British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses Parliament and says, “It is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal.”

Let us imagine another scenario whose probability might be as high as the scenario painted by May.

With the oligarchs of the world itching to start a war with Russia, suppose they hatch a plot to arouse the common people to insist on a war.

In Salisbury, England there is former British-Russian spy Sergei Skripal. After having been sent to prison in Russia for his spying, he is living in England because he was swapped in a British spy trade with Russia.

It’s been five years since he came to England, and about 20 years since he spied for the British. His daughter has returned to Russia to live there peacefully with no reprisals from the Russian government. The British have no use for him anymore. He is just an expense that they have to pay to keep him happy.

The plotters enlist the help of the British spy agency MI6 to poison Sergei Skripal, but pin the blame on Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian Federation. They come up with a scheme where Skripal will be poisoned in his new home town, but there will be no signs of a poisoner anywhere near the scene of the crime.

The plot starts at the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down where the plotters get the nerve agent Novichoks, reputedly to have been developed by the Russians in the 1970s.

The plotters know that although Sergei Skripal is leading a comfortable life in Salisbury, he still misses Russia. They find that his daughter, Yulia, is planning to visit her father in Salisbury. They get a box of Russian chocolates and insert the nerve agent into the pieces of candy.

The plotters find a person in Russia who Yulia trusts, and get the box of chocolates to that person. He gives the box of chocloates to Yulia to share with her father as a nostalgic reminder of Russia.

Yulia brings the box of chocolates to England in her luggage. Yulia and Sergei go out for a night on the town. After a nice meal at a restaurant, Yulia pulls out the nice surprise she has for her father. They both eat a piece of Russian made chocolates. Need I say any more?

CNN has the article Former Soviet chemist shares details of the nerve agent Novichok.

One of the many outstanding questions about the Skripal incident is how Novichok could have been administered and what form it came in. “An attacker should be very well educated and a trained person,” Mirzayanov said, adding the nerve agent could be “produced before the attacks, a couple of minutes before. After that it is ready to use” and could come in a spray form.

According to the CNN article, the British police seem to be worried that the sites where the incident took place might still be contaminated. I take that to mean that the above mentioned method of application does not preclude the preparation of the nerve agent in Russia and being carried to England in something like a box of chocolates.

If the agent had been sprayed, I would have thought that there would have been witnesses. Also, I would think that a spray attack would bring about collateral damage. I would also think the attacker would have to be well and obviously protected against the collateral damage. If all this is so obvious, why didn’t CNN ask about other methods of attack.

I found this talk by Raj Vedam on YouTube Indian civilization: The Untold Story- A Talk by Raj Vedam.

What if the history of India that we learn in our textbooks tells only part of the story, and worse, tells the story incorrectly? What if there are significant periods missing in the narration on Indian history that is not being told today? In this talk he critiques present-day narratives, examines the evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines, and presents a unique, strong and compelling case for an untold prehistory of India.

There is a very good follow-on video Q&A: Indian Civilization-The Untold Story:- A Talk By Raj Vedam.

I don’t often get an opportunity to name drop, so please indulge me in the following remarks.

I worked with Raj Vedam when I was in Oregon from 1994 to 2006. We had some deep conversations about the world, but I still had no idea of this level of research. When I worked with him, as far as I knew he was doing research in mathematics and computer science. I had enough of my own expertise to understand maybe half of what he tried to explain to me. However, I saw the evidence in the software that he produced to realize that he really knew what he was talking about.

I was just watching the NBC Nightly News story Songwriter behind Toys R Us jingle, one of the catchiest of all time.

I was wondering why NBC chose to do this story instead of commenting on the Bloomberg story Toys ‘R’ Us Shutting U.S. Stores After Failed Turnaround. Listen to the mention of private equity owners Bain Capital and KKR not allowing needed investment in the stores.

I was wondering if NBC chose this softball story because they had any connection to Bain or KKR. A little Google search surfaced two articles immediately.

The New York Times has the story Weather Channel Is Sold to NBC and Equity Firms.

Though the parties did not disclose the price, the buyers, NBC and the private equity firms Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group, will pay just under $3.5 billion, people briefed on the matter said.

Business Wire has the story FanDuel Announces Series E Financing of $275 Million from KKR, Google Capital and Time Warner.

Existing investors Shamrock Capital, NBC Sports Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Pentech Ventures and Piton Capital also participated.

I just report. You decide.

Craig Murray, whistle blower extraordinaire, has the post Of A Type Developed By Liars.

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation.
.
.
.
Porton Down is still not certain it is the Russians who have apparently synthesised a “Novichok”. Hence “Of a type developed by Russia”. Note developed, not made, produced or manufactured.

It is very carefully worded propaganda. Of a type developed by liars.

I post stuff like this on my blog for one important reason. When I tell information like this to friends and relatives, I often get the response, “Where on earth do you get this stuff?” Rather than making the weak claim that I read it somewhere, I like to be able to point them to my blog to show them where I get this stuff.

They can still deny this because it only comes from a whistle blower with inside knowlegde, but for at least a few, it will plant the seed of doubt.

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is,
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The Real News Network has the interview Is Another World Possible? – Leo Panitch on RAI (4/4).

On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Leo Panitch says it’s a dilemma that the gradualism of European social-democracy and attempts at a more radical transformation have so far both failed; Panitch says a first step towards democratizing the economy is to make finance a public utility – with host Paul Jay

This is a great interview, not because it provides all the answers. It is great because it asks some very intriguing questions. Making finance a public utility is a suggestion that is a rather puny part of what makes this interview so good. This is the first discussion that I have heard in a long time that doesn’t just rehash the standard arguments about socialism and capitalism.

Craig Murray has posted the article The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam.

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the ‘Foliant’ programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

To further attest to Craig Murray’s bona fides, he wrote the following:

And finally – Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any “novichok” ever existed in Russia itself.

Read the Wikipedia article on Craig Murray for verification.

Evonomics has the article How to Construct a New Invisible Hand: A Conversation with Peter Barnes.

A middle path between laissez faire and centralized planning.

When I say I believe in ‘what worksism”, another way to say it is a middle path. Don’t interpret middle path too literally. If it works and it is not an amalgam of two existing paths, I’d take that, too.

PB: Yes. I don’t think markets, at least as currently constituted, can self-regulate for the common good, nor do I think governments can plan, much less administer, a vast dyna­mic economy. So we need something in the middle.

Russia Insider has the article Kremlin Publishes Full Megan Kelly Putin Interview – NBC Cut the Best Parts (Video + Transcript).

Putin is very confident in this interview. He knows that what he is saying makes Russia look very smart, and America look ridiculous.

I have no idea who or what Russia Insider is. I have no independent knowledge of the faithfulness of the translation. If NBC wants to contest this transcript, they are free to publish their own transcript. I do wonder why they did not publish their version of the complete interview. In this day and age of the internet, you would think that NBC wolud publish a transcript of the whole interview even though they couldn’t fit it all in in the air time they decided to give this interview. Large parts of the USA and world audience demand more of our news media these days.

Democracy Now has the story Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran to Nicaragua to Hawaii to Cuba

As special counsel Robert Mueller continues his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, we take a look back at Washington’s record of meddling in elections across the globe. By one count, the United States has interfered in more than 80 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000. And that doesn’t count U.S.-backed coups and invasions. We speak to former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”

The tail end of this interview is in the article As Ex-CIA Head Admits to U.S. Meddling in Elections, Is Outrage over Russian Interference Overblown? This second part has a startling revelation about an organization called the National Endowment for Democracy. As you might guess, this organization promotes the opposite of democracy,

Kinzer’s latest book is The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.

Politico has the story The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

An ambitious US task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

I am not sure what to make of this story. There is enough in the story to back up the headline, but their are also tidbits that undermine it. Some day, I might put aside enough time to read the whole story.

Here is another excerpt from the story.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

While reading this, I was thinking of another post I had yesterday – “Rise and Kill First” Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel’s Assassination Program. In that post, I had an excerpt that said the following:

Bombing and invading Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, with assassination an essential element of the campaign, produced out of the hitherto pacific Lebanese Shiite community an organization called Hezbollah that became the most effective guerrilla force Israel had ever faced.

These words are not a direct refutation of the excerpt from the first story, but it has me wondering if there is some conflict between the two understandings of Hezbollah.