Inside the high-stakes world of spotters, racing's unsung heroes

By Alex Lloyd June 6, 2014 12:28 PM Motoramic  https://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/life-on-the-spotter-s-stands--and-the-high-stress-world-of-being-a-racer-s-eyes-in-the-sky-162805662.html

Spotters watch over a NASCAR race

Quick: Name a race car driver. You’ve probably got at least a couple at the ready — Dale or Senna or maybe Mario (Andretti, not Nintendo.) If you’re one of NASCAR’s millions of fans, you can likely name not just drivers but team owners or even a few crew chiefs. It’s also true for IndyCar, or Formula 1 or Le Mans, where even the designers and engineers get sprinkled with a bit of fame.
But no race series ever makes much of the person who in many cases has just as much to do with driving the car as the racer themselves — namely, the spotter, the lookout perched on top of the track who’s job is to see everything with a hawk’s vision — not to be seen.
In America’s top-level motorsports, drivers would not last long without a second pair of eyes. IndyCars surpass 230 mph on the fastest of racetracks, and with the driver set deep within the cockpit, the two tiny pieces of glass hung on either side serve so little purpose they might as well be memorials to the first rear-view mirror. The speed and vibration blurs images beyond recognition, and the pods behind the rear tires block any unobscured view. A driver’s head is also wedged into place via thick padding, helping mitigate the strain of g-forces that can surpass 4.5g — meaning you can barely turn your head more than a few millimeters to either side.
A NASCAR driver lives in a slightly less intense world, with lower speeds, slightly better vision and less g-force to deal with. But mirrors are useless in a pack of 40-plus stock cars inches apart or bump drafting. Without outside guidance they might as well drive blind, and spotters are so essential NASCAR requires them on duty every time a car takes the track.

Chris Wheeler and his dad Packy high-fiving after the race

At just 28, Chris Wheeler has already worked for many of America’s top race teams; he’s spent years on the IndyCar circuit as well as time riding the NASCAR merry-go-round. Wheeler was my spotter during the 2010 IndyCar season, a year we finished fourth at the Indianapolis 500. This year, he has teamed up with KV Racing to spot for four-time Champ Car World Series champion and ex-F1 driver, Sébastien Bourdais. The duties of a spotter sound simple: Relay clear, concise information to the driver via the radio as to the whereabouts of the surrounding race cars. Phrases like, “The #20 is two back and closing,” are commonplace. “He’s got a run, looking high,” too — which requires some knowledge of racing, but still, don’t we all watch enough to know?
The truth is far more demanding. At large tracks like Indianapolis or Talladega, a spotter might be over a mile away from their car they’re in charge of, and yet guys like Wheeler are still responsible for judging tiny gaps.
“If I clear Sébastien at over 200 mph on an oval based on a six-inch gap,” Wheeler explains, “that not only puts him at risk, but the other drivers on track, and even the spectators and safety crew at risk. It’s a huge amount of pressure. It forces you to execute on such a high level that I don’t know of any other job outside of the race car that can reach that level, at least during the race itself.”

So how do you judge a six-inch gap from a mile away, where cars look like a swarm of colorful bees racing towards you? I’ve spotted for race teams before, and even with a good pair of binoculars, it’s incredibly difficult to tell which car is yours, especially racing in a pack. Unless you're blessed with a bright pink machine, at a distance most cars look alike. If a spotter’s too cautious, a driver won’t trust their advice, meaning they must make those precise determinations with no help from the sky.

And while cautious might seem like the right call of the day, as Bourdais explains, that’s not always the case: “In these new IndyCars, you can’t see anything out of the wing mirrors. Nothing. So you can’t rely only on yourself. You need a good spotter, one you can trust, to help you make those tough calls.”
The good spotters earn the trust of their drivers, and in many cases, their wives and husbands too: “When I was spotting for you at Texas,” Wheeler recalls, back from our time racing together in 2010, “we were in that lead pack the whole night, and it kind of got crazy, wheels almost touching and stuff – hard racing, you know? After the race, your wife came to me and gave me a hug, thanking me for keeping you safe. That brought it home, just how much responsibility I have.”
I remember the race well, and I too was incredibly grateful for his judgment and concise calls at over 220 mph. When the green flag flies in IndyCar, it’s a joint effort between the spotter and the driver. Racing is a team sport. Bourdais concurs: “I know when he tells me something it’s really happening. That way I don’t have to second-guess, and have total confidence in what he says. I still have the wheel, so I make the ultimate decision in what to do. But I do so knowing what I’m being told in my ear is fact.”

Spotters at work during the race

That trust is what allows a driver to push to the max, and it can take entire seasons to build. In many cases, drivers and spotters become close friends. For guys like Wheeler, spotting is a full-time job. During an event, not only does he help with the immediate situations, he looks at how the race is evolving and what other car/driver combinations are doing – where they’re strong, where they’re struggling. He relays that information to the driver, as well as to the pit wall, helping the engineers plan the race’s strategy. For me, Wheeler played a role of cheerleader, too, pushing me to attack and go after the next car in line. Not every driver wants that level of involvement, but I enjoyed his calls to “KEEP DIGGIN’!” A good spotter also works with rival spotters on the stand to form allegiances, ones the driver can choose to follow if they wish. This can become especially crucial in NASCAR pack racing; at Daytona, if you break out of the draft to form a new line, you need to know whether the driver behind you will follow. Otherwise you’ll get swamped.

Due to a passionate spirit for their life on the stand, spotters are known to be fiery. Fistfights happen: “If one guy’s driver cuts yours off, especially repeatedly, yeah, we get frustrated. We want to win just as badly as anyone,” Wheeler says.

Despite every spotter and drivers’ best efforts, accidents occur. When one does, Wheeler’s philosophy is simple: “The immediate thing is to let the driver know there’s an incident,” he says. “As you’re doing that, your eyes are on the accident and you’re trying to determine where those cars are going to go — high or low. Unless it’s a full rear wing assembly or something, I never follow where the debris goes. I’m more worried about the bigger bits — the tub, the engine, things like that. I have to know where they are and where they’re going to end up, and tell my driver clearly to go high or low.”

“To them,” he continues, “it has to be simple, even if what’s happening is far from it. And at the same time, I need to let him know where the cars alongside us are – is there one on his inside, or are we threewide? That plays a part in what options the driver has.”

When a wreck occurs – especially one where there’s a lot of smoke – a driver may have no choice but to drive entirely off what the spotter is saying. It’s not quite “Days of Thunder,” but you can be faced with zero visibility and a 200-mph race car heading directly into blind debris.

Above all, the job takes immense, unwavering concentration.

“Spotting is like the childhood game where you have all these cards that are turned face down and you have to remember which one is which,” he says. “When you turn them over, you have to make matches. And you can never get it wrong.”

Germany Will Ban Tech Companies That Play Ball With NSA

No German federal contracts will go to companies that turn over data to the NSA and other spy agencies in the U.S., and elsewhere. There may, however, be one crucial exemption.

Frederik Obermaier and Benedikt Strunz (2014-05-16)

NSA headquarters - Photo: Trevor Paglen

MUNICH — It didn't take an Edward Snowden to figure out that American espionage service providers had access to confidential information about German citizens. It's been known for years that the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) works for American secret services.
It's also known that a former CSC subsidiary was involved in the abduction of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who was turned over to the CIA and subjected to abuse and degradation before the agency finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake.
Nevertheless, German CSC subsidiaries have in past years received more than 100 contracts from state and federal governments in Germany, as Süddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcaster NDR reported last fall. The operative rule at the time was that only companies that were found guilty of crimes could be excluded from public contracts. So far, no CSC employee has been prosecuted for the abduction of el-Masri. Per se, working for the U.S. intel agencies is not punishable. So Germany's federal government tied its own hands over the issue.
But according to research conducted by NDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's black-red "grand coalition" government has now tightened the rules for awarding sensitive public IT contracts. In cases of doubt, suspicious companies will now be excluded from such contracts. And companies now have to sign documents to the effect that no contracts or laws oblige them — nor can they be coerced — to pass on confidential data to foreign secret services or security authorities.
The new rule would seem to be aimed primarily at American companies. These companies, as numerous Snowden documents reveal, regularly pass on information to the U.S. spy agencies. At the NSA, a separate Special Sources Operations department deals with cooperation with "strategic partners," as agents call such companies. The companies say they are merely following the laws of the respective country, and so far this explanation has been accepted.
But since April, any company that cannot guarantee that foreign services or authorities will not obtain any of their data is being excluded from federal contracts in Germany. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior said that the aim of the new rule is to prevent "the flow of data worth protecting to foreign security authorities."
Will there be a loophole?
But whether CSC also will be excluded from sensitive federal contracts is open to question. In January the German federal government let it be known that it saw "no reason [to change] our contract-awarding procedures" as far as German CSC subsidiaries were concerned. And yet CSC is part of the American shadow army of private firms that deliver low-cost and untransparent projects for the military and secret services.
The company was part of a consortium that was awarded the contract for the Trailblazer Project, which was supposed to develop a gigantic data vacuum to suck up information — very similar to the NSA's current spy programs. "Data are the next battlefield," reads one company prospectus. And CSC is apparently delivering the requisite arms for the battle.
It was CSC subsidiaries that, among other projects, tested the German Federal Criminal Police Office's "state Trojan" and supported the Ministry of Justice when it introduced electronic files at the Federal Supreme Court. CSC was also awarded contracts pertaining to the German government network through which coded communications from the ministries and various authorities flow. And CSC advised the Ministry of the Interior on the introduction of electronic passports, and is involved in the De-Mail project, which aims to securitize email traffic.
In April CSC won a (negative) "Big Brother Award."
The powers that be at CSC point to the fact that the German subsidiaries "have no contractual relation to the U.S. government." Business with American secret services is conducted by "a separate, independent business arm headquartered in the United States." But just how separate can the business of subsidiaries of the same firm really be? In any case, all company emails apparently go through the mother company's server.

Read the full article: Germany Will Ban Tech Companies That Play Ball With NSA
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Disastrous, Job Killing “Free Trade”

 http://economyincrisis.org/free-trade

Free Trade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7EvI3gcZMc

Tariffs were originally set up to help protect American industries by Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, then leader of the new Republican Party, similarly implemented a 44 percent tariff to protect American industries and generate funds for the war and the construction of railroads. After World War II and during the Cold war, the U.S. government began lowering trade barriers and instituting what is known as “free trade.”
America is now oppressed by the chains of “free trade” through treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement, undemocratic and secretive trade regimes like the World Trade Organization and border tax inequities allowed by the WTO, such as the Value-Added Tax which is utilized by 152 of America’s economic competitors.
Shackled with these disadvantages, America is no longer able to compete economically on the world stage. Our nation is gradually allowing Japan, nations in the European Union and emerging economies in China, India and Brazil to overtake the U.S. as the world’s lone economic superpower. Eventually, if all remains the same, NAFTA, the WTO and the VAT will be responsible for America’s complete and total economic downfall. The nation is already well on its way, and without wholesale changes to our economic policy, we will certainly find ourselves in the economic gutter, so to speak.
So-Called “Free Trade” is not Fair Trade

Free Trade vs Fair Trade

It is no wonder then that America is unable to compete in the global marketplace. The nation is consistently hamstrung by these unfair trade practices. If we are to one day reemerge as an economic superpower NAFTA must be renegotiated, the WTO must be disbanded and the VAT must be eliminated. Otherwise, America will continue to be chained by the detrimental effects of “free trade,” descending deeper into economic turmoil.
The Trade Deficit
It’s no secret the United States has alarming trade deficits with a number of countries, but with no country on Earth is our trade more unbalanced than with China. Back in 2013, our trade deficit with the Chinese was $318 billion. 2014 numbers are not available yet, but they are likely to be even worse. This is even more devastating when you take into account our debt owed to China, which — as of last year — was well over $1 trillion dollars.
For the United States to become competitive in the global marketplace again, we must attack the source of the problem: “free trade” and other harmful trade relationships that hurt our economy. Our relationship with China has resulted in a high trade deficit, alarming debt, thousands of job losses, the decimation of our manufacturing industry, outsourcing of many powerful U.S. companies, and a consumer base content on living off of cheaply made, foreign imports.
We must strive towards becoming more self-sufficient in the future, or else our debt and trade deficits will continue to rise and U.S. jobs will continue to be lost.

The U.S. Trade Deficit

Refuting President Obama’s Lies, Omissions and Distortions

An Open Letter to the Graduates of West Point

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, June 07, 2014

Region: USA

Theme: Culture, Society & History, US NATO War Agenda

On May 2014 President Obama delivered the commencement address to the graduates of United States Military Academy at West Point.  Beyond the easy banter and eulogy to past and present war heroes, Obama outlined a vision of past military successes and present policies, based on a profoundly misleading diagnosis of the current global position of the United States.
His presentation is marked by systematic lies about past wars and current military interventions.  The speech’s glaring failure to acknowledge the millions of civilians killed by US military interventions stands out. He glosses over the growth of NSA, the global police state apparatus.  He presents a grossly inflated account of the US role in the world economy.  Worst of all he outlines an extremely dangerous policy of confrontation with rising military and economic powers, in particular Russia and China.
Distorting the Past:  Defeats and Retreats Converted into Victories
One of the most disturbing aspects of President Obama’s speech is his delusional account of US military engagements over the past decade.  Obama’s claim that, “by most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world”, defies belief.  After 13 years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, the US has failed to conquer the Taliban and is leaving behind a fragile puppet regime on the verge of collapse.  The US was forced to withdraw from Iraq after causing the deaths of hundreds of thousand of civilians, the displacement and wounding of millions and the ignition of a sectarian war, which has propelled a pro-Iranian regime to power in Baghdad.  In Libya, the Obama pushed NATO to destroy the entire country in order to overthrow the secular Gadhafi government, thus undermining any possibility of reconciliation among opponents.  He has brought bands of Islamist terrorists to power who are profoundly hostile to the United States.
Washington’s effort to broker an accord between Palestine and Israel is a shabby failure, characterized by Obama’s spineless capitulation to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s goal of grabbing more Palestinian land for new  “Jews only” settlements – paid with American tax money.  Obama’s craven pandering to the Jewish power configuration in Washington does little to bolster his claim to lead the world’s “greatest power”…
You have heard lectures on the world economy at the Academy: Surely you know that China has displaced the US in major markets throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa.  While China is a major economic challenge, it is not an expansionist military power.  It does not possess thousands of overseas bases or Special Forces troops operating in seventy-five countries; it does not pursue military alliances and does not invade countries thousands of miles from its borders.  Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ is a provocative expansion of US military power off China’s coast contrary to his public claims of “winding down” overseas military operations.
Obama speaks of defending “our core interests” by military force yet he provokes China over a disputed pile of rocks in the South China Sea, undermining the “core interests” of the 500 biggest US corporations which have invested billions of dollars in the most dynamic economy in the world and of the biggest American exporters to our second largest trading partner.
Obama refers to fighting “terrorism” yet his policies have encouraged and promoted terrorism.  Washington armed the Islamist terrorists who overthrew the secular Gadhafi government and plunged that country into chaos.  Obama backs the Islamist terrorists invading and attempting to overthrow the secular regime Syria.  He provides 1.5 billion dollars in military aid to an Egyptian military dictatorship terrorizing its democratic, civilian political opposition, assassinating and imprisoning thousands of dissidents.  In February, the US backed the violent overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine and supports the Kiev regime’s bombing of pro-democracy, pro-federation civilian populations in the Southeast, a majority of whom are ethnic Russians.  Obama’s “anti-terrorism” rhetoric in nothing but a cover for state terrorism, closing the door on any peaceful resolution of overseas conflicts and spawning scores of violent opposition groups in its wake.
Obama brags about “our success in promoting partnerships in Europe and in the world at large”, yet his bellicose policies toward Russia have created deep rifts between the US and the leading countries of the European Union.  With its multi-billion dollar trade agreements with Russia, German opposes harsh sanctions and provocations against Moscow, as do Italy, Holland and Belgium.  In Latin America, the US-controlled Organization of American States is a toothless relic amidst growing regional organizations which exclude the US.  Where are Washington’s “partners” in its hostile campaign to overthrow the government in Venezuela and blockade Cuba?  Washington’s efforts to forge an Asian economic bloc, excluding China, has run aground against the deep and comprehensive ties linking South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia to China.
Wherever you look, Washington’s closest ‘allies’ are the least dynamic and most repressive:  Israel, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states in the Middle East; Egypt, Morocco and Algeria in North Africa; Colombia in Latin America; the Philippines in Asia; and motley groups of sub-Sahara despots and Kleptocrats squirreling away billions of dollars into New York and London bank accounts while starving their countries’ budgets on health and education.
Obama’s diagnosis regarding the position of the US in the world is fundamentally flawed:  He ignores the military losses from unwinnable overseas adventures and understates the decline in US economic power.  The growing divisions among former regional allies have no place in his speech.  Above all, he refuses to acknowledge the profound disenchantment among most Americans with Washington’s foreign military and trade policies.  The flawed diagnosis, the deliberate distortions of current global realities and the deep misreading of domestic public opinion, cannot be overcome by new deceptions. Bigger lies and more extensive foreign military interventions mean that newly commissioned officers will serve as cannon fodder for policies deeply unpopular with our people.
Obama:   Political Desperado in Search of an Imperial Legacy
Obama has marked a new phase in his escalation of a military-centered foreign policy.  He is presently engaged in a major build-up of air and ground troops and provocative military exercises in the Baltic States and Poland…all of which are directed at Russia, raising the specter of a ‘First Strike’ strategy against a major nuclear power which poses no threat to our nation.
President Barack Obama, deeply unpopular at home, is propelled by a mania for global military escalation.  He is expanding naval forces off China’s coast. He has dispatched hundreds of Special Forces to Jordan to train and arm Islamist and al Qaeda mercenaries invading Syria.  He promotes Kiev’s brutal crackdown on civilian protesters in the Eastern Ukraine by increasing US military aid and training.  He has dispatched hundreds of US forces throughout Africa.  He has just allocated $1 billion for military expansion along the European frontiers with Russia and another $5 billion to boost the capacity of despotic regimes to repress popular insurgencies under the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.
Obama’s ‘vision’ of US foreign policy is clearly and unmistakably colored by his readiness to pursue highly dangerous military adventures.  His tactic of launching Special Forces’ operations in all corners of the world, his increasing use of mercenaries and proxies is a throw-back to 19^th century colonialism.  Sending client regime troops from one oppressed country to conquer and pillage another marks a regression to  brutal old-style empire building.  No one is deceived when Obama declares that “American leadership is indispensable for world order”.  His Washington-centered new world order is unraveling.  Disorder and misery are the consequence of relying on naked military intervention to delay the inevitable – the decline of a uni-polar world is a fact.
The Obama Administration’s involvement in the violent coup in the Kiev is a case in point:  As a consequence of placing an oligarch, the so-called ‘Chocolate Billionaire’ to head a junta infested with neo-fascists, Ukraine is falling apart, cities in the east are being bombed and the economy is in free-fall.  A massive humanitarian disaster threatens the stability of Europe if hundreds of thousands of people are displaced by the brutality of civil war in Ukraine.
Obama’s unopposed air war against Libya utterly destroyed that nation and has created a Hobbesian world where bloody warlords fight brutal jihadists over shrinking oil sales.   In Syria, US-sponsored ‘rebels’ have devastated the economy and the social fabric of a complex secular society.  Al Qaeda-linked terrorists have recently kidnapped hundreds of secular high school students heading for their final exams in Aleppo in order to prevent any recovery and reconciliation in that brutalized nation.
No major country in South America follows US ‘leadership’ on Cuba and Venezuela.  Even in the United States, outside of a few enclaves of fanatics in Florida, very few American citizens back Obama’s hostile policies to Cuba and Venezuela.

Obama’s duplicity, of talking peace while preparing wars, has been exposed.  And now this same president is preparing to commit you, newly commissioned officers of the US Army, to overseas military adventures against the interests and wishes of  the majority of your fellow Americans.

Obama will send you to war zones where you will face popular insurgencies, supported by masses of working people.  While propping up corrupt oligarchs and defending foreign capital, you will be despised by the local populations.  You will be ordered to ‘defend’ an Administration which has pillaged  our national Treasury  to bail out the 15 biggest banks in the world, banks which paid $78 billion dollars in fines, between 2012 – 2013, for fraud and swindles while their CEO’s received obscene bonuses, wealth and immunity .  You will be told to sacrifice your lives and limbs fighting wars for the State of Israel in the Middle East – an Israel which bombed the USS Liberty (among other incidents) – killing and maiming hundreds of American service people with impunity.  You will be sent to command bases in Poland and to direct missiles at Russia. You will be sent to the Ukraine to train neo-Nazis in the ‘National’ Guard to kill their own compatriots.  You will be expected to subvert the loyalties of military officers in Latin American, hoping to provoke military coups and convert independent progressive governments into neo-liberal puppet states – ripe for pillage and mayhem.

Obama’s plans for you do not resonate with your ideals and hopes for a prosperous America dedicated to democracy, freedom and peaceful development at home.  You face the choice of serving a political desperado, contemptuous of our Constitution and intent on launching unjust wars at the behest of billionaire swindlers and armchair militarists in Washington, or refusing to participate as muscle-men for bloody empire and joining the majority of the American people who believe that America’s ‘leadership’ should be directed at redistributing the wealth and power of an unelected oligarchy which currently runs this country.  Who will you choose to serve?

Unholy Matrimony: The Tie Between the Cult of Intelligence and the Cult of Oligarchy

• Power Elite / Secret Societies
• 3 Jun, 2014
• http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2014/06/03/unholy-matrimony-the-tie-between-the-cult-of-intelligence-and-the-cult-of-oligarchy/

by Paul David Collins ©, Sept. 9th, 2006
Recently the Central Intelligence Agency added yet another scandal to its ever-growing list. The scandal involved the outsourcing of torture. The following news article elaborates:

Two nations in support of the White House’s 2003 invasion of Iraq – Poland and Romania – are at the heart of a European Union investigation on human rights abuses and torture claims at camps allegedly run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Poland and Romania, along with Bulgaria, have indicated this week they intend to withdraw troops from Iraq saying the economic and image costs have run too high.
The White House doesn’t directly comment on whether or not the CIA is running secret prisons in Europe to house and torture al Qaeda captives, but vows the claims warrant an investigation.
However, more information from Europe has uncovered at least two CIA special flights landed in France in 2002 and again in 2005, but investigators did not know the final destination of those flights, which used a CIA Learjet and Gulfstream III. But the European Union says more than 300 flights in total have involved clandestine CIA activities. (No pagination).

Soon after the EU allegations, the ACLU, a left-of center American legal group, came forward with charges of their own:

As news broke of the European-led investigation the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to sue the CIA to “stop the transportation of terror suspects to countries outside” of the United States. The ACLU suit claims the CIA has violated international human rights laws.
Charges include abduction, detention without communication, beatings, use of narcotics on detainees, and transportation of suspects across country borders without just cause.
Some of the men under protection of the ACLU claim they were flown by the CIA to Syria (currently a country at odds with the White House) and Egypt where detainees were tortured, sexually assaulted, and drugged. The federal government denies such activity could ever have taken place and vows to defend itself “vigorously,” but added that under presidential order the CIA is absolved of presenting secret procedures in a court of law in the name of national security. (No pagination)

This is not the CIA’s first criminal and morally bankrupt act. The problematic intelligence organization seems to have been engaged in nefarious activity since its inception. What is the explanation for the Agency’s seemingly systemic corruption? Anti-government writers claim that CIA corruption stems from the fact that the Agency is an organ of a corrupt government. However, this contention is a gross oversimplification. While the Agency does have a government charter, it can only be considered a quasi-governmental organization. For the most part, the Agency is the enforcement arm of its “founding fathers.” While these “founding fathers” use national governments as their personal prostitutes, they inhabit a stratum that exists above governments. The “founding fathers” are the power elite.
What is being examined here is an unholy union. The first spouse is the Cult of Intelligence, which is the CIA. Despite its fierce secrecy, many, if not all Americans, are aware of this Cult’s existence. After all, it has a definite geographical location, which is Langley, Virginia. The major news media and the government also acknowledge its existence. On the other hand, the Cult of Oligarchy, which is the power elite, is not so easily detected. This cult constitutes a “virtual state.” Philip Bobbitt defines this term:

The virtual state has many of the characteristics of other states (a trained standing army and intelligence cadre; a treasury and a source of revenue; a civil service and even a rudimentary welfare system for the families of its fighters) but is borderless; it declares wars, makes alliances with other states and is global in scope but lacks a definable location on the map. (No pagination)

This status as a “virtual state” has allowed the Cult of Oligarchy to pass right under the radar of most Americans. Mention the cult’s various congregations, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, or the Bilderbergers, and the average person will shrug in blissful ignorance. However, this “virtual state” still must be examined, because it has been wedded to the Cult of Intelligence since the CIA’s inception.

Robert Lovett

The oligarchical origins of the Agency begin with the Lovett Committee. Created on October 22, 1945 by the Secretary of War Robert Patterson, the function of this committee was “to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of the U.S. intelligence activities” (Tarpley and Chaitkin 67). Lovett’s recommendations would create a renegade organization acting as an extension of the United States government. Under a national security cover, the new organization could pursue objectives that were not always in the best interests of the American peoples. Tarpley and Chaitkin describe Lovett’s recommendations:

Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central Intelligence Agency. The new agency would “consult” with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. (67)

It is obvious that the Agency, as conceived by Lovett, would be able to head off on rogues trajectories with little oversight and with the official sanction and blessing of the United States government. Whose interests was Lovett serving? In all likelihood the answer can be found with a Yale-based secret society.

Skull and Bones

Lovett was a member of the Yale-based secret society known as Skull and Bones. This secret society has alarmed both religious and non-religious researcher with its occult rituals that thematically celebrate death. What is even more disturbing is the fact that Skull and Bones recruits the offspring of blueblood dynasties and acts as an elite conduit. The Skull and Bones’ connection to the elite is found with the group’s founder, William H. Russell. Tarpley and Chaitkin explain the connection:

Skull and Bones – the Russell Trust Association – was first established among the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington Russell of Middle town, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate.
There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against, freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.
But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply-intermarried grouping of families then ruling Connecticut. The blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-British party within the state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and Bones Society over the years.
The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.
Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire.
The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation of the self-styled “blue bloods” or Brahmins of Boston’s north shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins sibling and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes, and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices.
John Quincy Adams and other patriots had fought these men for a quarter century by the time the Russell Trust Association was set up with its open pirate emblem-Skull and Bones. (118-9)

As Tarpley and Chaitkin made clear, the opium families operating through Russell and Company constituted part of a blueblood power bloc known as the “Boston Brahmin.” The blueblood families that fall into the Skull and Bones orbit provide textbook examples of elite criminality and elite deviance. This situation did not end with the introduction of new line families to the Bones fold. Many of the “Johnny-Come-Latelies” are almost dirtier than the old-line families. In all likelihood, Robert Lovett’s membership in Skull and Bones exposed him to the philosophies that motivated the nefarious activities of Russell and his gang of drug-pushers. So, it comes as little surprise that Bonesman Lovett played an integral role in the genesis of the CIA, an organization that has been the center of so much scandal. It also comes as little surprise that the CIA landscape is littered with Bonesmen.

The CFR Connection

The CIA was brought into existence by the National Security Act of 1947. Supervision for the writing of this act was provided by John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles. Allen would later serve as the Agency’s DCI until he was fired by Kennedy for the Bay of Pig fiasco. Both men were members of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Allen Dulles would even act as the CFR’s president for a time. The CFR remains closely connected to the CIA to this very day. Former executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA Victor Marchetti and former State Department analyst John Marks elaborate:

The influential but private Council, composed of several hundred of the country’s top political, military, business, and academic leaders, has long been the CIA’s principal “constituency” in the American public. When the agency has needed prominent citizens to front its proprietary companies or for other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members. (267)

The CFR obviously plays an important role in the CIA’s story. Therefore, it is important to look into the background of this elitist organization. The CFR’s story begins with an elitist named John Ruskin. In 1870, John Ruskin “hit Oxford like an earthquake,” proselytizing students in the imperialistic gospel of the British Empire (Quigley 130). In Tragedy and Hope, Dr. Carroll Quigley provides a brief summation of this gospel:

Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged ruling class. He told them that they were possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline, but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the Empire. (130)

Among one of the undergraduates who wholeheartedly embraced this message was Cecil Rhodes, who would keep his longhand copy of Ruskin’s inaugural lecture for thirty years (Quigley 130-31). Inspired by Ruskin, Rhodes established his scientific dictatorship in South Africa, where he monopolized the diamond fields through DeBeers Consolidated Mines (Quigley 130-31). Instrumental in the formation of this diamond cartel were Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, who provided Rhodes with financial support (Quigley 130-31). Yet, the borders of Rhodes’ African empire did not end there. Cecil also:

rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896), contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and South Africa, and sought to win a strip of British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and ultimately with a Cape-to-Cairo Railway. (Quigley 130-31)

Cecil Rhodes not the only adherent of Ruskin’s imperialistic message. Evidently, others had taken to heart the Anglophilic gospel of Ruskin and, eventually, became associated with Rhodes. Together, this network would establish a secret society devoted to the cause of British expansionism. Carroll Quigley elaborates:

Among Ruskin’s most devoted disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends including Arnold Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttelton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry) Birchenough. These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out his ideas. A similar group of Cambridge men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord Esher), Sir John B. Seeley, Albert (Lord) Grey, and Edmund Garrett were also aroused by Ruskin’s message and devoted their lives to the extension of the British Empire and uplift of England’s urban masses as two parts of one project which they called “extension of the English-speaking idea.” They were remarkably successful in these aims because of England’s most sensational journalist William Stead (1849 – 1912), an ardent social reformer and imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for sixteen years. In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a “Circle of Initiates;” while there was to be an outer circle known as the “Association of Helpers” (later organized by Milner as the Round Table organization). Brett was invited to join this organization the same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his return from Egypt. Both accepted with enthusiasm. Thus the central part of the secret society was established by March 1891. It continued to function as a formal group, although the outer circle was, apparently, not organized until 1909-1913. This group was able to get access to Rhodes’ money after his death in 1902 and also to funds of loyal Rhodes supporters like Alfred Beit (1853-1906) and Sir Abe Bailey (1864-1940). With this backing they sought to extend and execute the ideals that Rhodes had obtained from Ruskin and Stead. Milner was the chief Rhodes Trustee and Parkin was Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Trust after 1902, while Gell and Birchenough, as well as others with similar ideas, became officials of the British South Africa Company. They were joined in their efforts by other Ruskinite friends of Stead’s like Lord Grey, Lord Esher, and Flora Shaw (later Lady Lugard). In 1890, by a stratagem too elaborate to describe here, Miss Shaw became Head of the Colonial Department of the Times while still remaining on the payroll of Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. In this past she played a major role in the next ten years in carrying into execution the imperial schemes of Cecil Rhodes, to whom Stead had introduced her in 1889. (131-32)

When Rhodes died, the continuation of his imperialistic vision fell upon the shoulders of chief Rhodes Trustee Alfred Milner. Under Milner’s coordination, the Rhodes network would establish a stateside surrogate organization that would come to be known as the Council on Foreign Relations. Quigley continues:

As governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, Milner recruited a group of young men chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and international finance and become the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner’s Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organized semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief dependencies and the United States… In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor Family (owners of The Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period of 1919-1927. (132-33)

The CFR would eventually find its way into the halls of the United States government in 1939 with a project known as the War and Peace Studies Project. James Perloff describes this penetration of the halls of officialdom:

In September 1939, Hitler’s troops invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany; World War II had begun.
Less than two weeks later, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, and Walter Mallory, the CFR’s executive director, met in Washington with Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith. They proposed that the Council help the State Department formulate its wartime policy and postwar planning. The CFR would conduct study groups in coordination with State, making recommendations to the Department and President. Messersmith (a Council member himself) and his superiors agreed. The CFR thus succeeded, temporarily at least, in making itself an adjunct of the United States government. This undertaking became known as the War and Peace Studies Project; it worked in secret and was underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. It held 362 meetings and prepared 682 papers for FDR and the State Department. (64)

The CFR used its temporary position as a government adjunct as a conduit for spreading its members throughout the government. The State Department was particularly infested. In fact, the CFR’s influence over State led to what can only be described as the privatization of foreign policy. American foreign policy became little more than a vehicle for the agendas of bankers, corporations, globalists, and elitists. The CIA has provided this privatized foreign policy with muscle through covert operations. Manley’s Jamaica provides a good example of this fact.

Target: Jamaica

In 1972, Jamaica democratically elected a new government made up of the People’s National Party and headed up by Prime Minister Michael Manley (Phillips 475-76). Manley became a problem for the elite, namely those behind four U.S. aluminum companies: Kaiser, Reynolds, Alcoa, and Revere (477). Jamaica was one of the world’s largest exporters of bauxite, the mineral that is processed into aluminum (477). All four American companies and the Canadian company Alcan had dominance over the Jamaican Bauxite industry (477). Manley’s government had begun to tip the power balance by negotiating for 51 percent controlling interest in Jamaica’s bauxite industry (477).
Manley was going toe to toe with multinational corporations, which act as the locus of power for elites. This, of course, incurred the wrath of the oligarchs. The CIA was employed in a destabilization campaign against the Manley government. Phillips elaborates:

…toward the end of 1975 and during the first half of 1976, a concerted plan (later exposed as “Operation Werewolf”) was put into effect by agencies within the U.S.-apparently including the CIA-acting in concert with forces within the JLP, the major opposition party (misappropriately called the Jamaican Labour Party). In January 1976, a series of increasingly violent events began. People by the dozens were burned out of their homes (whole areas were torched) while paid gunmen shot or threatened those trying to escape. Most of the victims were PNP supporters. Food supplies were poisoned, and rumor of poisoning of water supplies were rife. The police and defense Force uncovered guns, explosives, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition of a kind never seen before in Jamaica. The violence escalated until Manley, exercising his constitutional powers, declared a state of national emergency in June, hinting strongly that outside forces were at work. The foreign Western press, especially in the U.S., picked up on the theme of violence in Jamaica, often misrepresenting or distorting the actual facts of events. Later, Manley, his ministers, and the leaders of several other Caribbean nations (including Guyana and Barbados) charged that a plot to “destabilize” the Jamaican government was under way. (478-79)

Is their any wonder why the CIA has been called “the private army of the Fortune 500″? Manley’s Jamaica makes it painfully clear that the oligarchic mentality was transmitted from the power elite and into the intelligence community.

Conclusion

Probably the best solution for dealing with CIA corruption is to dismantle the Agency and start over from scratch. The question is who has the guts and the clout to accomplish such a feat. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated shortly after he made clear his intentions of scattering the Agency to the four winds. More than a few people doubt the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Kennedy was a victim of a lone assassin. Skeptics even included President Richard M. Nixon. On tapes of the first six months of his second term in office, Nixon said that the Warren Commission was “the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated” (Kevin Anderson, no pagination). While Nixon did not elaborate, one need only examine the Zapruder film to understand why the Warren Commission would be considered a “hoax.” On the film Kennedy’s head flies backwards from what could only be a bullet impact from the front. This flies straight in the face of the Commission’s contention that Kennedy was shot by Oswald up and behind to the right in the book depository.
The Dealey Plaza knockout lesson was not lost upon future politicians. Furthermore, the lesson was reinforced with the strange death of former DCI William Colby. On April 27th, 1996, Colby disappeared from his vacation home in Maryland. A neighbor who came to check on him found his radio and computer still on (“Ex-CIA director believed drowned” 1). Investigators also discovered dinner dishes on Colby’s table and clam shells in the kitchen sink (“Colby was a man of contradictions”1). Ten days after his disappearance, Colby’s body washed up on a sandbar of the Wicomico River located a short distance from his Maryland vacation home. His death was ruled an accident. No one thought to ask what compelled the man to leave his computer and radio on, his dinner in the sink, and go canoeing. Such behavior is far too erratic for a man who was described as precise and orderly. Colby’s good friend and pupil, former state senator and Vietnam war hero John Decamp, is convinced that the former DCI’s death was neither an accident nor a suicide (DeCamp 386).
These examples should prompt activists and patriots to proceed with more caution. However, they should not cause people to disengage. The Cult of Intelligence and the Cult of Oligarchy are powerful, but they are not invincible. Like most cults, they are made up of fanatics. Even the most cunning fanatic makes mistakes and can even get wreck less. If the American people took this fact to heart, they would cease being humans playing at being insects and would actually begin to see progress in the right direction.

Sources Cited

• Anderson, Kevin. “Revelations and Gaps on Nixon Tapes.” BBC Online. 1 March 2002
• Bobbitt, Philip. “Get Ready for the Next Long War.” Time. 1 September 2002
• “CIA Denies Using Torture, Europe Demands Response.” Think & Ask. December 2005
• “Colby was a man of contradictions.” Springfield News-Sun. 7 May 1996: 1,7.
• DeCamp, John W. The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska. Nebraska: AWT Inc., 1996.
• “Ex-CIA director believed drowned.” Springfield News-Sun. 30 Apr. 1996: 1, 8.
• Marchetti, Victor and John D. Marks. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Dell Publishing, 1974.
• Perloff, James. The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline. Wisconsin: Western Islands, 1988.
• Phillips, James. “Renovation of the International Economic Order: Trilateralism, the IMF, and Jamaica.” Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, Holly Sklar, ed., Boston: South End Press, 1980, 468-91.
• Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
• Tarpley, Webster Griffin and Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992.

About the author

Paul D. Collins has studied suppressed history and the shadowy undercurrents of world political dynamics for roughly eleven years. In 1999, he earned his Associate of Arts and Science degree. In 2006, he completed his bachelor’s degree with a major in liberal studies and a minor political science. Paul has authored another book entitled The Hidden Face of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social Engineering, From Antiquity to September 11. Published in November 2002, the book is available online from www.1stbooks.com, barnesandnoble.com, and also amazon.com. It can be purchased as an e-book (ISBN 1-4033-6798-1) or in paperback format (ISBN 1-4033-6799-X). Paul also co-authored The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship (ISBN 1-4196-3932-3).
The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship is available here. Read a comprehensive collection of Collins essays here.

Treason, sedition, and Barack HUSSEIN Obama

OMFG America!  &   U (dummycocks) voted 4 THIS piece of shit ....not !  once  ...but fucking twice ..!!

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Diane Sori

So now it seems the U.S. military will pick-up all the medical bills for Bowe Bergdahl (too bad they do NOT do that for all our honorably serving veterans). So now it seems that the only thing Bowe is suffering from is some ‘cognitive issues’ after five years of captivity, and that physically he is quite stable NOT on the verge of imminent death as claimed by the White House. So now it seems that when search-and-rescue teams first went out to look for Bergdahl after he went missing that they were given orders NOT to bring him back alive, but were to shoot him on sight, because command knew he was NOT only working with the Taliban but that he would kill our people if given the chance.

And so now it seems that even as more information comes to light everyday supporting the fact that Bowe Bergdahl did in indeed go AWOL…did indeed desert…this administration…this president…  continues to stand by its claim that they did the right thing by making a deal with terrorists but claiming the deal was made to bring peace to Afghanistan. 

And if you believe that…to put it as kindly as I can…you are simply clueless or suffering from kool-aid overload. 

And negotiating with terrorists…caving to terrorist demands actually…got us what…it got us a traitor back as the enemy got to welcome back into their fold five of the world’s most cold-blooded hard- core murdering terrorists…terrorists listed by the U(seless) N(ations) as perpetrators of war crimes …terrorists now biding their time in Qatar until they can freely kill more of our troops yet again. 

And Obama still claims we got the better part of the deal because he left NO man behind…I say this was more like a deal made in hell…and one for which we’ll be paying the price in American blood for many years to come. 

And now out comes the devil’s minions…ooops…I mean Obama’s minions…to spew out the words they’ve been instructed to say…minions led off by an Obama puppet in the guise of Susan ‘It Was A YouTube Video’ Rice. 

The day after Bergdahl’s release, and once again making the rounds of the Sunday talk-show circuits…NOT learning a lesson after her Benghazi fiasco I guess…Rice was asked if Obama’s deal of trading terrorists to get back one of own back meant that the U.S. could NO longer say that it does NOT negotiate with terrorists…and her response,“I wouldn’t put it that way.” 

Excuse me, but how would you put it for that is exactly what was done…in fact, negotiating is NOT the right word…selling us out to the enemy’s demands is more precise. 

And in an official statement, muslim supporting Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, in defense and in support of Rice’s words…had the audacity to say, “We didn’t negotiate with terrorists,”totally ignoring the simple fact that this lopsided 5-for-1 exchange could start the ball rolling for future kidnappings of American soldiers… future kidnappings and beheadings of American soldiers if we do NOT acquiesce to their demands is more like it. 

Continuing on with the words, “In war, things are always dangerous and there are vulnerabilities… but our record, the United States of America, in dealing with terrorists and hunting down and finding terrorists, is pretty good,” Chuck Hagel refuses to accept the simple fact that when our troops lives are at stake ‘pretty good’ just does NOT cut it. 

And just two days ago, in a heated discussion with a Fox News reporter, U.S. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf had the unmitigated gall to claim that Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers…those who were in his unit and who knew him and his mind-set well…were NOT reliable sources in their accusations that Bergdahl deserted his post of his own free will. 

When directly asked, “Does the State Department consider Sergeant Bergdahl to be a deserter?” Harf’s answer was an unequivocal “NO.” Saying that, “… we are going to learn the facts about what happened here,” Harf’s regurgitating of the very set-in-stone ‘party loyal’ words set in motion…yet again…the act of diverting and deflecting attention off Obama…on whose shoulders this very act of acquiescing to the enemy’s demands truly lies. 

And treason is what Barack HUSSEIN Obama must be charged with as this man… this President of the United States…committed treason by the act of knowingly and willfully releasing known terrorists…known killers of American troops…as treason encompasses sedition as per 18 U.S.C. § 2388 : US Code – Section 2388: Activities affecting armed forces during war…as per (a) “Whoever, when the United States is at war, willfully makes or conveys false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies…” And that is exactly what this man has done…he has promoted the success of America’s enemies by releasing their leaders back into the fold to kill Americans again. 

Sedition as per 18 U.S.C. § 2381 : US Code – Section 2381: Treason. “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” 

And while we know Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s allegiance is NOT to the United States, he did take an oath of office to “…faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” 

But how can one protect and defend the Constitution when one has given ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy…when one has ‘aided and abetted’ the enemy…one simply cannot, therefore, one is in direct violation of the very oath one took in full public view. 

So those in this administration and those who are helping to circle the wagons around this most miserable of presidents…those folks need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and accept the fact that this president…one Barack HUSSEIN Obama…is guilty of acts of treason against the United States of America…most specifically concerning acts ‘aiding and abetting’ the enemy in a time of war. 

And that is something ‘We the People’ must demand that he be charged with… demand he be tried for…and demand when found guilty that he be punished for…period.

THE CONTINUING BLOWBACK: CHINA AND GERMANY IMPOSE “SANCTIONS” ON U.S. SERVERS, COMPUTER COMPANIES

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: News • http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/06/continuing-blowback-china-germany-impose-sanctions-u-s-servers-computer-companies/

What goes up must inevitably come down(unless, of course, it’s Malaysia Air Flight 370), and over the past week I’ve been continuing to blog about the increasingly bizarre space news that seems to have begun in April and continued throughout May and on into this month. And as usual, I’ve indulged in my trademark high octane speculation and, as evident yesterday, abandoned petrochemical speculation(with apologies to commodities traders) for some really bizarre dot-connecting concerning deflector shields, plasmas, ion drives, and ionospheric heaters, bypassing the subject of Nazi Bells and mad scientists completely.
But today we have to come back down to Earth and the muddle that modern geopolitics has become. Regular readers of this website know that I’ve also been watching the emergence of what I’ve been calling Cold War Act Two, for want of a better term, as the blowback and fallout of American unipolarism, most recently evident in the Ukraine and the revelations of vast NSA spying has gathered both in pace and intensity. For example, like former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts, I tend to view the electronic surveillance capabilities of the USA not so much in terms of a national security measure and capability, which it certainly is, but also as “the ultimate insider trading mechanism,” the ultimate ability to snoop on, model, and predict electronic financial clearing and hence to predict coming financial activity. Such a capability is a huge financial advantage, and as a result, I have also argued that systems of clearing such as SWIFT and CHIPS are vulnerable. In this respect, I have argued that the BRICS nations, or as I like to call them, the BRICSA nations, will inevitably, as a matter of their own financial and national security, to deploy their own systems of domestic and international clearing. The initial components of these steps, I have already argued, have been taken by Russia in the wake of the ongoing Ukrainian fiasco.
But there is another aspect of this story that goes back, somewhat, in the annals of alternative community “conspiracy theory,” to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that is the story of the so-called “clipper chip” that was rumored to be covertly installed on American made computers, from desktops to mainframes, in the wake of the notorious INSLAW scandal and the alleged theft of PROMIS database management software from the INSLAW company by the Reagan era Department of Justice. This device, it was alleged, was a secret hardware “backdoor” into every American made computer, vastly expanding the surveillance capabilties of the American national security apparatus. In my opinion, the current NSA surveillance scandal is intimately, deeply, and directly related to the INSLAW-PROMIS scandal of that era. I strongly suspect, for example, that whatever architecture made the PROMIS software so flexible and such a valuable prize to the Reagan administration is the same conceptual architecture – with appropriate updates – at work today. (For the story of the Clipper chip, see A basic history of the legislation surrounding the Clipper Chip. For the INSLAW-PROMIS story, the best source remains, in my opinion, Mr. Bill Hamilton, CEO of INSLAW, himself. But there is a decent review here from Wired magazine: The INSLAW Octopus. I have written about the matter here: A LITTLE UPDATE ON THE INSLAW MATTER, here: DAVE MARTIN AND THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS and here[for starters]: SOME MORE THINGS TO MAKE YOU GO HMMM: INSLAW AND THE FAREWELL DOSSIER)
As I documented in the last of my own blogs linked above(SOME MORE THINGS TO MAKE YOU GO HMMM: INSLAW AND THE FAREWELL DOSSIER), there is a plausible case that some of the “accidents” befalling the Soviet Union were not accidents at all, but the result of corrupted software “smuggled” into that country from the USA. This historical perspective, in other words, is bound to have other nations reassessing their exposure to American electronic surveillance, and China, for one, appears to have sounded up the clarion call, effectively ordering its financial institutions and international businesses to cease buying and operating with American hardware and software, in this case, IBM and Microsoft products:
First Cisco And Microsoft, Now IBM: China Orders Banks To Remove High-End IBM Servers
Now as the Zero Hedge article makes clear, in a wry and apt bit of humor, none of this will be reflected in the actual “market” performance of IBM or MSFT:

“That’s ok though: since news and fundamentals don’t matter, we fully expect IBM stock to also be up several percent on what now appears to be the terminal loss of one of the company’s largest export markets. And not only IBM: other stocks set to surge on this bad news are MSFT and, of course, Cisco, whose CEO was recently crying about Obama’s NSA policies, and whose sales in China are once again assured to crater. But as they say in the movies: tis but a scratch – who needs top line growth when a company can issue debt to buy back its share and pretend all is well?” (My thanks to Mr. J.K. for bringing this article to my attention.)

We’ll get back to that market performance stuff, and its evident disconnect from news that, under normal circumstances, should affect it, in a moment. Presently, however, consider the following news from Germany, one of China’s biggest trading partners:
Germany Will Ban Tech Companies That Play Ball With NSA
One can speculate here that perhaps there were discrete talks between Chancellorin Merkel’s government and Beijing over this step, with both countries expressing concerns over their international trade and NSA snooping upon it. Given that Frankfurt has also recently become a bond market for Chinese bonds denominated in reminbi, the concern of the two countries is understandable. Here one may make some predictions: if the trend continues, then the European basis of the concern will spread from Germany to other countries, and the target of the concern will also reach out to embrace the British Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, and the UK itself, which have electronic surveillance swap agreements with the USA, And eventually, we can expect to see Germany taking similar steps with regard to its computer hardware, by promoting regulations favorable to non-American computer building companies.
What I suspect all this heralds as a long term game which has only just begun, is that the BRICSA nations will make the type of action signaled by China a part of their agenda in coming years, and that agenda will include an inevitable insistence, in my opinion, that sensitive trade between that bloc and any non-member nation such as Germany, be conducted by “secure servers”. And that will mean, no clearing through SWIFT, CHIPS, and no clearing on American-made computers. Of course, Germany, Russia, India, China and so on, are just as  capable of their own electronic mischief, but so long as the heavy hand of Washington’s drone-imposed will continues to be exercised in the fashion it has, the blowback will continue

SOME MORE THINGS TO MAKE YOU GO “HMMM…”: INSLAW AND THE FAREWELL DOSSIER

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Conspiracy •http://gizadeathstar.com/2012/02/some-more-things-to-make-you-go-hmmm-inslaw-and-the-farewell-dossier/

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Inslaw Affair and the mysterious death of Gus Weiss and a little known espionage episode called the Farewell Dossier:
DAVE MARTIN, THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS, AND INSLAW Read more: DAVE MARTIN, THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS, AND INSLAW – Giza Death Star Community
A LITTLE UPDATE ON THE INSLAW MATTER
Recently I finished reading a fascinating fascinating book on The Farewell Dossier by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud, documenting this little-known triumph of French counter-intelligence running one of the most successful moles in intelligence history, Col. Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, inside the KGB during the early years of the administration of Ronald Reagan and the government of French President Francois Mitterand. The book, Farewell: the Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century, reads like a Robert Ludlum or John Le Carre espionage thriller, save for the fact that it is all true.
Vetrov, a disenchanted KGB officer disillusioned with the failures of the Soviet system as a whole, and with what he perceived as KGB dysfunctionality in particular, approached French counter-intelligence with the offer to give them extremely sensitive KGB information, including files documenting the devastating extent of Soviet industrial-technological espionage within the West, espionage that essentially provided the Soviet Union with the technology it needed to maintain technological parity with the West which it could not otherwise have done on its own.French counter-intelligence, which had no experience or even human agents within the Soviet Union, readily appreciated the plum that had fallen into its lap, and counter-intelligence chief Marcel Chalet quickly agreed to run the mole, to whom he assigned the codename “Farewell”.
As the book makes clear, Mitterand requested a private meeting with Reagan, and shared the good news, and eventually the French cache of information Vetrov was supplying was shared with American intelligence and the Pentagon. At this point, one of Reagan’s key advisers, Gus Weiss, conceived the idea to use the KGB’s own “shopping list” for advanced computer programs against it, and thus software intended to monitor and regulate a key gas pipeline was infected with a virus. At first, the software worked perfectly, but later the virus was activated, which led to a 3 kiloton explosion in the pipeline.(Farewell, The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century, p. 283). Of course, the implication here is that this was not the only infected software that was either sold to the Soviet Union, or which the West allowed to be “stolen” by the KGB. The book even strongly suggests that the whole Red Mercury scare of the 1990s may have begun as a CIA deception connected with the Farewell dossier (pp. 286-287).
What this whole story implies is something deep and profound, for it is a story of doctored software that was being done at precisely the same time that similar allegations surfaced surrounding Inslaw Corporation’s database management software, PROMIS, so to my mind, there is a high probability that the Farewell matter and the Inslaw matter are deeply connected.
But there is an even deeper implication and I hope it’s apparent: such sophisticated software management programs with backdoors and viruses brought down an entire system – Soviet Communism – without firing a single shot, and that software is/was in the hands of the US government and its various intelligence agencies. Now imagine similar such software – in the control of these government agencies and possibly any “rogue group” or faction within them – being installed in, say, banks like Chase Manhattan, the Bank of International Settlements, or – just for kicks – the Rothschild Nemrod Fund, or the Bank of Crooks and Criminals…er…I meant, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Nugan Hand, Barings (names I’m sure some of you will recognize), or the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, Credite Suisse, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transer (SWIFT) and you get the idea…
…. maybe, just maybe, the banksters aren’t in as much control as they’d like to think? Maybe it’s more of a two-way street between the government and the high financial elite than the banksters would have us believe?