussions stalled in April when the two counties failed to reach an agreement. All of this combined means that Russia could be looking at losing market share in a very important growth market. Related: Russia Looks To Woo Tech Companies As Oil Lags


The main pipeline, the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline, that supplies gas to Turkey from Azerbaijan, passes through the Tovuz region of Azerbaijan. This area borders the Armenian Tavush, where the clashes took place. Due to its geopolitically strategic location, a possible Turkish military intervention, especially considering its operations in Syria and Libya, is not unthinkable. Blowing up the current infrastructure in Azerbaijan would almost certainly ensure Turkish military involvement. "Turkey will never hesitate to stand against any attack on the rights and lands of Azerbaijan," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday. Erdogan suggested a wider conspiracy lay behind the latest fighting. Turkish pro-government media have been quick to accuse Moscow of encouraging Armenia to attack Azerbaijan, albeit without substantiating evidence. Some analysts believe Turkey’s actions in Libya and Syria are related to this new conflict. Ankara could be forcing a new front, and the hand of Moscow, to get some bargaining power in North Africa.








Whatever the cause of this latest conflict, the situation is on a knife’s edge. Azerbaijan, via its defense ministry, has warned Armenia that it could launch missile attacks on its Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant. These threats could be easily be countered by Armenian actions on Azerbaijan’s weak point, its oil and gas transit pipelines. The fallout would be felt not only in European markets, but globally as well.


By Cyril Widdershoven for Oilprice.com

What The UAE-Israel Deal Really Means For The Middle East

By Simon Watkins - Aug 31, 2020


The announcement on 13 August that Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will normalise relations, around the same as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was suspending plans to annex more areas of the West Bank that it seized during the 1967 ‘Six Dar War’, has naturally raised the adjunct question about what this deal means for the two powerhouses of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran? As with so many queries relating to the Middle East, the answer is not as straightforward as many might imagine, but it is outlined below. To begin with, the Israel-UAE deal is a lot more multi-layered than the simple announcement implies, which means that the response of Saudi and Iran to it is equally multi-faceted. “More than any other outcomes from this deal, the UAE wanted to put itself firmly in the U.S.’s most-favoured allies for receiving future business and financing deals, as it suffered a big hit from the Saudi-led oil price war that just ended, and to be included in the U.S.-Israel intelligence and security network to protect itself from Iran,” a senior source who works closely with the European Union (EU) on energy security told OilPrice.com last week. “This formal deal, though, just officially clarifies what has been happening for some time between Israel and the UAE in the field of intelligence co-operation to counteract Iran’s growing power in the region that has become more militaristic, given the increasing dominance of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] in Tehran,” he said.


A key part of this joint intelligence initiative between the UAE and Israel (and, by extension, the U.S.) has been the dramatic increase in the past two years of the purchase of commercial and adjunct residential properties in Iran’s southern Khuzestan province – a key sector for its oil and gas reserves – by UAE-registered businesses, particularly those based in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, said the source. “Around 500,000 Iranians left Iran around the time of the [1979 Islamic] Revolution and settled in Dubai, in the first instance, and then Abu Dhabi, and they have never been in favour of the IRGC having the key role in Iran, so some of them have been used to front businesses or commercial property developments in Khuzestan that are being funded from business registered in those two states of the UAE,” he added. 

“However, these apparently Abu Dhabi and Dubai businesses are actually being funded from a major Israeli property company that in turn is funded from a Israel-U.S. operation specifically set up for this project, with a budget of US$2.19 billion,” he told OilPrice.com. “These businesses, and the additional property acquisitions for the individuals working for these business in Khuzestan, mean that not only is the native Iranian population being diluted by non-Iranian Arabs [although broadly Persian in demographic terms, indigenous Arabs make up around two per cent of Iran’s population] but also the opportunity for on-the-ground intelligence gathering has been dramatically enhanced,” he underlined. “Basically, Israel is doing through the UAE presence in southern Iran exactly what Iran has been doing to Israel through its presence in Lebanon and Syria.”


Given the obvious opportunities for increased intelligence-gathering and economic and political disruption within Iran’s borders stemming from the new Israel-UAE deal, Iran has been unsurprisingly hostile to it. Iranian Parliament Speaker’s Special Aide for International Affairs, Amir-Abdollahian, made a very public show shortly after the announcement, of meeting with Palestine’s Ambassador to Tehran, Salah Zavavi, and stated that: “The UAE’s act to normalise relations with the Zionist regime is a strategic mistake, and the UAE government must accept responsibility for all its consequences.” He added that Iran remains firmly behind the Palestinian people. Palestine’s Zavavi asked the speakers of all parliaments of Islamic countries to condemn the action of the UAE and to support the ‘inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’.

More indicative of future actions over and above just words was the subsequent high-level meeting of Iran’s Defence Minister, Brigadier General Amir Hatami, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoygu. Even publically, Hatami alluded to the new military deals reached with China and Russia – revealed exclusively by OilPrice.com – referring to the joint strategic, regional and international goals and interests between Tehran and Moscow, underlining the “developing mutual defence co-operation” between the two sides. Hatami then castigated the U.S.’s recent attempts to invoke a ‘snapback’ of full international sanctions against Iran through the United Nations Security Council: “In recent years, Iran and Russia have launched a joint and purposeful effort to counter the unilateralism and bullying policies of the U.S. and the Trump administration in the region,” he noted. “The realistic response of the UN Security Council [UNSC] and the rejection of the recent U.S. anti-Iran resolution on extension of arms embargoes against Iran, once again, brought a major defeat for the U.S. and its regional allies and proved the global opposition to unilateralism,” he underlined.

“The guarantee of China and Russia’s support as two of just five Permanent Members on the UNSC was one of the absolutely key reasons why Iran agreed to the military elements of the 25-year deal it had made earlier with China,” said the EU source. Indeed, with this new Israel-UAE deal now formally announced, the IRGC (with the rubber-stamped blessing of Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) is fully set to allow the presence of Chinese and Russia naval assets in and around Iran’s key ports at Chabahar, Bandar-e-Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas, in line with the military element of the agreement, as from 9 November, a senior source who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week.

These deployments will be accompanied by the roll-out of Chinese and Russian electronic warfare (EW) capabilities that will encompass each of the three key EW areas - electronic support (including early warning of enemy weapons use) plus electronic attack (including jamming systems) plus electronic protection (including of enemy jamming). Based originally around neutralising NATO’s C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems, part of the new roll-out of software and hardware from China and Russia in Iran will be the Russian S-400 anti-missile air defence system (“to counter U.S. and/or Israeli attacks”) and the Krasukha-2 and -4 systems (“as they proved their effectiveness in Syria in countering the radars of attack, reconnaissance and unmanned aircraft”).

So, what will Saudi Arabia’s position be in the wake of the Israel-UAE deal? “Saudi Arabia, in particular, may be quietly supportive but is unlikely to normalise relations,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington told OilPrice.com last week. “The clerical establishment has had a privileged role in the Kingdom since the eighteenth century, the king is the custodian of the two holy mosques, and Saudi Arabia is the founder of the Organization of the Islamic Conference,” he added. ‘Quietly’ is the operative word here as, according to the Iran source, currently 62 per cent of the aforementioned US$2.19 billion Israel-UAE property fund for new settlements of UAE citizens into Iran’s Khuzestan comes from “Saudi Arabian-connected organisations.”

This fits in with the widely held view among dedicated-Saudi analysts that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) is far more sympathetic to the agreement – and to the ultimate strategic aim of the U.S. and Israel of undermining the IRGC’s grip on the country – than his father, King Salman. King Salman told the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation just last year that the Palestinian cause remained a core issue and that the kingdom “refuses any measures that touch the historical and legal position of East Jerusalem.” On the other hand, he is 84 years old and in poor health and even Saudi’s Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, cautiously welcomed the Israel-UAE agreement, saying: “It could be viewed as positive.” It is also apposite to note that back in 2002 – not that long ago in global geopolitical terms - it was the Saudis who launched the ‘Crown Prince Abdullah Peace Plan’ at the Beirut Arab summit, offering Israel full recognition in exchange for a return to its pre-1967 borders.


By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

WHITE Americans divided over armed civilians at protests

Associated Press

Boise, Idaho — The scenes have become commonplace in 2020: People gathered at state Capitols with semiautomatic long guns strapped across their chests. A couple near St. Louis emerging from their mansion brandishing firearms as Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched by the house. Men roaming the streets with rifles during protests over racial inequality, punctuated by two people being killed in Wisconsin and another in Portland over the weekend.

The coronavirus pandemic, protests against racism and police killings, a rancorous election year and a perception that cities are being overrun by violent mobs have brought about a markedly more aggressive stance by some gun owners and widened the divide over firearms in America.

WHITE Americans are turning out more often and more visibly with guns, a sign of the tension engulfing the country.

Last week’s arrest of a 17-year-old accused of killing two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with a semiautomatic rifle is just the latest flashpoint. Then over the weekend, a caravan of President Donald Trump supporters streamed into Portland, resulting in a clash with protesters in which a supporter of a right-wing group was fatally shot.

The teenager and other gun-toting protesters have been denounced as radical vigilantes who benefit from a double-standard — that if they were Black gun owners brandishing their firearms, the police would use deadly force against them.

To others, FOX NEWS VIEWERS, they are patriots seeking to bring law and order to cities that have been overtaken by extremists. 

“I would have done the same thing, to be honest with you,” Todd Scott, of Covington, Georgia, said of the teenager in Kenosha. He’s viewed video of the teen, Kyle Rittenhouse, being chased by protesters and believes he was acting in self-defense.

Scott himself once used his gun to break up violence, becoming a bit of a local hero in 2015 after a gunman killed a clerk and a customer at the liquor store where he was picking up beer. Scott fired on the suspect before he fled.

Kat Ellsworth, who heads the Liberal Gun Owners club in Illinois and who lives in Chicago, is appalled by those who have converged on protests and are openly carrying firearms. She believes those gun owners have been emboldened by Trump, who has made law and order a central part of his re-election bid.

The scenes of primarily white men walking around city streets openly carrying firearms, or of those who have flocked to state Capitols to protest pandemic business restrictions, are a demonstration, she believes, of white privilege. She’s convinced that a group of Black gun owners with AR-15s in public would be dealt with much differently

“I view them as instigators and I view them as people looking for an excuse to shoot people of color,” said Ellsworth, who is white.
The killings in Kenosha almost immediately opened up a new front in the culture wars over guns. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson called the episode a result of authorities refusing to bring law and order to the city.

“How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

Around the same time last week, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who were seen outside their St. Louis home brandishing a rifle and a handgun, were given a coveted prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention, where they defended their right to bear arms.

In the first half of this year, the turmoil has fueled an unprecedented buying spree of firearms.

Every month so far has smashed last year’s numbers of background checks. In a few instances, the number of background checks have soared past previous records set by a background check system that began in 1998.

So far this year, nearly 23 million background checks have been conducted, though not all checks were for firearm purchases. Still, the gun industry estimates that 40% of firearm purchases have been made by first-time buyers, or about 5 million people.

Ed Turner, a former police officer from metro Atlanta who now owns gun shops in Georgia, said he cringes seeing people openly carrying firearms. If someone is truly worried about their own safety, he said, concealing the weapon is “a much better approach than walking around like John Wayne.”

Among the people flocking to his gun shops, he has seen mostly women, African Americans and Latinos concerned about their personal safety and buying a firearm for the first time.

He considers their concerns justified amid calls to “defund the police” and riots that have some cases led to police stations being attacked.

“I am stunned that that behavior is allowed to go on,” he said.

Gun-control activists have viewed the situation in Kenosha, as well as the other protests that have drawn people openly carrying firearms, as a direct result of Trump’s firebrand rhetoric.

“It is because of an extreme world view that has been only encouraged at the highest levels of government, and by the gun lobby that has condoned their presence there,” said Nick Suplina, the managing director of law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “The presence of armed militia at these protests are not there merely to protect property but are there to intimidate protesters, to chill speech and sometimes worse,” said Nick Suplina, the managing director of law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety.

'Trump stokes violence in our cities, he can't stop it because he's fomented it' - Joe Biden

Biden condemns opponent as 'toxic' and denounces violent protest

Speech: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Mill 19 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images


Alexandra Jaffe, Joseph Lemire and Will Weissert
September 01 2020 

Declaring Donald Trump a "toxic presence," Joe Biden forcefully condemned the violence at recent protests while also blaming the US president for fomenting the divide that's sparking it.

"He doesn't want to shed light, he wants to generate heat, and he's stoking violence in our cities," Mr Biden said. "He can't stop the violence because for years he's fomented it."




Biden attacks Trump for 'fomenting violence'

In one of his sharpest attacks on the president yet, Mr Biden went on to call Mr Trump a "toxic presence in this nation for four years" and accuse him of "poisoning the values this nation has always held dear, poisoning our very democracy".

"In just a little over 60 days, we have a decision to make: Will we rid ourselves of this toxin? Or make it a permanent part of our nation's character?" Mr Biden asked.

The speech marked a new phase of the campaign as the Democratic challenger steps up his travel after largely remaining near his home in Wilmington, Delaware, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. And, after focusing his candidacy on accusing Mr Trump of mishandling the pandemic, Mr Biden is making a broader push to argue Americans won't be safe if his opponent wins re-election.

That was an effort to blunt Mr Trump's line of argument that a Biden presidency would mean more violence and rioting in the streets, part of the law and order message the president is emphasising as some protests against racial injustice have become violent.

The Trump campaign has sought to keep that focus because a sense has taken hold in his camp that the more the national discourse is about anything other than the virus, the better it is for the president.

The president tweeted: "The Radical Left Mayors & Governors of Cities where this crazy violence is taking place have lost control of their 'Movement.' It wasn't supposed to be like this, but the Anarchists & Agitators got carried away and don't listen anymore - even forced Slow Joe out of basement!"

Mr Trump and his Republican allies have falsely accused Mr Biden of ignoring the violence committed by some protesters at recent demonstrations after people were shot at protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon in recent weeks.

Yesterday Mr Biden denounced violence and looting at protests.


"It's lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted," he said.

He also accused Mr Trump of being too "weak" to call on his own supporters to stop acting as "armed militia". And he leaned on his own 47-year career in politics to defend himself against Republican attacks.

"You know me. You know my heart. You know my story, my family's story," he said. "Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?"

Mr Biden hit Mr Trump on everything from his handling of the coronavirus pandemic to the economy to relations with Russia.

He declared that even as the president is "trying to scare America", what was really causing the nation's fear was Mr Trump's own failures.

Mr Biden pointed to a rise in murders this past year, the tens of thousands dead from the coronavirus and the economic damage done by the pandemic. "You want to talk about fear? They're afraid they're going to get Covid, they're afraid they're going to get sick and die," Mr Biden said.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin, the National Guard was deployed to quell demonstrations in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, that have resulted in some looting, vandalism and the shooting deaths of two protesters.

One of Mr Trump's supporters was shot at a demonstration in Portland, Oregon, prompting multiple tweets from the president.

Portland has seen nearly 100 consecutive nights of Black Lives Matter protests, with vandalism to federal and city property.

Mr Trump and other speakers at last week's Republican National Convention frequently highlighted incidents of violence at protests that were sparked by the police killing of George Floyd last May, predicting that if Mr Biden is elected in November such incidents will become the norm.

Mr Biden in turn has accused his opponent of viewing the violence as a "political benefit."

"He's rooting for more violence, not less," Mr Biden said last week.

Neuralink put a chip in Gertrude the pig’s brain. It might be useful one day

Screenshot from Neuralink video

September 1, 2020

A recent demonstration video released by Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink might not look like much at first. In the video, a pig named Gertrude eats snacks from a person’s hand, while an accompanying computer screen displays blue lines that peak and trough, accompanied by some musical bleeps and bloops.

But this is no ordinary pig. Gertrude has been surgically implanted with a brain-monitoring device and, as the video’s narrator explains, the bleeps and bloops represent data being collected from the implanted device (in this case, extra contact with the snout means more bleeps and bloops, and bigger peaks in the visual data).

The important thing here is not the data itself collected via the Neuralink device in Gertrude’s brain. It’s no surprise that touching a pig’s sensitive snout causes neurons to fire in its brain.

The most interesting thing is how free Gertrude is to move around while the implanted chip collects the data.

Credit: Neuralink.


Not stuck to a hospital bed

This video shows Neuralink has created an implant device that can deliver brain recordings to a computer in real time while the brain’s owner is moving around and interacting with the world.

That’s a pretty big step forward, and it’s definitely an element that has been been missing from the research on brain-computer interfaces thus far. While some other wireless brain implants exist, they require major surgeries to implant and are typically either bulky or limited in where in the brain they can be placed.

There is a lot of research on how to decode data from the brain and the readings generated from more traditional brain-monitoring devices, but we don’t have good ways to collect that data.

So if Neuralink can get this device into humans, and it works, that would be hugely exciting for researchers.

Read more: Linking brains to computers: how new implants are helping us achieve this goal

Taking a breather

In terms of what data you can get from Neuralink’s device, however, things are a bit less exciting. This device covers data collected from a tiny part of the cortex from a small number of neurons. In humans, we know important brain functions typically use many parts of the brain at once, involving millions of neurons.

To use a device like this to, for example, help restore some mobility to a person who is quadriplegic, you’d need it to collect much more data, from a much bigger area of the brain.

It’s also worth taking a breather to remind ourselves that there is still so much we don’t understand about how to decode data collected from brain-computer interfaces.
Neuralink aims to develop brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers. Shutterstock

While we’ve come to understand a lot about how the brain works, there is currently no way to predict what makes any specific neuron fire or not fire.

We don’t fully understand the complex patterns produced in brain monitoring. We can say “this area of the cortex seems to be involved in such-and-such function”, but we don’t always know exactly how it is involved or how to make it work “better”.

So we are not yet at the point where Neuralink’s device puts us on the cusp of being able to improve memory or attention, or to use our brains to send a hands-free message to your partner’s phone.

But the device might help us towards exciting steps such as restoring the ability to talk, or move a wheelchair or robotic arm using signals from the brain. And for people in those situations, any incremental progress is very promising.

It’s like Neuralink has invented the wristwatch before the clock itself has been fully invented.
A new stage

Musk told reporters the company is preparing for first human implantation soon, pending required approvals and further safety testing.

Today, I am in my lab working on experiments that aim to train people to improve their visual attention. I observe them trying to focus their attention on a task, and giving them feedback on how well they are doing based on the signals I can see in their brains in real time.

But these people are not free to move around the lab or go about their daily lives - they are bound, by necessity, to the machines I need to use to do my research.

If, one day, researchers like me could use a device like Neuralink’s to collect data without my subjects being so constrained, that would represent a new stage in this area of research.

Read more: Brain-machine interfaces are getting better and better – and Neuralink's new brain implant pushes the pace

Author

Angela Renton
PhD candidate (Cognitive Neuroscience/ Neuroengineering), The University of Queensland
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