
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters has been obsessed with impeaching Donald Trump – so much so that her latest call for impeachment was during a eulogy.
During comedian Dick Gregory’s funeral on Saturday, Waters quickly turned what was supposed to be a memorial of her friend into an anti-Trump political rally, reports The American Mirror.
“I’m cleaning out the White House,” Waters declared. “We’re going to sanitize the White House. We’re not going to take what is happening in this country. Haven’t you taken enough?”
“And then comes along this person,” she said of Trump. “This person who does not respect you. This dishonorable human being who cheats everybody! This dishonorable human being who will lie at the drop of a hat. This dishonorable human being who has the alt-right, and the KKK and everybody else inside his Cabinet!”
Shockingly, the audience applauded as she hijacked the memorial.
“I’m gonna say ‘Impeach 45 everyday,’ ‘Impeach 45 everyday,’ ‘Impeach 45 everyday,’” she yelled.
WATCH:
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Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, MY A$$! We wouldn’t know freedom if it slapped us upside the head!
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Source: In Florida it’s Illegal to Power Your Home With Solar Panels – Thanks to Lobbying
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Imagine this movie-script: a former KGB spy, angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots a course for revenge… narrates the ominous sounding voice of Morgan Freeman.
The hysteria continues, and this time Hollywood has been enlisted. No this is not The Onion, but yet another serious committee for serious people. Meet the “Committee to Investigate Russia” which launched on Tuesday and immediately garnered broad coverage in pop-culture and entertainment news sites for its release of a short Morgan Freeman narrated video which aims to “tell us the truth” about Russian meddling in the US election. “We have been attacked,” Freeman says in his familiarly reassuring voice while gazing into the camera. “We are at war.”
Not only did the video burn up social media on Tuesday, but the founders of the lobbying group behind the production, barely one day old, were given substantial air time on cable news from CNN to MSNBC. Of course, it helps that actor, director, and lifelong Democrat Rob Reiner is behind it – he’s teamed up with neocons David Frum, Max Boot, and national security insiders like James Clapper.
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Similar to other recently launched ‘Russiagate’ campaigns and organizations we’ve profiled, the initiative is enjoying fawning mainstream media coverage from the very start. And apparently the historical irony is completely lost on Hollywood, a town which itself fell victim to the original McCarthyite witch hunt and its celebrity ‘blacklist’.
Meanwhile, it appears the “Committee to Investigate Russia” is designed to appeal especially to the popular masses and consumers of pop media and celebrity culture magazines. For example, the following gushing roll out coverage from entertainment news site PopSugar reads like the “famed” Max Boot himself is on a hollywoodesque mission to save the world from an ‘EVIL’ cabal bent on total world domination:
The group’s advisory board is a who’s who of the most outspoken individuals in America today: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, award-winning actor and director Rob Reiner, former George W. Bush aide and current Atlantic editor David Frum, AEI scholar Norm Ornstein, famed military historian Max Boot, and popular conservative pundit Charlie Sykes. And their mission? To educate the public on the threat that we face from Russia and to serve as a central location for updates, news, and information on all things related to the issue.
But like most commentary on the so-called ‘Russian connection’ there is one important caveat which appropriately skeptical readers will be sure to notice:
While we still don’t have definitive answers on much of what elapsed during the lead-up to the election — or, frankly, have a plan for what we can do to prevent this sort of thing going forward — what we do have is an issue that individuals on both sides of the aisle are desperate to get to the bottom of.
This of course translates to “well we know there’s a lot of smoke and no answers, umm… evidence” – but hey, Morgan Freeman’s noble and venerable wisdom-from-the-heavens-sounding voice will make it all true. Reiner told the Daily Beast that Morgan Freeman was chosen as spokesman due to the “weight and gravitas” of his voice. Reiner further explained the purpose as, “We’re trying to break through and explain to people why this is important and that there is a serious problem here that people don’t seem to really grasp.”
While the public has been assured the committee is stacked with bipartisan experts, it would help if there were any actual… Russian experts. As one Al Jazeera journalist who covers Russian affairs pointed out, the advisory board is made up of the following “experts” (in their respective order):
• a neocon blogger
• a perjurer
• wonk with no Russia background
• the director of When Harry Met Sally
• right-wing talk radio guy

In spite of all the immediate positive media coverage the Committee to Investigate Russia ran into some embarrassing problems the moment its website went live. Actual Russian experts identified a glaring error. According to the independent Russian language news site Meduza:
The committee even ran into trouble when trying to identify General Valery Gerasimov, the author of an alleged hybrid military doctrine that some analysts treat as the blueprint for Russia’s “information warfare” against enemies like the U.S. and Ukraine. When the committee first launched its website, it accidentally posted a photo of Gerasimov’s predecessor, General Nikolay Makarov. The group eventually corrected its mistake, but not before Russian media expert Alexey Kovalev called them out, highlighting the rather obvious dangers of taking on “Russia” without Russian expertise.
This is not Valery Gerasimov. http://pic.twitter.com/102BecI8r2
— Alexey Kovalev (@Alexey__Kovalev) September 19, 2017
As with Hamilton68 before it, this new project will likely become a go-to source of information for mainstream media which similarly lacks in real expertise. Apparently the two-minute Morgan Freeman video is now being roundly mocked in Russian state media, presumably for its ultra-simplistic reading of the fall of the Soviet Union and Putin’s rise to power (Morgan Freeman assures us it was all about “revenge”). Perhaps one of many lessons here is this: you’d better divert some funds toward consulting real Russian experts and journalists before hiring a big-moneyed celebrity to “educate” the masses.
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The U.S. government is suing citizens requesting public records all over the country, violating the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). The government is stating that it is in “good faith” to take away more of our rights, intimidate us and delay FOIA requests, thus challenging the notion of transparency and, in turn, the Open Government Initiative.
Throughout the U.S. government, a growing number of organizations, school districts, municipalities, and state agencies have filed lawsuits against citizens for making FOIA requests to obtain public information. The governmental bodies argue that they are doing so to let the court decide a matter that isn’t quite clear legally such as when the documents may be shielded by an exemption or privacy laws. But that’s causing problems, and becoming a new way for governments to hide information from taxpayers and even news organizations or individual journalists.
The practice, although highly ridiculed and uncommon, has been going on for years according to Columbia Journalism Review.
However, recently the Associated Press reported three different cases where the government sued citizens in the last year.
In the first case, an Oregon parent Kim Sordyl and journalist Beth Slovic sought details about Portland Public School employees on paid leave. The school board responded by suing them both, arguing that the records are exempt from disclosure due to the personal privacy of employees.
The second case involved two retired teachers, Dr. James Finney and Mike Deshotels, who were sued by Louisiana Department of Education for trying to get information on the school’s enrollment data relating to economically disadvantaged and English proficiency students. The two eventually ended up winning the case in a settlement but not before fighting for their rights in court to even see the data and spending $3,000 in legal fees.
Finally, the third case highlighting this abusive practice that the publication mentioned was Western Kentucky University suing two newspapers. The University filed a lawsuit against its paper, the College Heights Herald and the University of Kentucky campus newspaper, Kentucky Kernel, which sought records related to allegations of sexual harassment and assault involving its faculty. That story titled: “In The Dark: Records shed light on sexual misconduct at Kentucky universities” went on to win the University of Georgia’s Betty Gage Holland Award for excellence in college journalism and using a FOIA request to bring the questionable abuse to light.
“It’s appropriate to say it’s troubling the university (WKU) is suing its own newspaper for practicing good journalism,” attorney Michael Abate told the WKU paper, the College Heights Herald. “Even if they have a valid basis for withholding information, they still have to submit redacted documents.”
In 2015 a New Jersey Judge Michael Winkelstein ruled in favor of Harry Scheeler Jr. who was seeking Hamilton Township police surveillance video and was subsequently sued for his request, Columbia Journalism Review reported. In New Jersey, the state has a law called the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) in place of a Freedom of Information request. The judge ruled that such practices of governments counter-suing citizens was the antithesis of OPRA.
Winkelstein found that,
A government lawsuit against requestors subjects them to involuntary litigation with all of its concomitant financial, temporal, and emotional trimmings. A public policy that gives a government agency the right to sue a person who asks for a government document is the antithesis of the OPRA and common-law policy of providing citizens with a means of access to public information to keep government activities open and hold the government accountable.
Earlier this year in Michigan, the state House voted overwhelmingly 108-0 in favor of a bill that would make it illegal for government agencies to sue citizens who request public records.
The legislation was in response to a local county’s lawsuit against a newspaper that was seeking documents on two employees running for sheriff. A judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying the county had to approve or deny the request.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Klint Kesto, called the lawsuit “a backdoor channel to delay and put pressure on the requester” that circumvents the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
“Government shouldn’t file a lawsuit and go on offense. Either approve the request or deny it,” he said. “This shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the country.”
It’s troubling that so many of these requests have resulted in lawsuits against citizens who have a right to know public information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post and is Director of Content for Coinivore. Follow Aaron at Twitter and Steemit.
This article is Creative Commons and can be republished in full with attribution. Like Activist Post on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, follow on Twitter and at Steemit.
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A surge in Opioid consumption, primarily prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl – a drug 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine – and the resulting spike in overdose related deaths is devastating families in rural America. But the opioid epidemic is laying waste to more than just the broken families it counts among its victims, as Reuters points out today, rural municipalities are finding it nearly impossible to fund the surging costs associated with overdoses which come in the form of emergency call volumes, medical examiner and coroner bills, and overcrowded jails and courtrooms.
As an example, Ross County, Ohio, a town of only 77,000, says its budget for child services has doubled in just 5 years and 75% of the children place into protection come from homes where parents have opioid addictions.
Ross County, a largely rural region of 77,000 people an hour south of Columbus, Ohio, is wrestling with an explosion in opioid-related deaths – 44 last year compared to 19 in 2009. The drug addiction epidemic is shattering not just lives but also stressing the county budget.
About 75 percent of the 200 children placed into state care in the county have parents with opioid addictions, up from about 40 percent five years ago, local officials say. Their care is more expensive because they need specialist counseling, longer stays and therapy.
That has caused a near doubling in the county’s child services budget to almost $2.4 million from $1.3 million, said Doug Corcoran, a county commissioner.
For a county with a general fund of just $23 million, that is a big financial burden, Corcoran said. He and his colleagues are now exploring what they might cut to pay for the growing costs of the epidemic, such as youth programs and economic development schemes.
But it’s not just the cost of child services that is wreaking havoc on municipal budgets as everything from autopsy and toxicology costs to court fees and jail expenses are surging throughout rural America.
Autopsy and toxicology costs there have nearly doubled in six years, from about $89,000 in 2010 to $165,000 in 2016, county data shows.
Court costs are soaring, mainly because of the expense of prosecuting opioid-related crimes and providing accused with a public defender, local officials say.
The county is using contingency funds to pay for the added coroner costs, said Mike Baker, the county’s top government official. Last year, the county drew $63,000 from those funds, up from $19,000 in 2014, he said. In 2014, the county saw 10 drug-related deaths. In 2016, the number had grown to 53.
In Mercer County, West Virginia, 300 miles (483 km) to the south of Indiana County, opioid-related jail costs are carving into the small annual budget of $12 million for the community of 62,000 people.
The county’s jail expenses are on course to increase by $100,000 this year, compared to 2015. The county pays $48.50 per inmate per day to the jail, and this year the jail is on course to have over 2,000 more “inmate days” compared to 2015, according to county data.
“At least 90 percent of those extra jail costs are opioid-related,” said Greg Puckett, a county commissioner who sits on a national county opioid task force. “We spend more in one month on our jail bill than we spend per month on economic development, our health department and our emergency services combined.”
Meanwhile, as Bloomberg has just noted, attorneys general from 41 states are broadening their investigation into the opioid industry and have served subpoenas to five pharma companies that make the most powerful prescription painkillers.
They announced Tuesday that they had served subpoenas requesting information from five companies that make powerful prescription painkillers and three distributors. Forty-one attorneys general are involved.
The investigation into marketing and sales practices seeks to find out whether the industry’s own actions worsened the epidemic.
If the industry cooperates, the investigation could lead to a national settlement.
The Healthcare Distribution Alliance said in a statement that it’s not responsible for the volume of opioid prescribing but that it does want to work on solving the public health crisis.
Dozens of local and state governments have already filed, announced or publicly considered lawsuits against drugmakers or distributors.
To add some context to the scale of the opioid epidemic, the California Department of Public Health recently dropped some staggering statistics showing that there are a remarkable number of counties in California where annual prescriptions for pain killers actually exceed the population.
Trinity County is the state’s fourth-smallest, and ended last year with an estimated population of 13,628 people.
Its residents also filled prescriptions for oxycodone, hydrocodone and other opioids 18,439 times, the highest per capita rate in California.
Besides Trinity, other counties with more prescriptions than people include Lake, Shasta, Tuolumne and Del Norte counties. In the Sacramento region, El Dorado, Placer and Sacramento counties had prescription rates above the statewide average, with Yolo County slightly below the state average.
A county’s prescription total represents all opioids dispensed via prescriptions filled at a pharmacy and tracked by the state. Statewide, 15 percent of Californians were prescribed opioids in 2016, ranging from 7.3 percent of residents in tiny Alpine County to almost 27 percent in Lake County.
As might be expected, the scripts per capita are highest in California’s more rural northern counties.

So who is participating most in this deadly epidemic? Well, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the biggest abusers of opioids are high-school educated, unemployed, white people living in small towns…
“The following characteristics were associated with higher amounts of opioids prescribed: a larger percentage of non-Hispanic whites; higher rates of uninsured and Medicaid enrollment; lower educational attainment; higher rates of unemployment; (small-town) status; more dentists and physicians per capita; a higher prevalence of diagnosed diabetes, arthritis, and disability; and higher suicide rates,” concluded the authors of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in July.
“What you’re seeing in California is what you’re seeing in many parts of the country, including Oregon,”Korthuis said. “There are still a lot of rural counties around the U.S. that are awash in prescription opioids.”
Of course, growth in opioid addiction is hardly just a California phenomenon. According to the CDC’s Annual Surveillance Report of Drug-Related Risks and Outcomes, addiction-related deaths are far more prevalent in the rural ‘rust-belt’ states of the Midwest.

Meanwhile, the epidemic is growing far more severe every year with overdose deaths up 167% across the country since 1999.
The rate of drug overdose deaths increased from 6.1 per 100,000 population in 1999 to 16.3 in 2015; for unintenttional drug overdose deaths, the rate increased from 4.0 per 100,000 in 1999 to 13.8 in 2015; for drug overdose deaths involving any opioid, the rate increased from 2.9 per 100,000 in 1999 to 10.4 in 2015 (p<0.05); for unintenttional drug overdose deaths involving any opioid, the rate increased from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1999 to 9.3 per 100,000 in 2015 (p<0.05). For all four categories of drug overdose deaths, increases in rates were largest from 2013 to 2015, with the rate increasing on average by 9% per year for overall drug overdose deaths (p<0.05), 11% per year for unintenttional drug overdose deaths (p<0.05), 15% per year for drug overdose deaths involving any opioid (p<0.05), and 16% for unintenttional drug overdose deaths involving any opioid (p<0.05).

But don’t worry too much because, as Princeton Economist Alan Krueger told us recently, there is a simple solution to the opioid epidemic in the U.S…apparently it can all be solved with just a little more Obamacare.
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On Monday, President Trump tweeted birthday wishes to the Air Force and the CIA.
Both became official organizations 70 years ago on September 18, 1947, with the implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.
After spending years as a wartime intelligence agency called the Office of Strategic Services, the agency was solidified as a key player in the federal government’s operations with then-President Harry Truman’s authorization.
In the seventy years since, the CIA has committed a wide variety of misdeeds, crimes, coups, and violence. Here are seven of the worst programs they’ve carried out (that are known to the public):
1) Toppling governments around the world — The CIA is best known for its first coup, Operation Ajax, in 1953, in which it ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, reinstating the autocratic Shah, who favored western oil interests. That operation, which the CIA now admits to waging with British intelligence, ultimately resulted in the 1979 revolution and subsequent U.S. hostage crisis. Relations between the U.S. and Iran remain strained to this day, aptly described by the CIA-coined term “blowback.”
But the CIA has had a hand in toppling a number of other democratically elected governments, from Guatemala (1954) and the Congo (1960) to the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973). The CIA has aimed to install leaders who appease American interests, often empowering oppressive, violent dictators. This is only a partial list of countries where the CIA covertly attempted to exploit and manipulate sovereign nations’ governments.
2) Operation Paperclip — In one of the more bizarre CIA plots, the agency and other government departments employed Nazi scientists both within and outside the United States to gain an advantage over the Soviets. As summarized by NPR:
“The aim [of Operation Paperclip] was to find and preserve German weapons, including biological and chemical agents, but American scientific intelligence officers quickly realized the weapons themselves were not enough.
“They decided the United States needed to bring the Nazi scientists themselves to the U.S. Thus began a mission to recruit top Nazi doctors, physicists and chemists — including Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the rockets that took man to the moon.”
They kept this plot secret, though they admitted to it upon the release of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America by Annie Jacobsen. In a book review, the CIA wrote that “Henry Wallace, former vice president and secretary of commerce, believed the scientists’ ideas could launch new civilian industries and produce jobs.”
They praised the book’s historical accuracy, noting “that the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was headed by Kurt Debus, an ardent Nazi.” They acknowledged that “General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviets, was hired by the US Army and later by the CIA to operate 600 ex-Nazi agents in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany.”
Remarkably, they noted that Jacobsen “understandably questions the morality of the decision to hire Nazi SS scientists,” but praise her for pointing out that it was done to fight Soviets. They also made sure to add that the Soviets hired Nazis, too, apparently justifying their own questionable actions by citing their most loathed enemy.
3) Operation CHAOS — The FBI is widely known for its COINTELPRO schemes to undermine communist movements in the 1950s and anti-war, civil rights, and black power movements in the 1960s, but the CIA has not been implicated nearly as deeply because, technically, the CIA cannot legally engage in domestic spying. But that was of little concern to President Lyndon B. Johnson as opposition to the Vietnam war grew. According to former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner, as documented in his extensive CIA history, Legacy of Ashes, Johnson instructed then-CIA Director Richard Helms to break the law:
“In October 1967, a handful of CIA analysts joined in the first big Washington march against the war. The president regarded protesters as enemies of the state. He was convinced that the peace movement was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He wanted proof. He ordered Richard Helms to produce it.
“Helms reminded the president that the CIA was barred from spying on Americans. He says Johnson told him: ‘I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs…’”
Helms obeyed. Weiner wrote:
“In a blatant violation of his powers under the law, the director of central intelligence became a part-time secret police chief. The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos. It went on for almost seven years… Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.”
According to Weiner, “the agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over America.” Because they could not draw a “clear distinction” between the new far left and mainstream opposition to the war, the CIA spied on every major peace organization in the country. President Johnson also wanted them to prove a connection between foreign communists and the black power movement. “The agency tried its best,” Weiner noted, ultimately noting that “the CIA never found a shred of evidence that linked the leaders of the American left or the black-power movement to foreign governments.”
4) Infiltrating the media — Over the years, the CIA has successfully gained influence in the news media, as well as popular media like film and television. Its influence over the news began almost immediately after the agency was formed. As Weiner explained, CIA Director Allen Dulles established firm ties with newspapers:
“Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.”
He continued:
“It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information…The men who responded to the CIA’s call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Life, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader’s Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.”
The CIA’s influence had not waned by 1977 when journalist Carl Bernstein reported on publications with CIA agents in their employ, as well as “more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
The CIA has also successfully advised on and influenced numerous television shows, such as Homeland and 24 and films like Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, which push narratives that ultimately favor the agency. According to Tricia Jenkins, author of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film & Television, a concerted agency effort began in the 1990s to counteract negative public perceptions of the CIA, but their influence reaches back decades. In the 1950s, filmmakers produced films for the CIA, including the 1954 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Researchers Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, whose work has been published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, say their recent Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that the CIA — along with the military — have influenced over 1,800 films and television shows, many of which have nothing to do with CIA or military themes.
5) Drug-induced Mind control – In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with drugs to determine whether they might be useful in extracting information. As Smithsonian Magazine has noted of the MKUltra project:
“The project, which continued for more than a decade, was originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology. It ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.”
Further:
“The intent of the project was to study ‘the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,’ according to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977. The project was conducted in extreme secrecy, Turner said, because of ethical and legal questions surrounding the program and the negative public response that the CIA anticipated if MKUltra should become public.
“Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could:’ ‘promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;’ ‘render the induction of hypnosis easier;’ ‘enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;’ produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients– ‘people who could not fight back,’ in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.”
Further, as Weiner noted:
“Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York Hotel.”
Weiner added that senior CIA officers destroyed “almost all of the records” of the programs, but that while the “evidence that remains is fragmentary…it strongly suggests that use of secret prisons for the forcible drug-induced questioning of suspect agents went on throughout the 1950s.”
Years later, the CIA would be accused of distributing crack-cocaine into poor black communities, though this is currently less substantiated and supported mostly by accounts of those who claim to have been involved.
6) Brutal torture tactics — More recently, the CIA was exposed for sponsoring abusive, disturbing terror tactics against detainees at prisons housing terror suspects. An extensive 2014 Senate report documented agents committing sexual abuse, forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, waterboarding them so severely it sometimes led to convulsions, and imposing forced rectal feeding, to name a few examples. Ultimately, the agency had very little actionable intelligence to show for their torture tactics but lied to suggest they did, according to the torture report. Their torture tactics led the International Criminal Court to suggest the CIA, along with the U.S. armed forces, could be guilty of war crimes for their abuses.
7) Arming radicals — The CIA has a long habit of arming radical, extremist groups that view the United States as enemies. In 1979, the CIA set out to support Afghan rebels in their bid to defeat the Soviet occupation of the Middle Eastern country. As Weiner wrote, in 1979, “Prompted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter signed a covert-action order for the CIA to provide the Afghan rebels with medical aid, money, and propaganda.”
As Weiner detailed later in his book:
“The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who doled out the CIA’s guns and money favored the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.”
Though some speculate the CIA directly armed Osama bin Laden, that is yet to be fully proven or admitted. What is clear is that western media revered him as a valuable fighter against the Soviets, that he arrived to fight in Afghanistan in1980, and that al-Qaeda emerged from the mujahideen, who were beneficiaries of the CIA’s program. Stanford University has noted that Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian cleric, “established Al Qaeda from the fighters, financial resources, and training and recruiting structures left over from the anti-Soviet war.” Much of those “structures” were provided by the agency. Intentionally or not, the CIA helped fuel the rise of the terror group.
Weiner noted that as the CIA failed in other countries like Libya, by the late 1980s “Only the mujahideen, the Afghan holy warriors, were drawing blood and scenting victory. The CIA’s Afghan operation was now a $700-million-dollar-a-year-program” and represented 80% of the overseas budget of the clandestine services. “The CIA’s briefing books never answered the question of what would happen when a militant Islamic army defeated the godless invaders of Afghanistan,” though Tom Twetten, “the number two man in the clandestine service in the summer of 1988,” was tasked with figuring out what would happen with the Afghan rebels. “We don’t have any plan,” he concluded.
Apparently failing to learn their lesson, the CIA adopted nearly the exact same policy in Syria decades later, arming what they called “moderate rebels” against the Assad regime. Those groups ultimately aligned with al-Qaeda groups. One CIA-backed faction made headlines last year for beheading a child (though President Trump cut off the CIA program in June, the military continues to align with “moderate” groups).
Unsurprisingly, this list is far from complete. The CIA has engaged in a wide variety of extrajudicial practice, and there are likely countless transgressions we have yet to learn about.
As Donald Trump cheers the birthday of an agency he himself once criticized, it should be abundantly clear that the nation’s covert spy agency deserves scrutiny and skepticism — not celebration.
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The “Anti” in our name does not mean we are against the media, we are simply against the current mainstream paradigm. The current media, influenced by the industrial complex, is a top-down authoritarian system of distribution—the opposite of what Anti-Media aims to be. At Anti-Media, we want to offer a new paradigm—a bottom-up approach for real and diverse reporting. We seek to establish a space where the people are the journalists and a venue where independent journalism moves forward on a larger and more truthful scale.

Biologists have just discovered an underwater city of octopuses. Octlantis features dens made out of piles of sand and shells and is home to up to 15 of the cephalopods, according to marine biologists.
The scientists recorded 10 hours of video footage of the site now dubbed Octlantis, which lies 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 feet) under the water and measures 18 by 4 meters (59 by 13 feet). The international team of researchers saw the gloomy octopuses meeting up, living together, communicating with each other, chasing unwelcome octopuses away, and even evicting each other from dens – so it seems Octlantis can be quite a rough place to live.
Octopolis seems to be centered on an unidentified human-made object about 30 cm (11.8 inches) in length, but there’s no obvious comparable object in Octlantis that creatures appear to have settled around. Instead, it might be jutting rocks that first attracted the octopuses to the area, according to the researchers.
“These behaviors are the product of natural selection, and may be remarkably similar to vertebrate complex social behavior,” lead researcher David Scheel, from Alaska Pacific University, told Ephrat Livni at Quartz. “This suggests that when the right conditions occur, evolution may produce very similar outcomes in diverse groups of organisms.” –Science Alert
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Two behaviors at this site suggest that Octopus tetricus octopuses aren’t quite the loners they’ve always been portrayed as by biologists, but what we don’t know yet is whether these small octopus cities are particularly common, or exactly how they get started. Normally, octopuses meet to mate before going their separate ways and were never thought of as a social species.
The first odd social behavior is the “Octopus Fight Club.” The new octopus city lies in Jervis Bay on the coastline of eastern Australia and is close to another similar site discovered in 2009 called Octopolis. At that site, scientists have seen a kind of Octopus Fight Club take place in the past. Second, the researchers also discovered the discarded shells of eaten prey scattered around the city and sometimes those shells were used to form dens.
“At both sites there were features that we think may have made the congregation possible – namely several seafloor rock outcroppings dotting an otherwise flat and featureless area,” says one of the team, Stephanie Chancellor from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“We still don’t really know much about octopus behavior,” says Chancellor. “More research will be needed to determine what these actions might mean.”
*The research has been published in Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology.
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An angry woman was captured on video screaming at a man for bringing his PTSD dog into a restaurant. The man remained silent during the verbal onslaught until coolly telling her to calm down.
Shocking footage captured the moment a woman yelled at a military veteran after he brought his PTSD dog inside the restaurant. Workers and diners queued up to defend the serviceman who remained silent during the unpleasant verbal onslaught.
Holding his dog’s leash, the veteran stands near his dog, which appears to be a Great Dane mix with an official military coat wrapped around its body. These animals help victims of serious injury or accident feel safe during potentially difficult social situations. And the dog was probably handy in this particular social situation.
The video immediately went viral with online users criticizing this verbally abusive tirade.
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The woman repeatedly states that she finds animals, dogs included, in restaurants to be “gross.” When the screaming woman claims the veteran shouldn’t be allowed to bring his dog inside, one waitress is heard saying, “He’s allowed because he fought for our country.” The aggressive diner then responds erratically, claiming her husband was also a serviceman who died abroad and continued screaming. “It’s nasty to me, it’s f******* disgusting,” before calling various diners “w***es and b***es.”
Standing alongside a seemingly embarrassed male companion, the woman continues her tirade as the veteran tries to calm her down. It doesn’t take long for her to eventually begin threatening the staff to “shut her up.”
“Who’s gonna shut me up? Are you gonna make me? [sic],” pointing at workers. The staff continues to try to encourage the woman to leave, telling her she’s welcome to go eat somewhere else but she continues to yell loudly. After swearing and making more threats to more diners, the woman leaves the restaurant only to walk back in and shout, “It’s my opinion, none of y’all are gonna change it. It’s disgusting, it’s gross!”
Ironically, the “gross” and “disgusting” dog had more composure than the irate woman railing against its presence.
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The Equifax boondoggle has the potential to be cosmically bad!
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Source: This Is What Your Identity Sells For On The Dark Web
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It seems like no one can catch a break this hurricane season. Many islands, including the US territory of Puerto Rico, are taking a second hit from Hurricane Maria just over a week after Hurricane Irma tore through the region, and in their already weakened state, the damage could take out the power indefinitely.
Dominica was devastated last night
Hurricane Maria reached Category 5 levels yesterday just before making landfall in Dominica. The small island was absolutely devastated. No respecter of persons, it even ripped the roof off of the home of the Prime Minister.
Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit posted on Facebook:
Initial reports are of widespread devastation. So far we have lost all what money can buy and replace. My greatest fear for the morning is that we will wake to news of serious physical injury and possible deaths as a result of likely landslides triggered by persistent rains.
So, far the winds have swept away the roofs of almost every person I have spoken to or otherwise made contact with. The roof to my own official residence was among the first to go and this apparently triggered an avalanche of torn away roofs in the city and the countryside.
Come tomorrow morning we will hit the road, as soon as the all clear is given, in search of the injured and those trapped in the rubble.
I am honestly not preoccupied with physical damage at this time, because it is devastating…indeed, mind boggling. My focus now is in rescuing the trapped and securing medical assistance for the injured.
We will need help, my friend, we will need help of all kinds.
It is too early to speak of the condition of the air and seaports, but I suspect both will be inoperable for a few days. That is why I am eager now to solicit the support of friendly nations and organisations with helicopter services, for I personally am eager to get up and get around the country to see and determine what’s needed. (source)
Dominica has a population of 72,000 people and is 289 square miles.
During the storm’s siege on Dominica, it had maximum sustained winds of 150 mph and was downgraded to a Category 4, then an hour later, regraded to a Category 5.

After hitting Dominica, Hurricane Maria when past Martinique and Barbados causing little damage. The island of Guadeloupe, however, has lost all communication, so we don’t know how bad the damage was there at this time. This video was uploaded before communication was lost.
This video was taken on Monday night in Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe, as Hurricane #Maria pummels the island https://t.co/4Ac70NdWrt http://pic.twitter.com/I8oxDYZcrt
— CNN (@CNN) September 19, 2017
Hurricane warnings have been also posted for the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Martinique, and St. Lucia. A tropical storm warning has been issued for Antigua and Barbuda, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Maarten and Anguilla.
Next up: Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico, a United States territory, sustained a billion dollars in damage from Hurricane Irma, and now they’re up for Round Two, expecting a direct hit from Hurricane Maria tonight or tomorrow morning. Hurricane Maria has regained power and is again a Category 5 storm.
Governor Ricardo Rossello warned citizens:
“If you are in a flood zone or in a wood house, your life is in danger. There has never been an event like this in our history in the last 100 years. Our call is for all citizens to move to a safe place.” (source)
The governor also imposed rationing of batteries, milk, canned foods, flashlights and other supplies. Fuel was not rationed. (source) With supplies being doled out like this, there is absolutely no chance at this late hour to prepare for the long haul. If someone isn’t well-prepared already, it’s too late to do more than the bare minimum now.
Puerto Rico’s financial problems certainly make the idea of recovery a lot more difficult. Bloomberg reports:
Puerto Rico is facing an active hurricane season with little financial ability to navigate a natural catastrophe. It filed for bankruptcy in May after years of economic decline and borrowing to fill budget gaps. A series of defaults have effectively left it unable to raise money in the capital markets. And its aging government-owned electric utility, the Electric Power Authority, is also operating under court protection from creditors. Puerto Rico’s emergency fund stood at about $32 million before Irma passed through.
Prepa, the government-run utility, is still trying to restore power to hundreds of thousands of residents after its electrical infrastructure sustained as much as $400 million of the nearly $1 billion of damage from Irma. It was already in need of upgrades because it relies on oil to produce most of its electricity and the median plant age is 44 years, more than twice the industry average. (source)
It’s entirely possible that Hurricane Maria will put the island in the dark for quite some time to come, completely changing their way of life. Gov. 70,000 people are still without power from their bout with Irma, and much more damage to the utility system is expected. Rossello said:
“We will not have sustainable electric infrastructure in the near future. We will be bringing in crews from outside of Puerto Rico to attend to these measures.” (source)
Philipe Schoene Roura, the editor of a San Juan, Puerto Rico-based newspaper, Caribbean Business, wrote:
Prepa Executive Director Ricardo Ramos Rodríguez recently said the powerlines carrying electricity in the public corporation’s system are in such a deteriorated state that a strong storm could leave the island without power for weeks.
“To give you a number, if during Hurricane Georges 100 lines went down in 1998, today the same [kind of ] hurricane would bring down 1,000,” the official candidly told Caribbean Business when asked about the possibility of Prepa’s system effectively withstanding the onslaught of a similar storm.
“The lifespan of most of Prepa’s equipment has expired. There is a risk that in light of this dismal infrastructure situation, a large atmospheric event hitting Puerto Rico could wreak havoc because we are talking about a very vulnerable and fragile system at the moment,” Ramos added…
…Francisco Guerrero (a fictitious name to protect his identity), a Prepa field worker for 23 years, said it would take months for Prepa to bring up Puerto Rico’s power system should a hurricane like Harvey strike the island.
The lack of linemen and other technical personnel, as well as a lack of equipment—including replacement utility poles for powerlines and replacement parts—are the issues of greatest concern among public corporation employees, who say they risk their lives working with equipment in poor condition that provides them with little safety.
Guerrero said that today only 580 linemen remain out of the 1,300 who were part of the workforce in previous years—and that’s not counting the upcoming retirement of another 90 linemen. Likewise, he said there are only 300 electrical line testers to serve the entire island.
The source also said that much of Prepa’s equipment dates back to the 1950s—and the more “modern” equipment that is still functional dates from the 1990s; in other words, it’s from the past century.
“If a hurricane like this one [Harvey] hits us, the system is not going to come online, I’d say, in over six months. Right now, the warehouses don’t even have materials. I’m talking about utility poles and other stuff,” Guerrero explained.
“How can you say that you have equipment that dates back to the 1950s and you are not buying parts to repair them? When it’s time for maintenance work, you don’t have the part and you leave things as they are, but there is an entry in the log saying maintenance was done. And yes, it was done, but the most important thing was not done, which was to replace that part,” he added.
Although he did not assign the debacle to former Prepa Chief Restructuring Officer Lisa Donahue’s order to stop buying supplies as the main cause for the lack of materials, he is certain the order was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” (source)
If you are in the path of a hurricane and you are unable to evacuate, these tips may help. While it is too late to purchase supplies, some of the other ideas in this article may be helpful. Remember that surviving the storm is only a small part of the battle. It’s the aftermath that is the true challenge.
Everything could change in less than two weeks
Can you imagine living without electrical power for six months? This will completely change their way of life for many residents of Puerto Rico.
Yesterday, I wrote about people in Florida who are facing a few weeks without electricity, and suddenly, that doesn’t seem nearly as bad. At least on the mainland, there’s the possibility of leaving the area. On the mainland, you can get supplies. On an island, you’re totally isolated.
Think for a moment about how quickly this has gone down.
The country was already bankrupt, but now, with a one-two punch of natural disasters, there’s little way for them to recover. Unless a person was already well-prepared, there is not much chance of them stocking up now. In less than two weeks, everything could change for millions of people.
If you take no other lesson from all of this, consider how fast things can happen and stop procrastinating. Get prepared.
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Contributed by Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper.
Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor who lives in a small village in the Pacific Northwestern area of the United States. She is the author of The Pantry Primer: How to Build a One Year Food Supply in Three Months. On her website, The Organic Prepper, Daisy writes about healthy prepping, homesteading adventures, and the pursuit of liberty and food freedom. Daisy is a co-founder of the website Nutritional Anarchy, which focuses on resistance through food self-sufficiency. Daisy’s articles are widely republished throughout alternative media. You can follow her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and you can email her at [email protected]
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