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Authored by John Vibes via TheMindUnleashed.com,

According to the first Briton to go into space, Dr. Helen Sharman, extraterrestrials do exist, and it could even be possible that they are among us here on Earth. Sharman recently spoke with Observer Magazine about her beliefs on the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe, and had some very surprising things to say.

She seemed extremely confident in her beliefs, saying with certainty:

“Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it.“

“There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life,” she added.

Sharman surmised that aliens could even walk among us, but perhaps they are just invisible to our senses.

“Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them,” Sharman explained.

Aliens were not actually the primary focus of the interview, but rather, it was a discussion about her career and experiences as the first Briton in space. Sharman also noted her frustration about the media regularly referring to her as “the first British woman in space,” instead of simply “the first Briton.”

“It’s telling that we would otherwise assume it was a man. When Tim Peake went into space, some people simply forgot about me. A man going first would be the norm, so I’m thrilled that I got to upset that order,” she said.

Sharman is currently a chemist, who works at Imperial College in London, and was recognized in the 2018 New Year’s honors list last year. And in May of 1991, Sharman traveled to the Soviet space station Mir, becoming the first Briton to take the trip into space.

Others who were connected with previous space programs have also come forward with similar claims in recent years.

Former NASA scientist Gilbert Levin has recently published an opinion piece on his long-held belief that evidence of alien life was discovered on Mars in the 1970s. Gilbert Levin worked with NASA on the Viking missions to Mars, and he claims that evidence of life was found on the Red Planet during those missions.

Samples taken from the soil on Mars during these missions were later found to contain organic compounds. NASA scientists even suspected that carbon dioxide was contained in the samples, which they believed was being “regenerated, possibly by microorganisms as on Earth.”

Levin says that NASA should have followed up and conducted more research on this incredible finding, but the space agency ultimately concluded that they only found a “substance mimicking life, but not life.”

Passenger car vehicle sales in China fell yet again in December, plunging 3.6% to 2.17 million units, according to the China Passenger Car Association. 

This marks the 18th drop in the past 19 months for the country, which feels to be single-handedly spearheading a global recession in the industry. For the full year, sales in China declined 7.5%, marking the second straight annual decline. 

 

Automakers continue to struggle with a slowing economy and tariff uncertainties, despite “Phase 1” of the U.S./China trade deal supposedly being finished (even though it still has not been signed), according to Bloomberg.

GM said on Tuesday that its sales were down 15% in China and said that pressure into 2020 would likely continue. 

But, some analysts say there’s reasons for optimism: namely, that the pace of declines has slowed for four months in a row as comps have become easier. This will only hold true heading into 2020, where 2019’s comps will be much easier to catch than those of years prior, while the auto market was booming. 

The China Association of Auto Manufacturers predicts that vehicle sales will drop 2% in 2020, marking a third straight annual decline. Sales fell 7.5% in 2019 and 6% in 2018.

Well, if that’s what you want to call progress…

Cui Dongshu, the CPCA’s secretary general told the South China Morning Post: “For 2020, the market is expected to get off to a slow start as the downward momentum continues. But sales will shoot up from the middle of 2020 amid the release of pent-up demand. After all, the number of licensed drivers is increasing and new drivers will eventually buy cars.”

Global automakers have invested billions in China over the last few decades, but are all now reconsidering expansion plans in the area. For instance, Peugeot maker PSA Group is selling its 50% stake in a JV it has to make cars in China.

Meanwhile, local Chinese manufacturers are also feeling pain. BYD Co. posted an 11% drop in 2019 sales and SAIC Motor reported a “similar decline”. 

To make matters worse, Beijing slashed subsidies on EVs and NEVs this year – as we noted in the beginning of December – causing a huge dent in sales of plug-in vehicles. NEV sales plunged 42% in November. 

Yet some analysts insist that progress will be made in the new year.

“Environment-friendly cars would return to positive territory this year,” analysts talking to the SCMP said. 

As for us? We have been around “analysts” long enough to confidently say we’ll believe it when we see it. 

Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind

– Edward Gibbon

Counterfactual history is generally a waste of time because, in the end, it’s just speculation. But it’s fun and it can sometimes illuminate factual history.

For example, take the aborted Soviet-French-British alliance to stop Hitler. It came to nothing for a number of reasons but, had it happened, history would have been very different. (And – dare I say it? – probably better. And not the least of the benefits would be that we would be freed from the endless appeals to “Munich” to encourage us to stand firm and bomb the “Next Hitler”.) But I am not going to explore that counterfactual history in which the UK, USSR and France got together, Poland was convinced to let a million Soviet soldiers in and the German military, seeing the hopelessness of it all, overthrew Hitler and the future followed a different set of possibilities (Poland probably being occupied each time).

I am going to consider a counter-factual post Cold War history. Not because I believe – cynical as I have now become – that there was much of a chance of triumphalist Washington, in thrall to PNAC fantasies, allowing it to happen; I do it to illuminate some of the mess that we are in today.

After the Second World War, Stalin, either because he was a dedicated expansionist enemy of the West or because he was determined that, the next time, invaders would have to start their attack farther away from Moscow, absorbed most of the countries the Soviet Army captured/liberated. Communists – and each country had plenty – were put into power. (I invite the reader to speculate: they were absorbed but which was his true motive?) After the Washington Treaty, Moscow formed the Warsaw Treaty. But while the former was, more or less, voluntary, the latter was not and, the moment the USSR weakened, everybody wanted out. Mikhail Gorbachev, GenSek in 1985, began glasnost and perestroyka, believing that the USSR as it was had exhausted its possibilities; one thing led to another, the Berlin Wall came down, the Warsaw Treaty organisation collapsed: when the USSR’s “allies” realised the tanks weren’t coming, they jumped. The USSR itself then fell apart and a whole new world was there for the making.

This is what happened, now begins my counterfactual speculation.

The Western (NATO) capitals – none of which had foreseen these events – get together and think about how to profit from the collapse of their enemy and how to build a more secure world. A world that is not just better for themselves but more secure for everybody because the wise people in NATO understand that they cannot be secure if their neighbours are not: they know that security is indivisible.

The wise men and women of NATO ponder – it is their world-historical moment; they will create tomorrow. Alternate futures pass before their eyes, they have the power to choose one and eliminate the others; they will pick, out of all the possibilities, the one road the world will travel. Their challenge, now that a great war has ended, is how to fashion a wise ending to the struggle. Not a triumphant ending but a wise one; not just for us but for our descendants. Not momentary but enduring; not a quick sugar hit but lasting nutrition. Many roads to failure; only a few to success.

They take their place with modesty: while, naturally believing that their “free world” system was and is preferable to Marxism-Leninism, they are wise enough and modest enough to know that reality comes in shades of grey. No triumphalism here: just the pragmatic desire to build stability and peace. No boasting: just an acknowledgement that both sides have won.

They remember other decision points when a few created the future. The French Revolutionary / Napoleonic wars killed and maimed millions and devastated and squandered wealth throughout Europe. The easy end would have been to blame France and try to squash it for all time. But the victors – Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria – were wiser: they included France in the settlement; and their settlement avoided a great European war for a century. They knew that France would always be an important player and therefore had to be invested in the settlement. If it weren’t invested in the settlement it would be invested in breaking the settlement. It’s the essence of The Deal: everybody gets something and everybody has an interest in keeping things the way they are. When no one wants to tip it over, you have stability. The victors of 1919 forgot this principle and their settlement collapsed into an even worse war in twenty years. The victors of that war remembered the 1814 principle (partially) and integrated Germany, Italy and Japan into the winners’ circle.

The wise ones of NATO know this history; they know that the losers have to be made into winners so that the peace can have a chance of lasting; they remember the terrible example of the 1919 failure. There’s no place for boasting or triumphantasising. They bend their powerful minds in the Great Peace Conference of 1991 (counterfactual fantasy event) to calculate how to accommodate everybody’s security concerns. They know that security is indivisible: if one doesn’t feel secure then, sooner or later, no one will.

They start with two realities:

1) Moscow’s former allies – or at least their current leaders – hate and fear Moscow and

2) Moscow doesn’t trust NATO.

The Wise Ones waste no time moralising, they know these are the materials with which they have to work and have to make to fit together.

Expand NATO? No, say the Wise Ones: while it will please people in Warsaw or Prague (at least until they get the bill), it will make Moscow nervous and that violates the principle of indivisible security. If making Warsaw happy makes Moscow unhappy, then, at the end of the day, they will both be unhappy and, if they’re both are unhappy, then we will all be unhappy too. Indivisibility of security is the kernel of wisdom that the Wise Ones hold to. If nobody is unhappy then everybody is happy: it’s the geopolitical version of “happy wife, happy life”.

So, the question is this: how do we make a settlement to the Cold War in which NATO, the former Warsaw Treaty, former-USSR and Moscow all feel secure at the same time? Fortunately, at this unrepeatable moment in world history, the NATO leadership is replete with wise, knowledgeable and thoughtful people, well-informed about past errors, determined to do better, with the vision, modesty and ingenuity to square the circle. (I warned you it was counterfactual). They figure it out:

1. They tell Warsaw, Prague, Kiev and the rest of them to form an alliance (Central European Treaty Organisation – CETO –  or some such name) grounded on NATO’s Article 5 (an attack on one is an attack on all).

2. They get a formal, signed, ceremonial declaration from NATO that, should Russia attack any member of the Central European Treaty Organisation, NATO will come to its defence.

3. They get a formal, signed, ceremonial declaration from Moscow that should NATO attack any member of the CETO, Moscow will come to its defence.

So, between NATO and Russia, there would have been a belt of neither-one-nor-the-other-but-guaranteed-by-both countries. CETO would have lots of weapons and a high degree of interoperability and command structure left over from the Soviet days; therefore they would be able to mount quite effective defences with what they already had. Their weapons, being Soviet and very rugged, would work for years to come so they wouldn’t have to spend much on their defence.

(Note that, we have, as a sort of scale model of something like this, the relationship between Malta and Italy. From 1981 Malta is officially neutral and its neutrality is guaranteed by Italy, a NATO member. The USSR recognised this neutrality soon after.)

If a CETO had been formed, guaranteed by NATO and Russia, wouldn’t everybody be 1) happier and 2) more secure?

But that didn’t happen. We all know what did: the men and women of NATO were not so wise, they missed their world-historical moment and they went for the triumphantasising quick sugar hit.

So I wish you all a happy New Year in which you may reflect upon what might have been but wasn’t.

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

War hawks in Israel and Washington have been quick to denounce Iran’s nuclear power ambitions for years with the repeated excuse that “Iran has so much oil that nuclear energy is irrelevant for them- unless they wanted to build an Islamic Bomb!”

Hogwash. As we shall come to see, not only has Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei created a 2003 fatwa declaring nuclear weapons forbidden under Islamic Law, but Iranian leaders were already calling for the need to transition to a new and superior form of energy in order to escape the geopolitical constraints of oil politics over 70 years ago… ironically through the help of the USA!

On December 8, 1953 a speech was delivered at the United Nations by President Dwight D. Eisenhower which has come to be known as his Atoms for Peace speech. As flawed as Eisenhower was as a political leader, this speech did provide a valuable gateway out of the unwinnable Cold War logic of Mutually Assured Destruction that had officially begun with the Soviet Union’s first detonation of their own atomic bomb in 1949. The U.S. had itself been reeling over an 8 year internal coup begun in 1945 over the Anglo-American deep state which had purged much of the U.S. intelligentzia of genuine patriots under the FBI-run red scare and 1947 creation of the CIA. Using a talented hive of sociopaths under the direction of the Dulles Brothers, the Deep State had perverted U.S. foreign policy by launching the Korean War in 1950, and worked as Britain’s dumb giant in the overthrow Iran’s nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh in August 1953 when the later attempted to nationalize Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951.

Though a competent General, Eisenhower was admittedly naïve and only realized the full extent of what had gone on under his watch during his last days as President in 1961 as outlined in his Military Industrial Complex speech.

This part of history is vitally important to revive now, since Eisenhower’s efforts to undo the terrible injustice caused by America’s complicity in the Iranian regime change as well as broader threat of nuclear annihilation remains the only functional pathway to a durable peace in Iran or globally today. Unless Trump breaks from neo-con pressure in ways that Eisenhower failed to do throughout the 1950s, and returns to this spirit, the future looks bleak indeed.

Atoms for Peace and the Birth of Iranian Atomic Energy

In his 1953 speech, Eisenhower laid out the threats and opportunities which the peaceful use of the atom created:

“The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military build-up can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind. The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today. Who can doubt that, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and economic usage?”

The president listed several domains where the peaceful application of the atom would be of value to humanity saying:

“Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.”

He ended by dropping the conceptual bombshell which shook the foundations of the newly emerging Deep State by calling for a joint U.S.-Russia alliance to cooperate on deploying this new technology around the world under a spirit of goodwill and mutually assured survival when he said this vision would “allow all peoples of all nations to see that, in this enlightened age, the great Powers of the earth, both of the East and of the West, are interested in human aspirations first rather than in building up the armaments of war.”

An earlier attempt to establish U.S.-Russia entente was made by Stalin who welcomed a meeting with the newly elected President in December 1952. Stalin’s death in March 1953 ended this potential.

Many of the world’s nations who have suffered the most under the hands of the “dumb giant” deep state America in recent decades actually found a close ally in this better America. One might be surprised to discover that Atoms for Peace established the creation of atomic energy programs for Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan and Iran (to name but a few), through providing training to thousands of students internationally, as well as providing nuclear technology transfers, and financing (most of which ended in the wake of JFK’s assassination).

In 1955 the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy took place in Geneva under the leadership of Dr. Homi Bhaba (father of Indian Atomic Energy), and in 1957 the USA and Iran signed the Cooperation Concerning Civil Uses of Atoms that set the foundation for the 1959 creation of the Tehran Nuclear Research Center. Over the coming year, the first generation of Iranian nuclear scientists were trained in MIT and in 1967, the USA supplied Iran with a 5 megawatt research reactor and enriched uranium fuel. By 1969, the pace of nuclear development both within America and abroad had dropped drastically due in large measure to the deep state takeover of western governments and the imposition of a new logic of empire and post-industrial consumerism. This mis-anthropic agenda took the form of the 1970s CFR/Trilateral Commission-led “Controlled Disintegration of the Economy”.

The Controlled Disintegration Agenda

An important recipe in this Controlled Disintegration agenda took the form of the 1973-74 oil shocks which saw oil prices skyrocket four-fold as tankers replete with oil were kept harbored off the coasts of America under direction of Henry Kissinger. This operation was laid out in full by historian William Engdahl in his 1992 Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

An unexpected effect was that the Shah of Iran announced that his nation would refocus its energy policies on aggressive nuclear power development, funded by its vast oil revenues. In 1974 the Shah created the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO) saying “Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn… we envision producing, as soon as possible 23 000 mW of electricity using nuclear plants.”

In 1976, Iran’s nuclear energy budget was increased from $36 million to a whopping $1 billion and commitments to build 23 reactors were arranged with companies in Germany, France and the USA. Even President Ford, in a rare moment of sovereign thinking agreed to provide Iran with a reprocessing facility to complete the fuel cycle. Things were proceeding well as the two first 1190 mW reactors built by Germany were 80% and 50% completed when the Shah was suddenly overthrown by a regime change operation put into motion by none-other than the CFR’s Zbigniew Brzinzski, Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger in 1979. Within weeks ALL contracts were cancelled and the two reactors remained unbuilt for decades. A parallel derailing of a pro-nuclear orientation occurred with the execution of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who documented his fight with Kissinger over the latter’s denial of Pakistan’s right to access nuclear power.

Russia Revives Atoms for Peace

The anti-nuclear tides began to slowly turn in Iran’s favor in 1992 when China began supplying nuclear fuel to Iran and in 1995 Russia began to assist in the completion of the unfinished reactors. In 2011, the first 1000 mW reactor came online and a 2nd reactor was begun anew in 2019 under the guidance of Rosatom with several more planned for the coming decade.

While the American neocons and their Zionist brethren have continued a policy of asymmetric war, cyber war, economic war, assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists (and now military officials), Russia has proven herself to be the true heir to the spirit of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace.

Rosatom has taken up the torch of nuclear energy diplomacy with gusto in recent years by providing valuable nuclear power assistance to both Iran and Turkey while aggressively building nuclear power reactors at home. The fact that these three nations are the guarantors of the Astana Peace Process for Syria should also not be missed.

Russia has also demonstrated an enlightened interest in assisting African nations in their nuclear ambitions with agreements signed with South Africa, Egypt, Zambia, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Congo and Nigeria with scores of imperially-minded racists in London screaming of the “inappropriateness” of this advanced technology to the ‘dark continent’.

Under the guiding win-win framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Iran and the world has been given a master key to permanently throw off the threat of nuclear annihilation. Does President Trump have the moral and intellectual stamina to resist the neo-con pressure now and return America to its better traditions or will he permit himself to be used as a tool of the deep state by unleashing the nuclear dogs of war?

Humankind’s impact on the world is obvious, but, as Visual Capitalists’ Nicholas LePan notes, our spatial patterns are sometimes difficult to recognize from the ground.

Publicly accessible, high-quality satellite imagery has been a game changer in terms of understanding the scope of forces such as urbanization and land use patterns.

Google Timelapse Maps

Google Earth’s timelapsed satellite maps capture the drastic changes the planet’s surface has undergone over the past 34 years. Each timelapse comprises 35 cloud-free pictures, which have been made interactive by the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Three different satellites acquired 15 million images over the past three decades. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program. For the years 2015 to 2018, Google combined imagery from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2A. Sentinel is part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program.

Deforestation, urban growth, and natural resource extraction are just some of the human patterns and impacts that can be visualized.

Editor’s note: to view the following timelapses, press the play button on any map. You can also view individual years in the time periods as well. On slower internet connections you may need to have patience, as the series of images can take some time to load or display.

Cities and Infrastructure

Urban Growth: Pearl River Delta, China

Up to 1979, China’s Pearl River Delta had seen little urbanization. However in 1980, the People’s Republic of China established a special economic zone, Shenzhen, to attract foreign investment. In the following years, buildings and paved surfaces rapidly replaced the rural settings around the river delta. This is the Lunjiao area just south of Guangzhou.

Urban Growth: Cairo, Egypt

The present-day location of Cairo has been a city for more than 1,000 years, and its constrained urban footprint is now bursting at the seams thanks to Egypt’s population growth. A new city is being built in the nearby stretch of desert land (agricultural land is scarce) that will one day replace ancient Cairo as Egypt’s capital. If the government’s ambitious plans are realized, this desert boomtown could have a population of over 6 million people.

The Egyptian state needed this kind of project a long time ago. Cairo [is] a capital that is full of traffic jams, very crowded. The infrastructure cannot absorb more people.

– Khaled el-Husseiny Soliman

Urban Growth: Phoenix, Arizona

According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, Phoenix is the fastest-growing city in the United States. Over the past two decades, the suburb of Chandler evolved from agricultural uses to sprawling residential developments. This pattern was repeated in a number of cities in the Southern U.S., most notably Las Vegas.

Construction: The Brandenburg Airport, Germany

Berlin’s long overdue Brandenburg Airport began construction in 2006, with the airport initially expected to open in 2011. However, the airport has been subject to numerous delays and the airport now has a new opening date. Berlin Brandenburg Airport is now expected to open on Oct. 31, 2020.

Megaproject: Yangshan Port

The Port of Shanghai became one of the most important transportation hubs in the world after the completion of its offshore expansion – the Yangshan Port.

Building this massive port was a gargantuan engineering feat. First, land reclamation was used to connect two islands 20 miles southeast of Shanghai. Next, the port was connected to the mainland via the Donghai Bridge, which opened in 2005 as the world’s longest sea crossing. The six-lane bridge took 6,000 workers two and half years to construct.

In 2016, the Port of Shanghai was the largest shipping port in the world, handling 37.1 million twenty-foot container equivalents.

Resource Extraction

Mining: Chuquicamata, Chile

Chuquicamata is the largest open pit copper mine by volume in the world, located 800 miles north of the Chilean capital, Santiago. In 2019, Chile’s national mining company Codelco initiated underground mining at Chuquicamata.

Deforestation: Ñuflo de Chávez, Bolivia

Ñuflo de Chávez is one of the 15 provinces of the Bolivian Santa Cruz Department. Satellite images of southern Ñuflo de Chávez illustrate deforestation from agrarian expansion in the jungles of the Amazon. From the air, the deforestation takes on a unique grid pattern with circular clearings. Developed as part of an organized resettlement scheme, each circle is anchored by community amenities and housing, and surrounded by fields of soybeans cultivated for export.

According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, 8.4 million soccer fields of land have been deforested in the Amazon over the past decade.

Shale Gas Boom: Odessa, Texas

The small town of Odessa sits in the middle of one of the most productive shale gas regions in the world, the Permian Basin. The region is expected to generate an average of 3.9 million barrels per day, roughly a third of total U.S. oil production. While the gas may come from underground, the pursuit of this source of energy has drastically altered the landscape, marking the terrain with roads, wells, and housing for workers.

Changing Environment

Drying of the Aral Sea: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

It took almost 30 years to make a sea disappear. When the Soviet Union diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to irrigate cotton and rice fields in the 1960s, it turned the Aral Sea into a desert. Once the world’s fourth largest lake, the region is struggling to restore water levels and aquatic habitats.

Glacier Retreat: Columbia Glacier, Alaska, USA

The Columbia Glacier is a tidewater glacier that flows through the valleys of the Chugach Mountains and into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Increased temperatures initiated a retreat in the length of the glacier over three decades ago. Once in motion, a glacier’s retreat accelerates due to glacial mechanics. It is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers in the world.

Changing Rivers: Iquitos, Peru

Not all change is from humans. There are natural physical processes that continue to shape the Earth’s surface. For example, rivers that experience heavy water flows can be altered through erosion, changing the bends.

Better Perspectives, Better Decisions?

Often, the greatest impacts that occur are out of sight and mind. However, with the increasing availability of satellite technology and improved distribution of images through platforms such as Google Timelapse, the impact of human activity is impossible to ignore.

The bulk of visible changes come from human economic activity, because it is more easily observable on a smaller time scale. However, it’s also worth remembering that there are still many natural processes that take generations, if not thousands of years to affect change.

It is one thing to hear the facts and figures of humankind’s impact on the environment, but to see the change is a whole other story.

Authored by Max Parry via Off-Guardian.org,

When the Pentagon confirmed the assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, U.S. President Donald Trump took to social media to post a single image of the American flag to the adulation of his followers.

Unfortunately, most Americans are ignorant of the other flag synonymous with U.S. foreign policy, that of the ‘false flag’ utilized to deceive the public and stir up support for endless war abroad.

While the chicken hawk defenders of Trump’s reckless decision to murder one of the biggest contributors in the defeat of ISIS salivated over possible war with Iran, their appetite was spoiled by Tehran’s retaliatory precision strikes of two U.S. bases in Iraq that deliberately avoided casualties while in accordance with the Islamic Republic’s right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations charter.

The reprisal successfully deescalated the crisis but sent a clear message Iran was willing to stand up to the U.S. with the backing of Russia and China, while Washington underestimated Tehran which forewarned the Iraqi government of its impending counterattack so U.S. personnel could evacuate.

In the hours following the ballistic missile strikes, reports came in that a Boeing 737 international passenger flight scheduled from Tehran to Kiev, Ukraine had crashed shortly after takeoff from Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all 176 passengers and flight crew on board.

Initial video of the crash of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 (PS752) showed that the aircraft was already in flames while descending to the ground, leading to speculation it was shot down amid the heightened political crisis between Iran and Washington. In the days following, a second obscure video surfaced which only increased this suspicion.

Meanwhile, Western governments quickly concluded that an anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile brought PS752 down and were eager to point the finger at Iran before any formal investigation. Many people, including this author, were admittedly skeptical as to how a plane taking off from Tehran could have been mistaken five hours after the strikes in Iraq.

Nevertheless, those with reservations turned out to be wrong when days later the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came clean that its aerospace forces made a “human error” and accidentally shot the passenger plane down after mistaking it for a incoming cruise missile when it flew close to a military base during a heightened state of alert in anticipation of U.S. attack.

Many have noted that Iran’s honorable decision to take responsibility for the catastrophe is in sharp contrast with Washington’s response in 1988 when the U.S. Navy shot down Iran Air Flight 655 scheduled from Tehran to Dubai over the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 occupants, after failing to cover it up.

Just a month later, Vice President George H.W. Bush would notoriously state he would “never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”

Although he was not directly referring to the incident, one can only imagine what the reaction would be if Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were to say the same weeks after shooting down the Ukrainian plane, let alone an American one.

Predictably, Tehran’s transparency has gone mostly unappreciated while the Trump administration is already trying to use the disaster to further demonize Iran.

Oddly enough, Ukrainian International Airlines is partly owned by the infamous Ukrainian-Israeli oligarch, politician and energy tycoon Igor Kolomoisky, who was notably one of the biggest financiers of the anti-Russian, pro-EU coup d’etat which overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Kolomoisky is also a principal backer of current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky whose dubious phone call with Trump resulted in the 45th U.S. president’s impeachment last month.

In another astounding coincidence, Kolomoisky’s Privat Group is believed to control Burisma Holdings, the Cypress-based company whose executive board 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter was appointed to following the Maidan junta.

The former Vice President admitted that he bribed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor who was looking into his son’s corruption by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees.

Kolomoisky, AKA “the Chameleon”, is one of the wealthiest people in the ex-Soviet country and was formerly appointed as governor of an administrative region bordering Donbass in eastern Ukraine following the 2014 putsch. He has also funded a battalion of volunteer neo-Nazi mercenaries fighting alongside the Ukrainian army in the War in Donbass against Russian-speaking separatists which the military aid temporarily withheld by the Trump administration that was disputably contingent upon an investigation of Biden and his son goes to.

In 2014, another infamous plane shootdown made international headlines when Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) scheduled from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

From the get-go, the Obama administration was adamant that the missile which shot down the Boeing 777 came from separatist rebel territory.

However, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad denounced the charges brought against the Russian and Ukrainian nationals indicted in the NATO-led investigation, dismissing the entire probe as a politically motivated effort predetermined to scapegoat Moscow and exclude Malaysian participation in the inquiry from the very beginning.

Mohamad is featured in the excellent documentary MH17: Call for Justice made by a team of independent journalists which contests the NATO-scripted narrative and reveals that the Buk missile was more likely launched from Ukrainian Army-controlled territory than the DPR. One of Kolomoisky’s hired guns could also have been responsible.

Shamefully, Iran’s admission of guilt in the PS752 downing is already being used by establishment propagandists to discredit skeptics and conflated with similar contested past events like MH17 in order to intimidate dissenting voices from speaking up in the future.

The Bellingcat ‘investigative journalism’ collective which made its name incriminating Moscow for the MH17 tragedy are the principle offenders. Bellingcat bills itself as an ‘independent’ citizen journalism group even though its founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council think tank which receives funding from NATO, the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros’ Open Society Foundation NGO, and numerous other regime change factories.

Despite its enormous conflict of interest, Bellingcat remains highly cited by corporate media as a supposedly reputable source. At the outset, nearly everything about the PS752 tragedy gave one déjà vu of the MH17 disaster, including the rush to judgement by Western governments, so it was only natural for many to distrust the official narrative until more facts came out.

None of this changes that the use of commercial passenger jets as false flag targets for U.S. national security subterfuge is a verifiable historical fact, not a ‘conspiracy theory.’

In 1997, the U.S. National Archives declassified a 1962 memo proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Department of Defense for then-Secretary of State Robert McNamara entitled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.”

The document outlined a series of ‘false flag’ terrorist attacks, codenamed Operation Northwoods, to be carried out on a range of targets and blamed on the Cuban government to give grounds for an invasion of Havana in order to depose Fidel Castro.

These scenarios included targets within the U.S., in particular Miami, Florida, which had become a haven of right-wing émigrés and defectors following the Cuban Revolution.

In addition to the sinking of a Cuban refugee boat, one Northwoods plan included the staging of attacks on a civilian jet airliner and a U.S. Air Force plane to be pinned on Castro’s government:

8. It is possible to create and incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.

Although Operation Northwoods was rejected by then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy – which many believe was a factor in his subsequent assassination – Cuban exiles with the support of U.S. intelligence would later be implicated in such an attack the following decade with the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in 1976 which killed all 73 passengers and crew on board.

In 2005, documents released by the National Security Archive showed that the CIA under then-director George H.W. Bush had advanced knowledge of the plans of a Dominican Republic-based Cuban exile terrorist organization, the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), at the direction of former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles to blow up the airliner.

The U.S. later refused to extradite Carriles to Cuba to face charges and although he never admitted to masterminding the bombing of the jet, he publicly confessed to other attacks on tourist hotels in Cuba during the 1990s and was later arrested in 2000 for attempting to blow up an auditorium in Panama trying to assassinate Castro.

In 1962, the planners of Operation Northwoods concluded that such deceptive operations would shift U.S. public opinion unanimously against Cuba.

World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”

The same talking points are used by the U.S. government to demonize Iran today.

Initially, some Western intelligence sources also concluded that it was a malfunction or overheated engine that brought PS752 down in corroboration with the Iranian government’s original explanation until the narrative abruptly shifted the following day.

That they were so quick to hold Iran accountable without any investigation gave the apparent likelihood that PS752 could have fallen prey to a Northwoods-style false flag operation designed to further isolate Iran and defame its leaders after they took precautions to avoid U.S. casualties in their retaliatory strikes for the killing of Soleimani.

Maintaining the image of Iran as a nefarious regime is crucial in justifying hawkish U.S. policies toward the country and Iran’s noted restraint in its retaliation put a dent in that impression, so many were suspicious and rightly so.

It was also entirely plausible that U.S. special operations planners could have consulted the Northwoods playbook replacing Cuba with Iran and the right-wing gusanos who were to assist the staged attacks in Miami with the Iranian opposition group known as Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK/People’s Mujahedin of Iran) to do the same in Tehran.

In July of last year, Trump’s personal lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave a paid speech at the cult-like group’s compound in Albania where he not only referred to the group as Iran’s “government-in-exile” but stated the U.S’s explicit intentions to use them for regime change in Iran.

The MEK enjoys high-level contacts in the Trump administration and the group was elated at his decision to murder Soleimani in Baghdad.

From 1997 until 2012, the MEK was on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations until it was removed by the Obama administration after its expulsion from Iraq in order to relocate the group to fortified bases in Albania and the NATO protectorate of Kosovo.

The latter disputed territory is a perfect fit for the rebranded group having been founded by another deregistered foreign terrorist organization, the al-Qaeda linked Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leader, Hashim Thaçi, presides over the partially-recognized state. The MEK are no longer designated as such despite the State Department’s own account of its bloody history:

During the 1970s, the MEK staged terrorist attacks inside Iran to destabilize and embarrass the Shah’s regime; the group killed several US military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran. The group also supported the takeover in 1979 of the US Embassy in Tehran. In April 1992 the MEK carried out attacks on Iranian embassies in 13 different countries, demonstrating the group’s ability to mount large-scale operations overseas.”

Declassified documents revealing the sinister plans in Operation Northwoods which shockingly made it all the way to the desk of the president of the United States and the foreknowledge of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 are just two examples of solid proof that false flag attacks against civilian passenger planes are a part of the Pentagon’s modus operandi as disclosed in its own archives and there is no reason to believe that such practices have been discontinued.

That the U.S. is still cozy with “former” terror groups like MEK seeking to repatriate is good reason to believe its use of militant exiles for covert operations like those from Havana has not been retired.

If there were jumps to conclusions that proven serial liars could be looking for an excuse to stage an attack to lay the blame on Iran, it is only because the distinct probability was overwhelming.

Even so, a stopped clock strikes the right time twice per day and that is all Iran’s acknowledgment of its liability proves — that even the world’s most unreliable and criminal sources in Washington and Langley can be accurate sometimes, even if by accident.

Stay skeptical.

*  *  *

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Baltimore City Police (BCP) responded to multiple shooting on Saturday that left five people dead, reported CBS 13 Baltimore. 

In total, 12 people were shot, and five died on Saturday. The shootings were widespread and weren’t concentrated in a single neighborhood. 

All of the shootings and deaths occurred in low-income neighborhoods where wealth inequality is at extreme levels. These communities would be on the brink of social unrest if another Freddie Gray incident occurred. 

Baltimore City broke the murder record of the century in 2019, recorded 347 homicides for the year, breaching 342 seen in 2015 and 2017. 

With about 602,000 residents, the city’s homicide rate hit 57 per 100,000 residents last year, one of the highest rates in the country.

Last year was the 5th year the city recorded murders over 300, due mostly to the Ferguson effect post-2015 riots and socio-economic deterioration in the town. 

Out of control murders, extreme wealth inequality, and an out of control opioid epidemic comes as the total population in the city crashed to a 100-year low, many are fleeing the city for the suburbs as the local economy continues to dive deeper into a depression, never recovered since 2008.

Violent crime in the city has gotten so bad that the murder wave has spread to Baltimore County. 

Homicides in the county recorded 50 for 2019, surpassing the previous high of 42, set during the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, according to FBI statistics. On a yearly change, homicides in the county are up 85%. 

County homicides usually fluctuate in the low 20s. It wasn’t until the 2015 riots that murders started to increase.

Please do yourself a favor this year and avoid traveling to Baltimore. 

Via 21stCenturyWire.com,

This latest revelation should not surprise anyone who has been actively following the exploits of the current Trump Administration and its partner organization, Israel’s Netanyahu government.

According to a recent report released by the Times of Israel, it was officials in Tel Aviv who provided the White House with the key intelligence details leading to the targeted double assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader, General Qasem Soleimani, and senior Iraqi PMU commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, on January 3rd.

The illegal assassinations prompted an Iranian missile strike on two US bases in Iraq, and bringing Washington and Tehran dangerously close to a larger military confrontation, until Trump stood down in the face of reprisals by Iran and its allies in the region.

This latest news also validates previous analysis by 21WIRE which concluded that Israel has been the primary source of “intelligence” provided to the White House, relating to the recent chain of events involving the United States, Iraq and Iran.

Netanyahu Lied About Involvement

This also indicates that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was lying last week when he told ministers that the killing of Soleimani was “carried out solely by the US,” and that Israel was not involved. According to Axios:

“Netanyahu told Security Cabinet ministers Monday that the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani was carried out solely by the U.S. and that Israel was not involved in any way and must not be dragged into the escalating conflict, two ministers who attended the meeting told me.”

This calculated move to walk-back his previously hawkish stance on Soleimani and Iran appears to have been a shrewd and cynical political maneuver to avoid being implicated in the political maelstrom which ensued in Washington – where US Senators and Congressional Representatives were demanding the White House present any of the illusive intelligence relating to the successive incidents. Their calls were met with complete stonewalling from the Trump Administration who claimed that any discussion into the matter would be ‘helping the enemy.’

The question now is whether or not Israel also provided the White House the illusive intelligence that prompted Trump’s illegal assassination orders – the mysterious intelligence which claimed there were “imminent threats” to the United States. Elected representatives are still waiting.

The new reports now reveal how Israeli intelligence officials provided President Trump the location and reconnaissance data which resulted in the state-sanctioned murder of Soleimani. Details of the operation also appeared in an NBC News report:

Armed with a tip from informants at the airport in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the CIA knew exactly when a jet carrying Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani took off en route to Baghdad. Intelligence from Israel helped confirm the details.

Once the Cham Wings Airlines Airbus A320 landed, American spies at Iraq’s main airport, which houses U.S. military personnel, confirmed its exact whereabouts.

Three American drones moved into position overhead, with no fear of challenge in an Iraqi airspace completely dominated by the U.S. military. Each was armed with four Hellfire missiles.

(…) On large screens, various U.S. officials watched as an Iraqi militia leader walked up a set of stairs to greet the leader of Iran’s Quds Force as he emerged from the airplane. It was past 1 in the morning, so the black and white infrared imagery wasn’t very clear. No faces could be seen.

It is important to note that from the onset of the Trump presidency, Israel has played a visible role in directing US policy regarding Iran. In fact, the current round of hostilities between the US and Iran was started when the White House unilaterally withdrew from the landmark international JCPOA Iran Nuclear Agreement in May 2018. Leaked recordings reveal that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about his own role in convincing the White House to unilaterally withdraw from the JCPOA deal.