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A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

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IRAN, RUSSIA, CHINA, AND THE SILK ROAD

This has been one of those weeks in which news events have overtaken my original intentions for articles to blog about. And this is one of those cases, as E.G. brought this article from Zero Hedge to my attention:

Declassified: The Sino-Russian Masterplan To End U.S. Dominance In Middle East

In yesterday's New's and and Views from the Nefarium, I outlined a high octane speculation scenario concerning the recent attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf. There's no question that attacks occurred. The real question is, who actually did it and how was it actually done? Iran, as the US is claiming? Or is this a false flag? Was it a mine? or as the Japanese ship's crew maintains, something that flew into the ship?

This highlights my chief and fundamental difficulty with the whole thing. My chief difficulty was, and remains, that it is highly unlikely that the Tehran regime, nutty as it is, would not very likely attack a Japanese-owned tanker while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in Tehran for talks! Not since George Bush the Dumber have we seen such pressure for military intervention with so little evidence being made available to the public. In fact, while we're on the subject, this has all the "feel" to it of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, under Lyndon Johnson, a man who reached Clintonesque levels of corruption very early in his "career". I remember that "feel" because I was a boy at the time. If a false flag, then one could easily finger the usual suspects: the (out)House of Saud, the regime of Nuttyahoo, the Brits, the U.S.A.

But in yesterday's New and Views I outlined a scenario that it appeared to me might be emerging, namely, the presentation of a "united Front" against Iran. The episode of Chancellorin Merkel's "shakes", and then her press conference in which she maintained the evidence for Iranian involvement in the attacks was "quite strong", or words to that effect. I have to wonder if the shakes were a "message" sent to her to play along, "or else." So, as of today, add Germany to the "list" of "powers endorsing the narrative." Then, as I also noted yesterday, India has sent powerful elements of the Indian Navy to the Persian Gulf, so add another nuclear power to the mix in the region besides the USA.

The most highly speculative element of my musings yesterday - and they are very speculative - was my wondering if, behind the scenes, Russia at least, and possibly China, had not been convinced to go along with a "regime change" scenario. Consider a high price of oil: this would benefit Russia and Saudi Arabia, hurt China, India, and Japan. If America, on the other hand, suppressed the price, this would benefit China and Japan, and hurt Russia and the American ally the (out)House of Saud. So oil may or may not be a way to gauge the possibility of my speculation.

Which brings us to E.G.'s article, and these statements in it:

Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s early June 2019 summit in Moscow with People’s Republic of China (PRC) Pres. Xi Jinping seems likely to have a disproportionate influence on the next phases of the crises unfolding in the greater Middle East, and therefore on the future of the region.

The escalating confrontation between Iran and the US is both influencing and influenced by the mega-trends set by Russia and the PRC.

One of the first major confrontations with the US by Russia and the PRC was to be over the greater Middle East. The main reason was the advance negotiations with all key oil producers - including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran - on substituting the petrodollar with a basket of currencies where the yuan, the euro and the ruble dominate. Using the currency basket would enable the sellers and buyers to go around the US-imposed sanctions and quotas. Indeed, Beijing and Moscow were now enticing the oil producers with huge, long-term export deals which were both financially lucrative and politically tempting by offering guarantees for the well-being of the participating governments.

The crux of the proposal is regional and includes flagrant disregard of the US sanctions on Iran.

However, the key to the extent of the commitment of both Beijing and Moscow lies in the growing importance and centrality of the New Silk Road via Central Asia.

Persia had a crucial rôle in the ancient Silk Road, and both the PRC and Russia now expect Iran to have a comparable key rôle in the New Silk Road.

The growing dominance of heritage-based dynamics throughout the developing world, including the greater Central Asia and the greater Middle East, makes it imperative for the PRC to rely on historic Persia/Iran as a western pole of the New Silk Road. It is this realization which led both Beijing and Moscow to give Tehran, in mid-May 2019, the original guarantees that Washington would be prevented from conducting a “regime change”.

Therefore, even though both Russia and the PRC were not satisfied with the Iranian and Iran-proxy activities and policies in the Iraq-Syria-Lebanon area, it was far more important for them to support Iran, and also Turkey, in their confrontations with the US in order to expedite the consolidation of the New Silk Road. (Emphasis added)

It's that last statement that opens up the possibility that my scenario isn't as wild as it may sound, for it indicates that under certain conditions, Russia and China might be prepared to throw over the Tehran regime if they had a reasonable assurance that any replacement regime would be amenable to their Silk Road plans. It's an indicator that the Tehran regime really benefits no one. Meanwhile, even as I compose this blog, some radio media in this country are pointing out that President Trump's remarks that "Iran maybe made a mistake" are giving that country an "out", and perhaps are indicative that he's not completely on board with the idea of a military intervention.  In the long term, the Tehran regime is not only destabilizing to the area, it is destabilizing to the entire Silk Road project's "southern route". That means the political calculus will inevitably change for Iran, Russia, and China, if the regime remains in place, and it may imply that the calculus just did.

So for now, it's not only "watch oil" but watch Russia, and China. And there's a third European power that we've not heard from which, due to its recent Memorandum of Understanding with China to use its ports as a component in the Silk Road project, has vaulted to the top of having a vital interest in the situation.

And that's Italy.

See you on the flip side...

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TRUMP ADMIN “STREAMLINES” GMO REGS

Every now and then I run across an article in my in-box that I'm tempted to blog about, except that my ire and ranting would hardly improve on that in the article itself. This is a case in point:

SHOCK as Trump signs executive order that will end most regulations and oversight on genetically engineered food

Count me in this camp:

With Trump now seemingly siding with Monsanto / Bayer over the near-deregulation of genetically engineered foods, his second betrayal of health-conscious consumers will have many people asking what’s coming next. Will Trump promote Big Pharma’s mass drugging of children with psychiatric drugs? What corporate chemical horror will Trump back next?

In fairness, had Hillary Clinton been elected president, there’s no question she would have aggressively pushed GMOs and mandatory vaccines, all while covering up her own deep-rooted corruption and repeated abuses of government power. Regardless, those of us who care deeply about health freedom and clean food must now begin to question Trump’s authenticity as a candidate who promised to challenge the status quo and drain the swamp.

When it comes to science, there is no deeper or swampier swamp than the GMO industry and its long history of fake science, intimidation of journalists and payoffs to government regulators. By signing this executive order, Trump just poured more putrid swamp juice right into the swamp.

Trump has arguably stood against the establishment on many important issues, but if he’s going to blindly push GMOs and vaccines while utterly failing to take any decisive action against the coordinated tech censorship of independent media, he’s going to lose the election in 2020 as his former supporters lose faith in his proclaimed mission. None of us who supported Trump as an “outsider” in 2016 are going to feel compelled to vote for him again if he’s beholden to establishment corporate interests. And if he doesn’t solve the techno-fascism censorship issue before the 2020 election, he’ll lose it for that reason anyway.

If there is no candidate that gets people excited about the 2020 election, then intelligent people will stay home and not vote at all, in which case the Democrats win from the sheer numbers of fraudulent illegal left-wing voters, and America will collapse into San Francisco-like conditions of high taxation, human feces running in the city streets, and an authoritarian police state that controls what you are allowed to think, speak, watch or share. This is the overt goal of the left-wing fascists who currently run the tech monopolies that dominate online speech. They have already demonstrated they have zero respect for individual liberty, freedom of speech or the rule of law.

As far as I'm concerned, you can add me to that group increasingly tempted to return to my non-voting status. I only ended my embargo because I was so thoroughly repulsed by Hillary and the Bolshecrats that my 2016 vote was a vote against her and them, rather than for Trump and the do-nothing Republicans. But as I watch a slew of states passing "anti-Semitism" laws banning any criticism of Israel, and watch the Neocons taking over his administration and foreign policy, it's becoming a temptation again.

But beyond that, there's something in this article that sent chills through me, and it should you too. Again, I cannot improve on the concern expressed here:

Even though Trump is far from an “establishment” Republican, to the frustration of health-conscious Americans, he just signed an executive order that might as well be called “the GMO Streamlining Act.” As reported by the Associated Press, this executive order directs federal agencies to reduce or eliminate regulations and oversight mechanisms that might help ensure the safety of genetically engineered crops.

In other words, President Trump just ordered the federal government to turn American into a massive GMO experiment where anything goes. “The move comes as companies are turning to newer genetic engineering techniques that make it easier to tinker with the traits of plants and animals,” reports AP, meaning that regulations are being dropped at exactly the moment in history when easy, low-cost genetic modification methods such as CRISPR are rapidly emerging, placing GE technology into the hands of small companies and even determined individuals. (Italicized emphasis added)

Enough is en0ugh, Mr. President. I didn't vote for taking the entire Federal budget black; I didn't vote to allow Israel to run roughshod over our first amendment rights nor to control our foreign policy, and I sure as heck did not vote for an unregulated GMO industry. I still waver, but there's one issue if you waver on, I'm gone, because I'm already hanging by a thread.

See you on the flip side...

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“KILL SWITCH” TEST? OR SOMETHING ELSE?

V.T. spotted this story: it appears that last Sunday google cloud went down. That sparked some speculation from Zero Hedge: was someone testing the alleged "internet kill switch"?

Did The Government Just Test The Internet Kill Switch?

As one can tell from the screen captures that accompanied the article, the outage took down google cloud and several other sites that use it, and the outage covered a significant portion the northeastern United States, a portion of southeastern Canada, and some of western Europe.

Doubtless we'll inevitably hear that this was caused by our good old friend, the glitch ex machina, that serve-all explain-nothing "explanation" usually resorted to by the powers that be to pretend like they're not alarmed, and have everything under control. Zero Hedge, however, is at least raising the issue, and it's the same issue I and others have been trying to warn people about: cyber systems simply are not secure; with enough expertise and know-how, they can be hacked.

What concerns me here is a very different question, and that's the assumption that is implicit in the title of the Zero Hedge article: "Did the government just test the internet kill switch?" But why need it be the US government? Virtually any government might sponsor cyber-warfare, and Russia and China are known to have large contingents of cyber-warfare experts in their intelligence "communities," and one may make a fair assumption that most other major powers do too. Nor should one rule out the possibility that major corporations and other extra-territorial and non-state actors are doing this type of work as well. This leads me to my next point and high octane speculation of the day:

I've entertained the idea in previous such "hacking events" that someone appeared to be reconnoitering the architecture of the internet, learning gateways, crucial nodal points, network connections, and so on, and that's the impression I get from this story. Almost any entity with a commercial or national security interest would be interested in known as much as possible about the exact structure and architecture of the internet, particularly is it was developing cyber warfare and counter-warfare capabilities; maximizing damage to a potential opponent, and minimizing blowback damage to oneself, would be a necessity of such a program, and that, in turn, would necessitate events such as this. Nor would this activity be limited merely to the standard image of cyber-warfare of a team of computer geeks sitting in front of their monitors, typing and wreaking chaos. Internet architecture includes the hardware: the cables, gateway computers, satellites, and so on. In this respect, I've speculated that the attacks on internet cable both in the San Francisco-Bay area, and in Arizona, a couple of years ago, may also have been a part of this effort.

All of this makes me suspect that it is not the US government testing things. And there's a final, all-important reason that I suspect one should cast suspicion on other actors: the up-coming JEDI contract. Last week I blogged about this important but little-talked about subject: the US military in effect wants to move a significant amount of its data and command-control functions to "the cloud." The contract will be worth billions to whomever is awarded it. But this recent attack on the googlecloud only exposes the vulnerabilty of cyber systems, the very last thing that one would think the US military would want to expose right now. Of course, it is possible that some such test of security was being conducted, but again, it would seem to defeat the purpose.

So, I'm left with yet another data-point in my (admittedly "out there") speculation that someone appears to be reconnoitering the architecture of the internet; literally creating a map of the structure.

The real question is who, and for what ultimate purpose?

That I'll leave up to you.

See you on the flip side...

 

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THIS WEEK’S BELLY LAUGH: MICROSOFT VOWS TO PROTECT AMERICAN ...

This story was shared by B.H., but I had to laugh and blog about it, and that's something, as I don't like talking about American politics very much. The reason for that is very simple: it has that hysterical-eschatological-insane asylum quality to it. In a word, it's nauseating and disgusting, as are most of the people involved with it. I have no use for the Dummycrooks whatsoever and precious little use for the do-next-to-nothing Republithugs who haven't done much of anything since the interstate system, nor done much to roll back that "big government" they're always complaining about.  Their other big success was the Civil War. Senator Taft complained about it (big government, I mean, not the Civil War) and would've done something about it, but they sidelined him, and we've been stuck with the Raw Deal ever since then. Moreover, since the 2016 election, we've been subjected to three years of Muellerism. About the only thing I have said about American politics in general, or Swamptington, D.C., is that I thought the 2016 elections were significant in one very important way, and that was that both candidates were "deep state" candidates, but that it appeared that there were now deep rifts or divisions in that deep state, such that one faction was backing one candidate (recall that strange episode with the military on President Trump's inauguration), and that another faction was backing the other(think of the "intelligence complex").

But just when you think it couldn't possibly get any more hysterical than this Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump circus, something happens to rob you of all your certainty, and thrusts you into a whole new level of eschatological Angst (and make sure you're not swallowing a drink when you read this one, because it will make you spew it all over your computer screen in laughter):

Microsoft’s ElectionGuard a Trojan Horse

 

Now, I can think of several reasons why having Mr. Gates anywhere near our computer-rigged elections is a very bad idea:

(1) He's Bill Gates;

(2) He was a big sponsor of Common Core, trying to make more money selling computer software to the Amairikuhn quackademic edugarchy;

(3) He's trying to do the same thing here, make money at the government trough by selling computer software  (oink oink);

(4) Did I mention he's Bill - oink - Gates?

(5) Do we really want to be in the middle of voting only to read on the computer screen "Please do not turn off this computer; your update will be done soon"?  (Or maybe that's all part of the P.L.O.T.: get the voting lines to become so long while people are waiting for the latest Microcrud update to load, they'll get so frustrated and simply stay home and not vote at all, which will make the job of fabricating the acceptable results on the part of the programmers and technocrats at Microcrud so much easier);

(6) Do we really want to be turning our computer-rigged elections over to the designer of one of the worst opera-  please be patient and do not turn off your computer while we update Windows - ting systems ever?

(7) Did I mention that he's Bill Ga-please be patient and do not turn off your computer, your spyware update is being installed - tes?;

(8) While we're installing your spyware update, and you're waiting to vote, we can go ahead and give you your mandatory vaccine which you're required to have so that you can vote...

Well, you get the picture. Now, to this long litany of mercantilist globaloney billionaire busybodyism and vaccimania that is Bill Gates, add the fact that this cyber-miracle of computerized voting is being - please be patient and do not turn off your computer, your spyware update is being installed - done in conjunction with the military, and I'm sure you, gentle reader, are probably as alarmed as I am: votes can really be rigged, and the whole system can become the target of cyber attacks as well. Think of all the nightmare scenarios that could result: election results that were "unacceptable" could be quietly and truly covertly over-turned: votes could be made literally to disappear with the push of a button. Records could be falsified or erased altogether. Add to this the fact that no cyber-system has integrity or is completely secure, and elections could be altered by anyone, or endlessly contested to the extent that one would have a "de facto postponement" of installation into office of the "winner" (think Florida 2000).

Worse, down the line, why even bother about representative bodies at all, when one can have computerized voting which promises a truly participatory democracy? Why have a Congress, or a state legislature at all? Why not allow everyone to propose and vote on  every measure, and allow a megacorporation, a billionaire busybody, and the military to be the custodians of the whole thing? (After listening to "congresspersons", it's actually a tempting idea.)

Of course, there's an obvious solution here, one that is neither very expensive and wouldn't have to involve the likes of Mr. Gates or the military, and that's good old fashioned paper ballots. Of course, those old analogue methods can be hacked too and ballot boxes can be stuffed (just ask Lyndon Johnson) or go missing altogether (think Cook county, 1960), but in the main, it's much more difficult to do. We'd have to wait a couple of months before results were announced, but given the "quality" of candidates in recent years, I could live with that.

Or to put all this is Microsoftese (a dialect of busybodyism spoken outside the confines of Swampington DC):

Microsoft’s press release announcing ElectionGuard highlights its claim that its system would make elections more verifiable, secure, and auditable; be open source-based; and improve the voting experience. While all of these things sound nice enough, there is reason to believe — based on the description given by Microsoft — that some of these claims are dubious and misleading. Unfortunately, for now, analysis of ElectionGuard is restricted to Microsoft’s description of the software as it is not yet available for public examination. The ElectionGuard software kit is expected to be released later this year on the GitHub platform.

The first aspect of the “verifiable” claim relates to a voter tracking system, where each voter is given a unique tracking ID which allows them “to follow an encrypted version of the vote through the entire election process via a web portal provided by election authorities.” Voters can choose the option of confirming “that their trackers and encrypted votes accurately reflect their selections.”

Yet Microsoft notes that “once a vote is cast, neither the tracker nor any data provided through the web portal can be used to reveal the contents of the vote,” meaning that while a person can track whether their vote was counted, they cannot verify whether the content of the vote (i.e., who they voted for) is counted correctly or not. Microsoft goes on to note that only “after the election is complete” will the tracker page allow the content of the vote to be seen.

The second “verifiability” component of ElectionGuard “is an open specification – or a road map – which allows anyone to write an election verifier.” Microsoft then notes that this open specification would mean that “voters, candidates, news media and any observers can run verifiers of their own or downloaded from sources of their choosing to confirm tabulations are as reported.”

...

Election forensics analyst Jonathan Simon, author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy, was not fully persuaded by the E2E-V claim. “Pardon my skepticism,” Simon told MintPress, “but I’ve read Microsoft’s ‘good news’ ElectionGuard flyer and it reminds me very much of the flyers and PR material long served up by the vendors and programmers of the current voting equipment — the very computers that IT experts discovered could be hacked by outsiders and programmed to add, delete, and shift votes by insiders.”

Simon continued:

Right now, for example, they’re hawking expensive and completely unnecessary ballot-marking devices (BMDs) that turn your votes into a barcode, a code that no voter can read or verify. Very slick but yet another level of non-transparency, another step away from public, observable vote-counting, and another vector for fraud.

Yep... what Simon said.

And ponder this one: you know they're howling with laughter in Moscow and Beijing at the thought of Gates protecting American elections.

See you -please be patient and do not turn off your computer, your spyware update is being installed - on the flip side...

 

 

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NOW IT’S A RUSSIAN PLANT THAT EXPLODED

Remember all those Chinese chemical plants that exploded? at the time of the first explosion, which left a massive and deep crater, I entertained suspicions that the explosion was not accidental,  and like many others on the internet, I thought then and still think now that the depth and shape of that crater was not commensurate to having been made by a chemical explosion. Many - I among them - entertained the idea that perhaps a "rod of God" technology had been used to cause the explosion. And to this day I am not convinced, at least in the case of that first explosion, that the standard explanations suffice.

With that little bit of context in mind, there were a few people who caught this one this week: there's been another explosion at a plant, this time not in China, but in Russia, and it was a munitions plant at that. But before we get to that, and just for the record, I'm 99.99% inclined to view it as an accidental explosion. We'll get back to that.

Here, in any case, are RT's and Zero Hedge's presentations of the story:

Dozens injured as massive blasts hit TNT plant in Russia’s Dzerzhinsk city (VIDEOS)

Massive Explosion Rocks Russian Munitions Plant; Dozens Injured, 200 Buildings Damaged

This is not the first time that accidental explosions have occurred in Russian munitions factories or ammunition dumps. Indeed, former Lt. Col. Tom Bearden has mentioned in many of his books at enormous explosion in the late 1950s Soviet Union, which he believes to have been caused by a "scalar experiment" gone horribly wrong. Then of course we had the Chernobyl incident, a case study of the inefficiency and corruption of the Glories of Socialism.

So it's tempting to view this explosion as just an accident, a horrible event and "another example of Russian inefficiency and the regime's callous disregard for normal safety and human life." You know the routine well: "insert standard western media boilerplate narrative here," and "add the usual mentions of Vladimir Putin's regime here" and so on. Growing up in the Cold War, I was used to such narratives, and they made a lot of sense because the Soviet Union was wicked and corrupt and evil and callous and inefficient &c &c. The problem with the narrative that I always had was a philosophical one: if the Russians were that incompetent, then how in the name of sense did they manage to become a superpower? Oh yea, I forgot, they stole it all from us.

Except that the problem here is that Putin's Russia is not Khrushchev's or Brezhnev's or Andropov's or Gorbachev's Soviet Union.

Which brings me to the two articles and my high octane speculation on that other .01% possibility, for there's something interesting in these two articles, or rather, there's something interesting that's not in these two articles. Consider the final paragraph from the RT article:

This is not the first time explosions had happened at the same explosives-maker. On April 4, a blast brought down one of its one-story structures. It took an hour to put down the fire, and, luckily, no one got hurt that day. A much deadlier explosion occurred in the plant in August, when five of its workers were killed.

Ok... so there were earlier explosions at the same plant, which, incidentally, we're told made explosives for "mining." But nowhere in the article to we get even a hint, not the tiniest suggestion, of what may have led to the explosion. Turning to the Zero Hedge version of the story, one additional tidbit of information is given:

A criminal investigation has been launched into the explosions.

Something, in other words, has made the Russian government sit up and take notice, and to start a criminal investigation. One can only assume that with previous explosions in the same plant, that this might be a normal or regular procedure. I don't know as I'm not at all knowledgeable in Russian law and regulation. One might assume that at least some laws from the Soviet era about criminal incompetence and slacking might still be on the books. That at least would be a "standard narrative" explanation for it.

I suspect, however, that like me, many readers here will be entertaining darker "high octane speculations," namely, that "criminal" in this context may mean something far more sinister: sabotage by terrorists, or, worse, sabotage by "major actors" on the world stage, and if the latter, perhaps another event in an ongoing "covrt war" being fought behind the scenes by people who possess advanced technologies capable of creating such "accidents" and "acts of nature." In a world being sprayed to death with chemicals to increase the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere so that the boys in the Pentagram can play at "full spectrum dominance," then sparking a Russian munitions plant might be a fairly easy thing to do. And I suspect the rather tight-lipped nature of the Russian response to the event tends to confirm this line of more sinister speculation.

Then there's the videos of the event, which I made a point to watch, even though I don't have time for videos (which reminds me, once again folks, please do not clutter up my inbox with videos. Opening such emails only to find videos only slows me down. PLEASE do not send videos). Anyway, watching the explosion, which appears to have been recorded in more or less real time by locals, I was struck by three things: (1) the size of the explosion, yielding an enormous mushroom cloud more evocative of a nuclear explosion rather than a conventional one; (2) the fact that, nonetheless, the explosion was apparently conventional because I saw no signs of continuing combustion of material in the mushroom cloud, a telltale sign of nuclear explosions; and (3) that the explosion therefore had to be more or less the near-simultaneous combustion of all explosives at the plant in order to produce that type of signature. This was not, in other words, the case of an explosive fire traveling through a plant and setting off a number of smaller explosions in a sequence. On one video, one does not hear a sequence of explosions, but one very loud "bang". One yet another video, one hears two very loud bangs (a signature, some will recognize, of a thermobaric or fuel air bomb).

One can only assume that, in any case, the plant would have fire doors and other safety features designed to prevent that, and to confine any accidental explosions to one area, much like on old battleships one had fire doors, bulkheads, and other safety features to prevent a flash fire from erupting into a full magazine explosion. Something appears to have overcome whatever safety features the Russians had at tha plant to isolate and localize accidental fires and explosions, in order to produce the result that we see and hear.

It's the enormous size of that mushroom cloud that indicates a "full up explosion", the near-simultaneous detonation of a lot of conventional explosives, that makes me suspect that something beyond mere accident, or "routine human incompetence" are in play.

And the Russians are not even hinting at why they launched a criminal investigation. As in all things Russian, in this case, time might tell...

Oh, and by the way, in March there was another explosion in a Chinese chemical plant:

"Horrifying" Blast At China Chemical Plant Kills 47, Injures 640

Really, if this is just "incompetence" then it's a marvel that China has any chemical industry at all.

As you might have gathered, I'm not buying that narrative...

See you on the flip side...

 

 

GOOD BYE OLD FIEND, HELLO MEWING MAIDEN

(As tomorrow is Memorial Day in the USSA, I'm posting this blog early).

It's been a long time since I had one of my occasional rants about the declining state of edgykayshun in the Amairikuhn quackademy. But this time my rant concerns no quackademy in the USSA, but rather, my alma mater, the Old Fiend, which, if the following article is to be believed (and I do), then the Diversity Mongers have successfully targeted Oxford (this article thanks to many people who saw it and passed it along):

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-23/oxford-university-dumbs-down-admissions-process-disadvantaged-applicants

It's difficult for me to express what I am feeling and thinking about all of this. At one level, it makes me think that the nickname for Oxford - The Old Fiend -  that I and my friend Dr. Scott De Hart have for the place should now be changed to The Simpering Spinster, or perhaps The Mewing Maiden, because the inevitable result of this Amairikuhnization of The Old Fiend will be the impositions of collectivist conformity, an increasingly stupid student body, and the final end of those unwritten, unspoken, but nevertheless very real traditions that made the place what it was.  It seems there is no cultural tradition or institution that the Nihilists of Progressivism will not attack and spray paint with the graffiti of the blithering nonsense of Edubabble and Psychoblither and "Diversity". Am I over-reacting? Perhaps. But I doubt it. Consider this from the article:

With the goal of increasing Oxford University's undergraduate students intake from disadvantaged backgrounds from 15% to 25% over the next four years, the prestigious British university has unveiled a "sea change" in its admissions process.

Echoing the new SAT 'Adversity Score' in the US, which attempts - through various socioeconomic factors - to adjust applicants' 'clean' merit score for their relative disadvantage in life, The Telegraph reports that Oxford will offer places with lower grades to students from disadvantaged backgrounds for the first time in its 900-year history.

50 students in the new intake - which will include refugees and young carers - will be eligible to receive offers “made on the basis of lower contextual A-level grades, rather than the university’s standard offers”. (Italicized emphasis added, boldface emphasis in the original).

"Carers"?  What the heck are "carers"? Granted, typos occur all the time (my books are full of them). But there's the disconcerting possibility that this isn't a typo, but an actual spelling error, and that means "the rot has already set in". The spell checker is only as good as the programmer programming it, and in this case, the spell-checker was not, apparently, consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (which, let us hasten to add, must now be made to follow suit, to include the speech patterns and words of "disadvantaged backgrounds.")

More important, however, is the whole inherently patronizing and condescending attitude which is now to be made a matter of policy. One former student has already raised the issue, and good for her:

Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who read law at Oxford, writes that she was from a “disadvantaged background.” And she would not have wanted adversity points to help her get into Oxford:

If someone had told me that the college only admitted me because of “contextual data” – my family’s low income, the paucity of books in our house, the fact I was from a broken home, or because, in my touching ignorance, I thought a Reader’s Digest condensed version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a literary masterpiece (bless!), I would have been mortified.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be patronised in that way. If I wasn’t good enough to be admitted on my own merits to a university renowned for its excellence, then I’d rather not have gone to Oxbridge at all.

Pearson explains how the new policy came about:

The trouble starts when well-meaning, guilt-stricken liberals (that’s pretty much all university lecturers) start lowering the bar because too many comprehensives are bad at helping the brightest pupils to reach their full potential. (And too many teachers are Corbynists who detest Oxbridge anyway.)

Hear hear! The whole attraction of the Old Fiend for me was precisely the fact that it cared not a twopence about my "disadvantaged background" as a hack from South Dakota. Indeed, I turned down a full post-graduate ride at a major big name Amairkuhn quackademy when I learned that part of my required course work would have been to study "feminist theology" and "learn" to use "non-offensive gender inclusive language." Presumably, I was to keep all of my patriarchal prayer references to myself.  Sorry, but "Our collective social God-concept that we attribute to hyper-numinal and perhaps multi-dimensional topologies" just didn't have the same "ring" as "Our Father, Who art in Heaven...". I told the dean of that particular quackademy to keep the scholarship, and to pound sand (I said it more politely, but that was the gist of it). It was, as far as I was concerned, a case of "Behold, I can give you all professorships if thou but bow down and embrace and worship The Agenda." The dean of that quackademy was perplexed and I suspect actually surprised. Apparently he'd never encountered a "not only no but hell no" response to the blandishments of scholarships-in-return-for-embracing-the-agenda before.

S0 I'm in exactly the same position, and have exactly the same reaction, as Ms. Pearson. And the predictable concerns have already surfaced:

Dr Anthony Wallersteiner, head of Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, said that the number of privately-educated children getting places at Oxbridge had been “driven down” as part of efforts to boost diversity.

He recently told The Times that private-school parents claimed that their children were being “edged out” by social engineering.

Sadly, I do not foresee any way of halting the process, not there, nor anywhere else. The nihilists will succeed in capturing this institution as well for the process was begun long ago. I saw it under way when I was there. You can now cross The Mewing Maiden off your list of places to send your kids to college.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

TIDBIT: RIP STANTON FRIEDMAN

Famed UFO researcher Stanton Friedman is dead at 84:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/stanton-friedman-ufologist-dead-1.5135588?fbclid=IwAR36KrylRYp%E2%80%933PnjLEsgA2fLjsXH1kp3ZspXsiJ1NOjB1kt51-dAgJeAxw

As the article notes, Mr. Friedman made the Roswell UFO incident a matter of mainstream conversation. But this would not do justice to the full range of Mr. Friedman's contributions to ufology. In many ways, Mr. Friedman joined a very small list of people with the credentials and the research abilities to make the field respectable. In many ways he was the "father of modern ufology." The field has lost someone irreplaceable.

…AND THERE WAS A FIRE NEAR THE DOME OF THE ROCK, TOO…

One of this website's regular readers sent along this article, and in case you hadn't yet heard about it, I decided I needed to blog about it. On the same day that Notre Dame de Paris was burning, there was also a fire at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

That's near the Dome of the Rock, folks:

Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque Fire Burns at the Same Time As Flames Engulf Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

Like Notre Dame, the Dome of the Rock is, architecturally, a beautiful and sublime building, and like Notre Dame is for the Christian world, the site is one of the most revered  in the Islamic world...

... and it was burning not only on the same day as Notre Dame, but at the same time:

A fire broke out at the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem just as flames ravaged the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Footage showing smoke and fire emerging from the roof of a structure known as the Marwani Prayer Room, or Solomon's Stables, could be seen on social media. The Palestine News Agency, the official outlet of the Palestinian National Authority, cited a guard as saying Monday that "the fire broke out in the guard's room outside the roof of the Marwani Prayer Room, and the fire brigade of the Islamic Waqf handled the matter successfully."

No injuries or damage was reported during the short blaze.

News of the incident at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam and central to the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, was largely overshadowed by a much larger blaze engulfing the Notre Dame Cathedral at the same time. There was no evidence of any link between the two fires.

...

The Marwani Prayer Room is located underneath the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, which contains both the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Sheikh Azzam al-Khatib, director general of the Jerusalem Waqf and Al-Aqsa Mosque Affairs Department, told Jordan's Al-Mamlaka TV that the fire broke out in the courtyard and preliminary information suggested that it may have been caused by children tampering in the area. (Emphasis added)

Ok... I admit it: as soon as I read this story, I wasn't buying, and I'm still not buying, and one reason I'm still not buying is that there hasn't been much else coming out about this story. But consider just two points from this article: (1) the fire was reported by an actual guard at the site as having broken out "in the guard's room outside the Marwani Prayer room," but then we are told that the director general of the site stated that (2) the fire "broke out in the courtyard" and (3) that is may have been caused by children tampering in the area," in other words, it was all a childish prank of some sort, gone horribly wrong, or an accident of play that got out of hand.

There's so much here that sends my suspicion meter straight into the red zone that I don't even know where to begin, but I suppose we could begin with that business about "children tampering in the area." I'm calling hogwash on that one, for what set of parents - or for that matter, the children themselves - are going to think that a fun prank would be to set fire near the mosque? For Christian or Jewish children, one can't imagine parents raising their children to think it's ok to play pranks at the mosque, and for Muslim children it would be similarly - though for very different reasons - unthinkable.

But then there's the outright contradiction of where the fire started: was it outside in the courtyard, or inside in the guards' room? What strikes me here is that we have "an official story" (it started in the courtyard) versus an actual witness's story which contradicts the official story, in this case, the witness being a guard, who said it started in the guard room. That I can wrap my head around, for if the intention was to severely damage the mosque, getting rid of the "first responders" would seem to be a logical step.

But above all it's the timing here that bothers me. Certainly a fire at Notre Dame and a fire at the Al-Aqsa mosque can happen "coincidentally" and "accidentally." But it's when one considers the emerging details and contradictions in the narrative that inevitably send the suspicion meter into the red zone, that the possibility that both fires were deliberate acts begins to take on a horrifying possibility.

The only difference between the two events is that the mosque fire was put out fairly quickly, and before serious damage could be done, otherwise we might have some globaloneyist proposing to rebuild it as some modernist "inclusive" monstrosity.

The bottom line for me here, and I don't know about you, is that there is much more to this story... it's like a mackerel on a moonlit beach: it both shines and stinks, not the least because of the contradictions in what is known, as well as for the fact that not much more is known.

Time will tell, but I suspect this story, too, will not go away. I"m just not buying the "coincidence" story.

See you on the flip side...

MORE STRANGENESS ABOUT THE NOTRE DAME FIRE

We're still not at the stage we can move the sad story of the burning of Notre Dame from the "You Tell Me" tab to the "Call it Conspiracy" tab, but just so the record is clear, I'm right on the cusp. Thus far, I've had all sorts of weird stories emailed to me, including one that claimed that a famous international theme park operator and movie-maker wanted to donate to the rebuilding fund. As far as I can tell, M. Macron's idea of turning this into an "international effort" was serious, and as far as I am concerned, extremely dubious. Let us be very clear here: yes, Notre Dame is very much a French monument; kings and queens worshipped there, Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French there. But it is also and equally, if not preeminently, a Christian cathedral, a functioning temple of Roman Catholic worship; it was not a monument but a place of Christian worship. To open  any rebuilding process to some sort of "international committee" seems to me to be - up front - a sacrilege, the more so if the call to do so is coming from (dare I say it) a rootless cosmopolitan globaloneyist twit like Macron who by his own admission does not think there's any such thing as French culture, which gives us a solid clue of what he might have to say about the wider Christian culture lying underneath, and that gave rise to, that Macronly non-existent French culture. Do we really want, for hypothetical example, Saudi money paying for a solid bronze plaque on the "rebuild" commemorating the generous donations of the companies with Mickey Mouse ears or Golden Arches? More to the point, should an un- and anti-French twit like Macron be allowed anywhere near a rebuilding project?

My little French paternal grandmother had a word for such ideas, which began with an "m", and was followed by the German word for Earth.

And apparently I'm not the only one expressing some doubts over the Billionaire Busybodies' Rebuild campaign:

Escobar: Now Comes The Notre Dame Of Billionaires

However, there is some good news for the rebuild effort in this article, shared by S.D.; it seems Notre Dame, in its entirety, was digitally scanned by lasers:

Professor Who Scanned All of Notre Dame Died Months Before Fire

But back to why I'm on the cusp of moving Notre Dame updates from the "You Tell Me" to the "Call it Conspiracy" tab, for this story was also spotted by S.D., and it raises some disquieting thoughts that, frankly, I and doubtless many others were having as we watched the cathedral burn:

Chief architect of Notre Dame: 'We installed new detection system in 2010, and completely rewired the cathedral, so the fire wasn't caused by electrical short-circuit'

What the cathedral's former chief architect is responding to are stories like these about the ever-useful Glitch-ex-machina:

"Computer glitch" may be behind Notre Dame Cathedral fire, rector says - live updates

Between the two explanations, I'm obviously on the side of the architect. But wait, what kind of computer glitch ex machina are we talking about? Apparently, two, the one the started the fire itself, and then the other one, that sent the firefighters to the wrong place in the cathedral while the fire was burning somewhere else:

Notre-Dame fire: Firefighters 'lost valuable time after computer glitch signalled blaze in wrong location'

So, yea, folks. I'm still on the cusp... but what I forgot to tell you is, that my body is leaning dangerously into the "call it conspiracy" territory, and I'm holding on to a rope tied on to a wall, hoping almost against hope that this was not a deliberately set fire, and that I come crashing down into the conspiracy territory.

See tou on the flip side...

 

 

 

 

 

CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT AGAINST 5G? AND LLOYDS’ WON’T ...

A few months ago I blogged about a story from The Netherlands about a 5G test there, and the apparent deaths of a flock of birds it allegedly caused. And while 5G is not a topic I cover very often here, I do follow it occasionally, since like many people I believe it's another one of those corporate crapitalism-sponsored disasters  in the making. It's bad enough in the modern USSA that we're forced to be jabbed, prodded, taxed to death, spied upon, our privacy invaded, our data bought and sold, our DNA collected, told what pronouns we can and cannot use, forced to pay for the slaughter of the unborn and to subsidize the corporation doing it, subsidize Marxism in the schools and the academies, be regaled with ugly modern art and music at every turn(think the Obama library or portrait), while the neighbor down the street keeps everyone awake at 2AM by playing his jungle music through the sub-woofers in his pickup truck or home stereo - Boom Boom Boom! - now, on top of that, they want to bake everyone's noodle - literally - by beaming even more microwaves at us, and, surprise surprise, they haven't even really studied any of the effects yet.

Every time I think of 5G, I think of GMOs, and "substantial equivalence." Remember that one? In case you forgot, "substantial equivalence" was that nifty doctrine that Mon(ster)santo and other "agribusiness giants" of the agribusiness "community" brewed up in their bubbling cauldrons and served to the FDA in the late 1980s (that's the Food and Drug Administration; you know, the agency of the same goobernment that says its ok to put aluminum and mercury and all sorts of stuff in vaccines and while outlawing a plant and making it a crime for people who want to smoke it). The doctrine said, in effect, that (1) extensive inter-generational testing of GMO crops - corn, or as they call it in Europe, maize for example - was unnecessary since it looked like ordinary corn and tasted like ordinary corn, so voila, for the consumer, it was substantially equivalent to ordinary corn, except that when it came to (2) the patent for said corn, then the corporations had every right to sue the daylights out of farmers if one little sprout of their substantially equivalent plant was found on their land if they didn't purchase the license for it, and in fact, even if they had never planted it. Thus, so far as I am concerned, the words Substantial Equivalence are a fitting symbol for a Great Big Crock Full of Steaming Bull Puckey.

As far as I can tell with my very cursory familiarity with the whole 5G rollout, it looks to me as if we're being served another steaming crock full of Substantial Equivalence; it's more or less the same as cell phone towers, only "better" somehow. Well, we know the story of how well Substantial Equivalence is working out now - decades later - for Bayer with the recent lawsuits. And that appears to be behind the thinking in this article, shared by V.T.:

http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=120705

Class action suit, huh? Well, why stop at a mere trillion? Let's bump it up a bit.

It was while reading that article this week, that I bumped into this one, and this, I suspect, tells the whole story about this latest bit of Substantial Equivalence oozing toward us from corporate crapitalism: http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=120870

And in case you missed it:

The FCC and other government regulatory bodies, in collusion with the big telecomm industries, are ferociously pushing smart meters, 5G and the Internet of Things.

This roll-out is not only happening in the US, but all over the world. The giant telecomms gush enthusiastically about how EVERYTHING will be connected

OMG!! We’re gonna have Incredibly high-speed connectivity so your little girls and teens can, at supersonic speed, upload pix of their latest nail-polish jobs or cute puppy videos to FaceBook, Pinterest, etc., etc., for their friends to gasp and giggle…..and, of course, click “like” and forward these to their friends…. again, all at warp speed.

...

BUT WAIT!! …. There’s a tiny but growing wrinkle in this rosy scenario of sugar plums dancing in the heads of these telecomm leaders. Specifically, Lloyds of London, one of the world’s premier insurance groups, is refusing to insure health claims made against wireless technologies. And, other insurance companies are following Lloyd’s lead in this.

If you follow the money, this is HUGE. After all, if these wi-fi techno-toys are so safe, why is Lloyds leaving all this additional money on the table?

Well, Lloyd’s November 2010 Risk Assessment Team’s Report gives us a solid clue: the report compares these wireless technologies with asbestos, in that the early research on asbestos was “inconclusive” and only later did it become obvious to anyone paying attention that asbestos causes cancer. (Emphasis in the original)

Bingo. And for me, this story has some added bitterness, as I lost my youngest sister Jeannie to a glioblastoma multiform brain tumor in 2000. The tumor appeared - you guessed it - exactly where she always held her cell phone when answering calls. And people wonder why I don't have a cell phone.

In any case, Lloyds' is saying to the 5G promoters, "proceed at your own risk." Indeed, proceed at your own risk. The problem, of course, is that class-action lawsuits are an after-the-fact strategy, one that will allow the whole thing to be implemented, and which must then wait until the inevitable health problems occur in such numbers as to be actionable at law. So we're back at Substantial Equivalence again, where a corrupt goobernment allowed the agribusiness "community" to sell everyone a bill of goods, reap great profits, pack the bureaucracy with corporate "science" backing their claims. The lawsuits followed thirty years later, and so far as I can tell, have not curbed the planting of GMOs very much.

So I propose a different strategy: just say no to the steaming stream of Substantial Equivalence coming from Swampington, D.C.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

ADAM, EVE, AND THE CIA

This story was seen and passed along by so many people that it went straight into the "finals" folder this week, and it's a fitting way to end this week's blogs, for the implications of this story are rather large, especially if you're one of those people following the "crypto-archeology" story, i.e., the idea that major governments and intelligence agencies have been and are involved in the covert investigation of ancient lore, sites, and traditions.  The story concerns this bit of declassified CIA documents, in this case, having to do with the stories of the Flood, and as it turns out, Adam and Eve:

THE ADAM AND EVE STORY

If one notes the date of declassification of this document, the CIA website states that it was June 24, 2013. When one opens the pdf file, what one has is a book or pamphlet published in 1965. In other words, a publicly available book found its way into the maze of classification of the American intelligence "community."

The question is, why?

A brief read of the document shows that it was concerned with various "floods" the author thought recurred on planet Earth, as well as the Adam and Eve story. And he begins his book/pamphlet with a scenario of catastrophe hitting the west coast of the USA. So from that standpoint, it does make some sense, for any such catastrophe would be viewed as a national security issue and hence of concern to the intelligence "community."

But my high octane speculation motor, as one might suspect, is running in high gear and I am seeing other potential implications here, the first being that no matter how apparently crazy or bizarre a theory concerning ancient history may be, it will be investigated, or at least "passed along to headquarters." It is, in other words, a clear indicator that the "alternative research field" is not only of interest to that "community," but that its productions are being watched, monitored, and no doubt analyzed. Certainly it has been known for some time that the UFO field, for example, is closely watched by intelligence bureaucracies, and at times, "interfered with" and if recent history is any example, that actual "marketing campaigns" are promoted in order to push certain narratives and achieve certain results, such as making that particular research field look ridiculous (and yes, I am talking about the Blue Chickens, folks, among other things). But what this little document release indicates is this this interest in the alternative research field is not confined solely to UFOs.

And that implies something else, namely, that there are dedicated resources in that "community" to do so. That may mean nothing more (or less) than "standing orders" to notice and pass along information such as this. To do so also implies that somewhere in the labyrinth of intelligence bureaucracies, that there is someone reading and analyzing such materials.

One may view this from the standpoint that any cultural trend or phenomenon  - like flood stories, themes of recurrent catastrophe, and so on - are of interest, perhaps for the purposes of social engineering, as I outlined in my recent book Microcosm and Medium.

However, during my presentations at the 2015 Secret Space Program conference in Bastrop. Texas, I also argued a case that the national security "community" would have viewed the UFO problem as a potential problem involving another "Tower of Babel moment of history," and that leaving no stone unturned, it may have investigated ancient lore, traditions, and texts to gain a perspective on the problem it was dealing with in the UFO phenomenon. (Incidentally, many people think I am the one who originated the phrase "Tower of Babel moment of History." I am not. The phrase is actually that of Leonard Bernstein, who used it in his celebrated Harvard Norton Poetry lectures, The Unanswered Question, in 1973.) One may even speculate that perhaps the intelligence "community" was intrigued by this pamphlet precisely because it suspected that recurrent catastrophes were in fact engineered or deliberate interventions in human affairs, and hence constituted "Tower of Babel moments of history."

And that, perhaps, is the real story here, a bit of confirmation (again, perhaps) that my speculations in Bastrop may have some traction. If so, then it leads to a disquieting question, one implied by the question of a "Tower of Babel moment of History" itself, namely, if that be the case, then whose "side" is the intelligence "community" on, and with whom might they be attempting to negotiate (if at all)?

If recent news and cultural trends, not to mention the predominance of various secret society relationships within the intelligence "community" are any indicator(think Skull and Bones, folks), they may have made the wrong choice...

See you on the flip side...

 

MORE STRANGENESS(?) ABOUT ETHIOPIAN FLIGHT 302

Something seems terribly wrong with the story of Ethiopian flight 302. I blogged about this last week, after having a few emails from various people suggesting that perhaps the MCAS artificial intelligence system on the craft was either deficient, or perhaps had even been hacked. Thus far, the consensus on the story seems to be that this system is opaque and not intuitive, and that there are deficiencies in the pilot's manual.

What concerns me however are the strangeness of airline accidents lately. The disappearance of Malaysia Air flight 370 continues to daunt any explanation (and search), and was followed by the apparent downing of Malaysia air flight 17 over the Ukraine. Then came the crash of Lyon Air flight 610 in Indonesia, the first of the Boeing 737-Max 8's to crash, followed now by Ethiopian Air's flight 302. As most readers here are probably aware, the aircraft has now been grounded, and reportedly Boeing is working on a "fix" to its MCAS system, which is supposed to automatically adjust the trim of the aircraft due to unusually forward-mounted engines on its wings... or... something like that.

But there's two articles that make me wonder if we're getting the full story. I'm not a pilot, of course, and I know nothing about flying (other than that I don't like it and won't do it), however these two articles, taken together, give me pause and make me wonder if there is something more going on than meets the eye. This is one of those "you tell me stories," because to my amateur's eye, something is quite amiss. The first article was sent by Mr. E.G., and the graphs alone make one rather sick to the stomach, imagining what those poor people on that doomed flight were experiencing:

"Something Was Extraordinarily Wrong": Doomed Boeing Swung Up And Down Hundreds Of Feet

If one looks at the graphs of the vertical speed of the Lyon flight and the Ethiopian Air flight, they are quite similar in that the speed increases and decreases seem all out of whack. But what's interesting is that we're not being shown the data for the last half of Ethtiopian flight 302's short flight into disaster. The flight appears to have been on some kind of roller coaster ride:

According to officials with Ethiopian Airlines, the crew of flight 302 told air traffic control they they were experiencing "flight control" problems just a few minutes before contact was lost. Pilot Yared Getachew - who had more than 8,000 hours of flying experience, reported the initial "flight control" problem in a calm voice within one minute of departure. 

According to the radar, the aircraft was flying far below the minimum safe altitude recommended during takeoff. Within two minutes, the plane had climbed to a safer altitude, and the pilot reported that he wanted to remain on a straight course to 14,000 feet.

The plane then proceeded to rapidly climb and fall by hundreds of feet while flying unusually fast, according to the Times. Air traffic controllers "started wondering out loud what the flight was doing."

The plane's trajectory was so erratic that two other Ethiopian flights - 613 and 629, where ordered to remain at higher altitudes.

While the controllers were instructing the other planes to keep their distance, a panicked Captain Getachew interrupted just three minutes into their flight and requested to turn back as the plane accelerated to even higher speeds well beyond the plane's safety limits.

So far, so bad. As the story goes, all of this information seems to support the "problems-in-the-AI-MCAS" system hypothesis. But then there's this tidbit of information:

A minute later, it disappeared from the radar while flying over a restricted military zone.

Ordinarily this bit of information wouldn't make me think twice. But then one turns to the second article, shared by Mr. S.D.:

Army captain killed in Ethiopia plane crash

In this article, there is reference to a statement by an eyewitness, who shortly before the actual crash saw something very strange:

The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft went down in clear weather just minutes after takeoff. It “rotated two times in the air” with smoke coming from the back before crashing, said witness Tamrat Abera. (Emphasis added)

What's interesting here is the implication that this witness may have seen something very strange during that portion of the flight about which we otherwise seem to have a curious lack of information. What this witness describes is itself something very odd: the aircraft apparently rotated two times... the problem here is what this language actually means: did the aircraft do loops in the air like a looping rollercoaster? That's rather difficult to believe if indeed the witness saw this just before the crash. Or did it do a spiraling corkscrew? or was it in a spiraling nosedive? Or worse, was the fuselage being twisted back and forth along its central axis in some sort of torsion effect? Ordinarily I'd opt for "spiraling nosedive", but the language is ambiguous enough to allow for other, more disturbing possibilities.

Then there's the matter of the smoke "coming from the back," meaning, perhaps, from the back of the fuselage, which would again be rather odd since the engines are mounted on the wings; so it sounds as if something else might have been on fire other than the engines. Thus, if there's smoke coming from the fuselage, what might be burning? Hydraulics from the control systems for flaps and so on? If so, then that means there might be another culprit than the MCAS system, and it is obvious that one could not rule out foul play. In any case, all this "rotating" and "smoking" is taking place while the aircraft "disappears from the radar while flying over a restricted military zone", making me wonder if the strange behavior described by the witness might be the result of some technology being employed against the aircraft, or if indeed a bomb or some other method of destruction had been placed on it. Who knows?

I certainly do not know, but it seems to me that something smells here, and it has my suspicion meter in the orange-to-red zone. My guess is that this witness, cited in the second article, may have an important key, if not the key to it. And accordingly my guess is we'll hear very little - if anything at all - from that witness by way of clarifying those strange remarks in the future. I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong. But in the meantime, we're in the presence of a mystery, and I want very much to hear more detail from that witness, as I do from recovered black boxes.

See you on the flip side...