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Authored by Diana Johnstone via ConsortiumNews,com,

Whew.  Finally, at last, the United Kingdom has formally left the European Union.  Here in Paris, the champions of French withdrawal from the EU are celebrating. They see Brexit as the harbinger of a future “Frexit,” a French departure from undemocratic governance, and the beginning of the end of a failed project to unify Europe around the demands of neoliberal capitalism.

But the paradox is that the champions of European unification might be celebrating even more – if it weren’t too late. Because years of British membership have already helped shatter the original dreams of a united Europe, whether the aspirations of the federalists for political unity or the project of a European confederation of independent states advocated by Charles De Gaulle some 60 years ago. 

Way back then, when De Gaulle was meeting with the aged West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to promote Franco-German reconciliation, the two old statesmen were thinking in terms of working gradually toward a partnership of core European states that would preserve their sovereignty within a confederation ensuring peace and cooperation.

French President Charles de Gaulle, left, and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1961. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

From the start, the question of British membership appeared as a thorn in the side of European unity. Initially, London was opposed to the Common Market.  In 1958, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan assailed it as “the Continental Blockade” (alluding to Napoleon’s 1806 European policy) and said England would not stand for it.  But as the project seemed to take shape, London sought accommodation.

De Gaulle warned from the start that Great Britain didn’t belong in a unified Europe, geographically, economically or above all psychologically.

The remark has become famous: in 1944, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, in a quarrelsome exchange, U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill reportedly told De Gaulle that if Britain had to choose, it would always go for “the open sea” rather than the European continent.

Of course, Britain long ago lost both Churchill and its empire.  Nevertheless, Brits remain psychologically wedded to their island status, the origin of their overwhelming maritime power that built the empire and has left traces of English-speaking nations and preferred trade relations all around the world.  They do not normally feel part of “the continent” and the traditional policy of their governments was always to keep the continent divided and weak.  This policy was passed on to London’s pupils in Washington, echoed in the description of NATO’s purpose: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down” – the joke that tells the truth.

De Gaulle Envisioned American Trojan Horse

Sixty years ago, De Gaulle, who envisaged a European confederation as a way to achieve independence from the American liberators (who came to stay), saw very clearly that the U.K. would be America’s Trojan horse in the European community. That is called vision, the quality of a statesman – a breed that seems to have died out in the West.  He opposed British membership as long as he could, but the American influence was too great.  And curiously enough, the ardent European federalists joined in promoting British membership, seemingly unaware that such membership was totally incompatible with the political unity they desired.

British leaders, firmly attached to their parliament, their royalty, their class system, and their unique role in the world — now largely passed on to their heirs in Washington — never would consider genuine political unity with the continent.  But as a trading nation, they wanted to be part of a Europe that would favor free trade, period.

The United Kingdom first applied for membership in 1961, at a time when it comprised the central core made up of France, Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy.

But as long as De Gaulle was president of France, this was not possible, despite U.S. support (the United States has always supported enlargement, notably Turkish membership, now considered out of the question).  The United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community only on Jan. 1, 1973, bringing with it both Ireland and Denmark, another advocate of free trade.

Bringing in Britain was the decisive step toward making unified Europe into a vast free market, a step toward globalization.  This was indeed the program of Jean Monnet, a totally Americanized French businessman who plotted the path to European unity through purely economic measures, indifferent to political issues. But it took British weight to pull Europe firmly in that direction, away from the original Common Market idea (removing trade barriers only among Member States) toward an open market, with minimum trade barriers, extending the benefits of its “free competition” doctrine to such giants as the United States and China.

Leon Brittan Enforced Neoliberalism 

Leon Brittan in February 2011. (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Wikimedia Commons)

In 1989, U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appointed Leon Brittan to the post of European Commissioner for competition, where he stayed until 1999 in charge of trade and external affairs. In Brussels his was the most powerful influence in confirming the EU’s role as chief enforcer of neoliberal policies. At the same time, Thatcher demanded “her money back” and strengthened the U.K.’s own freedom from European institutional constraints.

The U.K. never agreed to the Schengen agreement on EU borders and declined to scrap the pound sterling for the euro — a wise move, no doubt.  But also symptomatic of the essential incapacity of the U.K. to fully merge with the continent.

At the same time, the presence of London has certainly contributed to the total inability of the EU to develop a foreign policy that deviates from that of Washington. Britain supported the enlargement to the East which has made the EU more politically disunited than ever and has been the strongest supporter of the paranoid Russophobia of Poland and the Baltic States which pushes other European countries into a dangerous conflict with Russia that is contrary to their own interests.

EU Members’ Own Mistakes

Not that Britain is responsible for everything that is wrong with the European Union today.  A major mistake was made by French President François Mitterrand in the 1980s when he insisted on a “common European currency” under the illusion that this would help France contain Germany — when it turned out not only to do the contrary but to ruin Greece and cause ravages in Portugal, Spain and Italy.

And there are plenty of other mistakes that have been made, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s invitation to come to Europe, ostensibly addressed to Syrian war refugees but understood by millions of unfortunates in the Middle East and Africa as meant for themselves. 

And certainly, there were and are a minority of U.K. residents who sincerely identify with Europe and want to feel part of it.  But they are a minority.  Britain has for too many centuries cherished and celebrated its uniqueness for that to be erased by complex impersonal institutions.

As Great Britain returns to the uncertainties of the open sea, it leaves behind a European Union that is bureaucratically governed to serve the interests of financial capital. Member States, such as Macron’s France, are governed according to EU decrees against the will of their people. British membership contributed to this denial of democracy, but paradoxically, the British people themselves are the first to reject it and demand a return to full national sovereignty. 

Even the ardent fans of European Unity increasingly insist that they want “a different Europe,” recognizing that the project has failed to produce the wonders that were promised. But changing this particular Europe would require unanimity between the 27 remaining, and increasingly quarrelsome, member states.

That is why the idea is growing that it may be time to give up this failed European union and start all over, seeking political understanding issue by issue between sovereign democracies rather than a nonfunctional economic unity as decreed by transnational capitalist bureaucracy.

Authored by Steven Guinness,

Putting yourself in the mind of someone who commits an act of illegality is perhaps the only way we can begin to understand the motivation behind the transgression. A common reflex reaction to the most heinous of crimes is to simply call for the perpetrator to be removed from society and put in prison. Out of sight, out of mind. Whilst this is not an unreasonable expectation, it does not get to the root of why he or she became a criminal.

We can take a similar stance when it comes to globalism. If a self appointed elite who permeate institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the IMF share a desire to concentrate world power through a centralised network of global governance, rather than simply rebel against this vision is it not equally as important to try and understand the vision from the perspective of those who created it? I would argue that to comprehend the minds of global planners it is necessary to mentally place yourself into their way of thinking.

A couple of years ago I published an article called, Order Out of Chaos: A Look at the Trilateral Commission, where I examined some of the key motivations behind this particular institution’s goals. I quoted past members of the Commission openly rejecting national sovereignty and championing the interdependence of nations. One of those quotes was from Sadako Ogata, a former member of the Trilateral Commission’s Executive Committee, who at an event to mark 25 years of the institution remarked how ‘international interdependence requires new and more intensive forms of international cooperation to counteract economic and political nationalism‘.

Shortly after the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973, one of its members, Richard Gardner, wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine (the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations). In ‘The Hard Road to World Order‘, Gardner emphasised the objective of dismantling national sovereignty:

In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.

With Britain in the process of leaving the European Union, you could argue that one of the main planks of the Commission’s agenda has failed. If the global elite want the integration of European nations, and for the majority of those nations to be controlled through a centralised behemoth like the EU, surely seeing the UK become independent from the union goes against everything they believe in? Not necessarily.

Back in 2014 and before globalists began touting political protectionism / nationalism as a danger to financial stability, the Trilateral Commission published a paper called,’Credible European Governance‘. Within the paper the UK’s membership of the single market is discussed, an issue which has been central to the narrative on Brexit since the referendum:

A debate on competences has been launched by the British government on Britain’s future position in Europe where reference is made to the Single Market. Today, most EU countries accept that the euro area represents what President Van Rompuy calls the “symbolic heart of the European Union”. For the United Kingdom, the single market is the essence of the EU. Can these two visions continue to coexist within the EU, now that the euro area is surmounting its “existential crisis”?

I asked in 2017 whether this passage in particular was not only questioning the UK’s position inside the single market, but by extension it’s membership of the European Union. It was the same paper that quoted Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Union:

People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognize necessity when crisis is upon them.

As I have discussed in previous articles, this philosophy gives credence to the theory that crisis scenarios, rather than being a detriment to the aspirations of globalists, present an opportunity to further their grip on power.

At the latter end of 2015, just months before the EU referendum, the Commission produced another paper conceived by four David Rockefeller fellows – ‘EUROPE’S NEW NORMAL: SIMULTANEOUS CRISES THAT THREATEN TO UNRAVEL THE EU‘. The authors wrote at length about the growing distrust of ‘ever closer union‘ following the European debt crisis that originated after the collapse of Lehman Brothers:

Many Europeans have come to suspect that the EU’s institutions have become overly powerful and some think that they have even used the latest crises for a further power grab. 

A solution put forward by the fellows was that ‘some flow into the opposite direction might help Europeans to regain trust in the European process‘.

This was my response published back in 2017:

One interpretation of this remark is that countries be granted a platform to express their grievances with the European Union, perhaps even to the point of seeking renewed independence or opting to withdraw from the bloc altogether. From their own perspective the union desires a sharing of sovereignty rather than individual expressions of it. Therefore, a nation instigating a greater level of autonomy (dubbed protectionism / populism in some quarters) might eventually suffer lasting consequences given the steadfast and federalist nature of the supranational EU. Over time countries demonstrating more nationalistic tendencies could quite easily unravel into crisis. Especially if separation from the union results in a nation being compromised economically. In this scenario, might those same Europeans opposed to further integration become more receptive to the idea?

The ultimate question then is whether the outbreak of a ‘crisis’ is organic, in the sense that it happens beyond the control of government and globalist institutions. Or whether instances such as Brexit were designed to happen to further the agenda for more power. You may ask why the UK would be permitted to leave the EU when the objective is for ‘ever closer union‘. But without Brexit and further instances of a rise in ‘populism‘, calls for reform have no traction. Crisis must either originate or be instigated to achieve the desired response from the electorate. Calling for reform inside a vacuum of no discernible unrest on a geopolitical level leaves institutions like the EU exposed to greater scrutiny.

Moving forward to the present day, last week Chatham House published an article (Managing the rising influence of nationalism) that was part of a special report from the World Economic Forum titled, ‘Shaping a Multiconceptual World‘.

Here, Chatham House observed that ‘the process of globalization demanded that all states adapt to being part of a shared project and subject themselves to its norms and laws‘, and that ‘the European Union became the vanguard of this process of post‑nationalism.’

They identified that European identity was essentially anti-nationalist in nature. But the growth of nationalism witnessed throughout Europe over the past five years has distorted this belief. Combating it will require ‘investing over the coming years in the legitimacy of major international institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund.’

According to Chatham House, without investment, ‘these institutions will find they are increasingly ineffective.’ In short, the advent of a new wave of nationalism has created a narrative that global bodies will require more power to shore up both trade and economic stability now and into the future.

At the same time this article was published, it was announced at the World Economic Forum that businessman George Soros is to launch a ‘global network of higher education‘ against nationalism, with investment of $1 billion. By coincidence or otherwise, Chatham House is involved in the initiative. Here is what Soros himself said about it:

I believe that as a long-term strategy our best hope lies in access to quality education, specifically an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating critical thinking and emphasising academic freedom.

The tide turned against open societies after the crash of 2008 because it constituted a failure of international co-operation. This in turn led to the rise of nationalism, the great enemy of open society.

But is a resurgence of nationalism really the ‘great enemy‘ that Soros makes out, given that crisis on a global scale invariably leads to opportunity? One example is from an op-ed written by former IMF Deputy Director Mohamed A. El-Erian, who in 2017 questioned whether a rise in populism and nationalism throughout the world could be remedied by revamping the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights:

So, do today’s anti-globalisation winds – caused in part by poor global policy coordination in the context of too many years of low and insufficiently inclusive growth – create scope for enhancing the SDR’s role and potential contributions?

We have seen as well how the EU and the World Trade Organisation have presented proposals for the wide scale reformation of the WTO in the wake of renewed nationalism. And as regular readers will know, central banks led by the BIS and IMF are rapidly advancing plans to reform global payment systems and introduce digital currencies. These were not public considerations prior to the likes of Brexit. They only started to gather momentum after nationalism became a permanent fixture on the geopolitical landscape.

The overriding sentiment from globalists has been that a combination of political and economic protectionism is a direct threat to financial stability. The IMF, the BIS and the World Bank have all over recent months been ramping up warnings about the dangers of an impending economic downturn. Two weeks ago the IMF’s new Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva commented at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington:

We have to learn the lessons of history while adapting them for our times. We know that excessive inequality hinders growth and hollows out a country’s foundations. It erodes trust within society and institutions. It can fuel populism and political upheaval.

As well as the IMF, the start of 2020 saw the World Bank warn of a impending global debt crisis and how persistently low interest rates might not be enough to stave off a downturn. In the autumn of 2019 the BIS warned how an unsustainable rise in leveraged loans could jeopardise the financial system. The IMF joined them a few weeks later by declaring that ‘accommodative monetary policy is supporting the economy in the near-term, but easy financial conditions are encouraging financial risk-taking and are fuelling a further build-up of vulnerabilities.’

The one issue binding all these warnings together is trade protectionism, which stems directly from the resurgence in political nationalism.

Beyond the global economic houses, France’s President Macron said in 2018 that in relation to trade conflict, ‘economic nationalism leads to war.’ BHP boss Andrew Mackenzie said in August 2019 that the rise of nationalism presented a risk to the global economy. Even China and Russia have spoken out against the build up of trade protectionism, saying it will compromise the global economy.

Now is the time to put yourself into the mind of a globalist. Whether it be the Innovation BIS 2025 project or the UN’s Agenda 2030 sustainability goals, what circumstances would benefit these people the most in furthering their ambitions? What would have to occur for the elite to gain widespread public support for policies that would fundamentally change our way of life? If an increased break out of trade protectionism and political populism triggered an economic collapse, would this impair the autonomy of global institutions? Or would it serve to reinvigorate them in the sense of scapegoating nationalism as being responsible for the rupture of the ‘rules based global order‘ founded after World War Two?

From a globalist perspective, national sovereignty – the independent nation state – has no place in an interconnected world. It is an outmoded concept. The goal is always to further centralise power. But by what means exactly?

Recall what Richard Gardner said back in 1974: ‘an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.’

The institutions cited in this article are not ignorant to the plight of the global economy. The policies enacted since 2008, from near zero interest rates and trillions of dollars in quantitative easing measures to rising interest rates and quantitative tightening, has brought the financial system to where it is today. Central banks know perfectly well the effect their policies have on the health of economies, evidenced by comments from Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell back in 2012:

Right now, we are buying the market, effectively, and private capital will begin to leave that activity and find something else to do. So when it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response.

Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.

From a UK standpoint, the country’s departure from the EU may appear on the surface to be rallying against the tide of globalism. But my concern is that globalists will successfully manage to position Brexit and the spectre of a global trade conflict as causes for an economic collapse, when in fact it is monetary policy over the last twelve years which will be the primary culprit.

Rather than heavy handedly marching into western nations and claiming their sovereignty, I would be concerned that the global elite will allow nationalist movements to fall on their own sword, and for the onset of a series of crises to consume geopolitics throughout the next decade. The job then would be to implement a whole raft of reforms and to educate the next generation on the perils of self determination.

The realisation of a ‘new world order‘ means tearing down existing structures, or at the very least jeopardising them to the point of collapse, to facilitate the new. Out of resurgent nationalism may come a swathe of centralised directives that make today’s level of globalisation seem tame by comparison.

Over half a million Americans are currently homeless.

After a period of progress and decline, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that the U.S. homeless population has increased slightly by three percent according to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It now stands at 567,715 with 63 percent of that total living in sheltered accommodation. The national increase is primarily due to a leap in homelessness in California where it grew 16.4 percent between 2018 and 2019.

More than half of all unsheltered homeless people in the U.S. – some 53 percent – are in California. That’s nearly nine times as many as the state with the second-highest total of unsheltered homeless which is Florida.

Homelessness is primarily an urban issue and more than half of the homeless population is scattered across the country’s 50 biggest cities. Nearly a quarter of them live in just two cities – New York and Los Angeles. Despite its considerable homeless population, New York can at least claim that the vast majority of its rough sleepers are given sheltered accommodation with only 4.4 percent estimated to be living on the streets. The same cannot be said of the state of California where 71.7 percent of all homeless people are unsheltered.

The infographic below also shows the top-10 worst cities for homelessness across the U.S. with New York in first place with 78,604.

You will find more infographics at Statista

It’s important to mention that in this comparison, the data is broken down by CoC – those are Continuums of Care that are local planning bodies coordinating responses to the issue.

Los Angeles is in second place with over 56,000 while Seattle/King County comes third with 11,199.

Authored by Craig Murray,

A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.

A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading. The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.

Before I analyse these particular emails, I should make plain that they are not the major point. The major point is that the FBI claimed it had no records mentioning Seth Rich, and these have come to light in response to a different FOIA request that was not about him. What other falsely denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not fortuitously picked up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals?

To look at the documents themselves, they have to be read from the bottom up, and they consist of a series of emails between members of the Washington Field Office of the FBI (WF in the telegrams) into which Strzok was copied in, and which he ultimately forwarded on to the lawyer Lisa Page.

The opening email, at the bottom, dated 10 August 2016 at 10.32am, precisely just one month after the murder of Seth Rich, is from the media handling department of the Washington Field Office. It references Wikileaks’ offer of a reward for information on the murder of Seth Rich, and that Assange seemed to imply Rich was the source of the DNC leaks. The media handlers are asking the operations side of the FBI field office for any information on the case. The unredacted part of the reply fits with the official narrative. The redacted individual officer is “not aware of any specific involvement” by the FBI in the Seth Rich case. But his next sentence is completely redacted. Why?

It appears that “adding” references a new person added in to the list. This appears to have not worked, and probably the same person (precisely same length of deleted name) then tries again, with “adding … for real” and blames the technology – “stupid Samsung”. The interesting point here is that the person added appears not to be in the FBI – a new redacted addressee does indeed appear, and unlike all the others does not have an FBI suffix after their deleted email address. So who are they?

(This section on “adding” was updated after commenters offered a better explanation than my original one. See first comments below).

The fourth email, at 1pm on Wednesday August 10, 2016, is much the most interesting. It is ostensibly also from the Washington Field Office, but it is from somebody using a different classified email system with a very different time and date format than the others. It is apparently from somebody more senior, as the reply to it is “will do”. And every single word of this instruction has been blanked. The final email, saying that “I squashed this with …..”, is from a new person again, with the shortest name. That phrase may only have meant I denied this to a journalist, or it may have been reporting an operational command given.

As the final act in this drama, Strzok then sent the whole thread on to the lawyer, which is why we now have it. Why?

It is perfectly possible to fill in the blanks with a conversation that completely fits the official narrative. The deletions could say this was a waste of time and the FBI was not looking at the Rich case. But in that case, the FBI would have been delighted to publish it unredacted. (The small numbers in the right hand margins supposedly detail the exception to the FOIA under which deletion was made. In almost every case they are one or other category of invasion of privacy).

And if it just all said “Assange is talking nonsense. Seth Rich is nothing to do with the FBI” then why would that have to be sent on by Strzok to the FBI lawyer?

It is of course fortunate that Strzok did forward this one email thread on to the lawyer, because that is the only reason we have seen it, as a result of an FOI(A) request for the correspondence between those two.

Finally, and perhaps this is the most important point, the FBI was at this time supposed to be in the early stages of an investigation into how the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. The FBI here believed Wikileaks to be indicating the material had been leaked by Seth Rich who had then been murdered. Surely in any legitimate investigation, the investigators would have been absolutely compelled to check out the truth of this possibility, rather than treat it as a media issue?

We are asked to believe that not one of these emails says “well if the publisher of the emails says Seth Rich was the source, we had better check that out, especially as he was murdered with no sign of a suspect”. If the FBI really did not look at that, why on earth not? If the FBI genuinely, as they claim, did not even look at the murder of Seth Rich, that would surely be the most damning fact of all and reveal their “investigation” was entirely agenda driven from the start.

In June 2016 a vast cache of the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. On 10 July 2016 an employee from the location of the leak was murdered without obvious motive, in an alleged street robbery in which nothing at all was stolen. Not to investigate the possibility of a link between the two incidents would be grossly negligent. It is worth adding that, contrary to a propaganda barrage, Bloomingdale where Rich was murdered is a very pleasant area of Washington DC and by no means a murder hotspot. It is also worth noting that not only is there no suspect in Seth Rich’s murder, there has never been any semblance of a serious effort to find the killer. Washington police appear perfectly happy simply to write this case off.

I anticipate two responses to this article in terms of irrelevant and illogical whataboutery:

Firstly, it is very often the case that family members are extremely resistant to the notion that the murder of a relative may have wider political implications. This is perfectly natural. The appalling grief of losing a loved one to murder is extraordinary; to reject the cognitive dissonance of having your political worldview shattered at the same time is very natural. In the case of David Kelly, of Seth Rich, and of Wille Macrae, we see families reacting with emotional hostility to the notion that the death raises wider questions. Occasionally the motive may be still more mixed, with the prior relationship between the family and the deceased subject to other strains (I am not referencing the Rich case here).

You do occasionally get particularly stout hearted family who take the opposite tack and are prepared to take on the authorities in the search for justice, of which Commander Robert Green, son of Hilda Murrell, is a worthy example.

(As an interesting aside, I just checked his name in the Wikipedia article on Hilda, which I discovered describes Tam Dalyell “hounding” Margaret Thatcher over the Belgrano and the fact that ship was steaming away from the Falklands when destroyed with massive loss of life as a “second conspiracy theory”, the first of course being the murder of Hilda Murrell. Wikipedia really has become a cesspool.)

We have powerful cultural taboos that reinforce the notion that if the family do not want the question of the death of their loved one disturbed, nobody else should bring it up. Seth Rich’s parents, David Kelly’s wife, Willie Macrae’s brother have all been deployed by the media and the powers behind them to this effect, among many other examples. This is an emotionally powerful but logically weak method of restricting enquiry.

Secondly, I do not know and I deliberately have not inquired what are the views on other subjects of either Mr Ty Clevenger, who brought his evidence and blog to my attention, or Judicial Watch, who made the FOIA request that revealed these documents. I am interested in the evidence presented both that the FBI lied, and in the documents themselves. Those who obtained the documents may, for all I know, be dedicated otter baiters or believe in stealing ice cream from children. I am referencing the evidence they have obtained in this particular case, not endorsing – or condemning – anything else in their lives or work. I really have had enough of illogical detraction by association as a way of avoiding logical argument by an absurd extension of ad hominem argument to third parties.

*  *  *

Unlike his adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, Craig’s blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate. Subscriptions to keep Craig’s blog going are gratefully received.