Your Newswire has the article Truth Bomb Dropped Live On BBC By British Ambassador Goes Viral.

“Trump has just given the jihadis a thousand reasons to stage fake flag operations, seeing how successful and easy it is, with a gullible media, to provoke and lead the West into intemperate reactions.

Since the first false flag operation in 2013, I have been saying exactly what the former Ambassador has been saying about the message we send to the jihadis. What I did not know at the time and did not know until recently is that Hillary Clinton’s State Department facilitated the transfer to the jihadis of the chemical weapons that we found in Libya. What did she expect them to do with these materials, and what message was she sending to them? Apparently, they have received the message loud and clear.

Bad Ass Teachers blog has the article Why Should We Teach Critical Thinking? It Just Gets In The Way Of The Propaganda by Dr. Michael Flanagan. Sounded like a great tirade, but one think caught my eye.

Or referring to the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a “sneak attack” even though the Japanese had notified FDR and declared that there was a state of war between the U.S. and Japan.

Oh, my goodness, was the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! completely wrong that the Japanese didn’t warn our government until after the attack had already started?

Following the precepts of my <sarcasm>beloved</sarcasm> President Ronald Reagan, “trust, but verify”, I decided to check out the reference that showed that “the Japanese had notified FDR and declared that there was a state of war between the U.S. and Japan.”

The reference pointed to the Telegraph article Pearl Harbour memo shows US warned of Japanese attack. This looks promising. Certainly the headline seems to make the stated point by Michael Flanagan, but wait.

But Mr Shirley said: “Based on all my research, I believe that neither Roosevelt nor anybody in his government, the Navy or the War Department knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbour. There was no conspiracy.

“This memo is further evidence that they believed the Japanese were contemplating a military action of some sort, but they were kind of in denial because they didn’t think anybody would be as audacious to move an army thousands of miles across the Pacific, stop to refuel, then move on to Hawaii to make a strike like this.”

Is this the lesson in critical thinking we are supposed to learn? If you have learned anything from this post, you will follow my references to verify my telling of this. If you do, I think you will find what Michael Flanagan said was even more blatantly wrong than my excerpts would indicate.

Your News Wire has the article Robert Kennedy Jr: Syria Is Another Proxy Oil War. I couldn’t decide which excerpt to feature.

Excerpt 1

Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.

Excerpt 2

Even as America contemplates yet another violent Mid-East intervention, most Americans are unaware of the many ways that “blowback” from previous CIA blunders has helped craft the current crisis. The reverberations from decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across the Mid-East today in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the wrecked landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped obliterate.

Excerpt 3

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

Finally I decided to just keep reading thie article, and not worry about choosing an excerpt.  If you really want to get an understanding of what is going on, just read the whole article yourself.

RT has the report White House claims on Syria chemical attack ‘obviously false’ – MIT professor (VIDEO).

Speaking about the US “intelligence” report, here is what the MIT professor had to say.

The report “contains absolutely no evidence that this attack was the result of a munition being dropped from an aircraft,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Theodore Postol, who reviewed it and put together a 14-page assessment, which he provided to RT on Wednesday.

Here is the video that is attached to the article.

Being a graduate of MIT, I don’t feel the need to bow down to the ‘authority” of a “respected” university. I know who some of the largest benefactors of MIT are. For instance MIT and I totally disagree on the appropriateness of their accepting money from the Koch brothers.

The point of seeing the video and reading the report is to judge the soundness of the analysis. I don’t just assume it on “credentials”. At least it seems to show that there is still some academic freedom at MIT, despite the inroads of the Koch brothers.

The Young Turks has the article Bernie Sanders And “The Resistance” Slink Away On Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of a military action is when principled opposition to “regime change” would really count. And the plain fact is, Sanders does not oppose regime change in this instance, and he does not oppose on principle the US being a central actor in facilitating the ouster of Assad. That’s why FiveThirtyEight characterized him as “ambiguous” and noncommittal — because his comments since Thursday give credence to the logic underlying Trump’s attack.

In a private email thread that I have exchanged with the Draft Bernie For A People’s Party, I expressed my disappointment with Bernie as the reason that I would not be working for that effort anymore. They recognized my disappointment, and agreed that they were disappointed, too. They explained that we only need Bernie to help form the new party, but we don’t need him to run for any office. I knew that already, but I don’t want to be associated with an effort that appears to endorse Bernie Sanders anymore.

I had a feeling that the right word to apply to Bernie Sanders’ stance was pusillanimous. It seems like I was right.

Consortium News has the article Trump Should Rethink Syria Escalation.

Two dozen ex-U.S. intelligence officials urge President Trump to rethink his claims blaming the Syrian government for the chemical deaths in Idlib and to pull back from his dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia.

Went it comes to picking a side to believe, we naturally believe the Americans who want war over the Americans who want peace. Obviously the people who want peace have some nefarious ulterior motive. The people who want war to build a pipeline through Syria have nothing to gain.

Did I need to put sarcasm flags around the above? It wasn’t obvious enough for some people?

The Los Angeles Times has the story Putin calls for U.N. investigation of gas attack as G-7 nations reject new sanctions against Russia.

Instead of sanctions, the meeting’s final communique called for an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to determine who was responsible for the “war crime.” The U.S. and Britain say there is little doubt Assad’s forces are culpable.

Perhaps this is a sign that the wall of intimidation that the USA has built is starting to show cracks. It isn’t crumbling yet. We will have to see if the instinct to resort to reason can overcome the money of the oil interests. I wish there were little doubt that reason would win.

YouTube has the video Interview with British Journalist Tom Duggan.

Interview with British Journalist Tom Duggan in Damascus Kasaa at the French Hospital tells us about the chemical attacks accusations:

You can find links to this video all over the internet. Here is one from The International Reporter – SYRIA: Terrorist Attacks on Civilians in Damascus, Alleged Chemical Attacks in Idlib – Tom Duggan Reporting Live.

I was trying to find other instances of Tom Duggan’s reporting other than the above interview. One that I found was Project 1070 Under fire ASP report Aleppo Tom Duggan with Sinan Saeed. This has been enough to convince me that Tom Duggan might actually be who he claims to be. In this web of lies that reporting on Syria has become, it is hard to know if anybody can be trusted to tell you even a portion of the truth.

Naked Capitalism has the article, Trump’s Idea of Running Government Like a Business is Bad for Citizens, based on The Real News Network’s interview with Michael Hudson.

The idea of running it like a business is to screw labor. To pay labor as little as possible, and to get as much money for themselves — the businessmen — as possible. So, when Kushner says, “Let’s run government like a business,” what he really means is, let’s run government for business.

In general, a business’s purpose is to make a profit. Selling something is one way to do it. Speculating in commodities or other company’s stock is another. Whatever the business, the main purpose is to make money. In the old economy selling something was the where most profit in the economy came from. In today’s financialized economy, the most profit is made via financial transactions.

In the days of making things and selling things, it was not a zero sum game. A manufacturer would take raw materials and turn them into something more valuable to sell.

In today’s financialized economy it is a zero sum game. What ever one business gains, it comes from someone else’s loss. There is very little of value being created.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: Great Debt Unwind: Consumer Bankruptcies Jump, First since 2010; Commercial Bankruptcies Spike.

The irony is thick: In all major sentiment surveys, economic confidence has soared since November: consumers, owners of small businesses, and corporate executives are riding high on their own ebullience. But the economic reality is tough for businesses and consumers struggling under the hangover from eight years of ultra-low interest rates.

There is an election irony here too. It is hard to figure out though. On the one hand, voters voted based on their current feelings without knowing what was coming in the near future. On the other hand, the ebullience since November might be caused by the election results, nevertheless, the people don’t know what is coming.

To the question that was asked in one of the comments “Who gets hurt badly by zero interest rates? Retirees, that’s who.” I responded as follows:

I am not so sure retirees get hurt. By the way, I am one. I remember my father reveling in the 13% interest rates he was earning on CDs in the 1970s. I kept telling him that the income was looking great, but inflation was eating up his principle.

Now that I am earning around 3% or so in dividends, the income may be low, but my principle isn’t being eaten up by inflation. I haven’t done a calculation to answer the question exactly, but I think I am doing OK.