All posts tagged: Catte

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” at 175

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Catte This is an updated version of our 2017 article to mark the 175th anniversary of A Christmas Carol Today we think of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as a cosy piece of traditional seasonal fare, replete with steaming puds and roasted goose and comfortably easy lessons about not being stingy at Crimbo. But when Dickens wrote his novella in 1843 he was delivering a far more serious – and possibly freshly relevant – warning about the moral bankruptcy of a society that destroys human lives in pursuit of profit. It’s a fact not much considered, but Das Kapital and A Christmas Carol were both written in the same city, in the same decade – just five years apart. To those familiar only with the numerous adaptations of Dickens’ tale it might seem absurd to look for any point of connection between these two books. What can a feel-good tale of middle class redemption have to do with a study of the class struggle? But this question only begs to be asked because a lot …

Khashoggi: a danse macabre & the New RealityTM

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Catte Black The Khashoggi incident continues to roll out in screaming headlines. The “confession” that the journalist died in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is the latest twist, an indicator of the struggle to control narrative. The manufactured crisis is being used not solely to demonise NATO’s erstwhile best buds, the house of Saud, but also to further isolate and discredit Trump in nice time for the November elections. Trump is currently being bashed by the Dems for doing what they and everyone else was doing a few weeks ago – viz cozying up to the mass-murderers and selling them weapons. With shameless opportunism the same people who ignored the slaughter in Yemen as recently as a week ago are now appalled by it. Aware that the speed of the change might make them look like the sold-out moral blanks they actually are, Jonathan Freedland and Max Fisher (amongst others) are inventing vomit-inducing excuses for why they just hadn’t got round to noticing the dead children until the deep state told them to care. They …

“Chepiga” and “Boshirov” – what does Bellingcat actually tell us?

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The alleged “citizen journalist” website, Bellingcat has, of course, recently published the results of its latest piece of alleged research on the “real identity” of one of the men accused (so far without any evidence) of attempting to poison Sergey Skripal and his daughter back in March 2018.

We’ve talked about Bellingcat, and its supposed founder, Eliot Higgins, before on OffG. Bellingcat’s work has been revealed on countless occasions to be both incredibly amateurish and incredibly biased toward a certain extreme neocon/neoliberal agenda. Whether Higgins himself knows it or not, his outfit is almost certainly a front run by various intel agencies for the purpose of disseminating low grade, and often fake or corrupted, data that the agencies and associated governments do not want to be associated with directly.

UPDATED: Amazon UK caught actively blocking purchase of new 9/11 book?

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UPDATE Sep 26 2018: We’ve had quite a few responses from readers detailing their own experiences of trying to purchase 911 Unmasked. Thus far we have twenty-two who are still waiting for the book, one who tried to order a used copy and and was told the book had become unavailable (much like Raskolnivov below), and three who are saying it’s “temporarily unavailable.” We also have one successfully delivered purchase reported, which at least confirms Amazon has the book and can dispatch it. Hopefully the problem, whatever it is, will be resolved soon. Note – you can purchase 9/11 Unmasked direct from the publishers HERE We’re taking the liberty of publishing a post that first appeared on The Lifeboat News discussion board, posted by a user named Raskolnikov. Confronted with the ongoing and currently unexplained delays in shipping of the new book 9/11 Unmasked on Amazon worldwide, Raskolnikov allegedly spotted a copy that was available for purchase “used” through Amazon UK. However when he/she attempted to order the book the order was allegedly “cancelled by …

Consensus reality has outlived its evolutionary usefulness

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The nature of reality used to be a philosophical, metaphysical contemplation. But now it’s political.

Why did UK court say “limited evidence” Skripals have relatives while cousin interviewed in UK media?

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Why did the UK Home Office make no attempt to contact the Skripals’ relatives in Russia? Why does High Court judgment imply they may not even exist when they have appeared on UK TV? More bizarreness in this already very bizarre case

State-funded BBC lets Boris Johnson claim of Russia “stockpiling novichok” go unchallenged while UK govt’s Skripal “drama” continues to defy sense & reason

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The government’s rhetoric is currently so deranged, its conduct by turns so delusional and so furtive, while the basic facts of what happened to the Skripals remain so contradictory, it’s legitimate at this stage to wonder how real any of this “drama” actually is.

“We hates Putin…we hates him forever…”: the Guardian’s fresh ravings on Russia reflects West’s tipping point into new levels of dangerous insanity

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There is ample evidence that the Guardian is now, following the re-shaping of its financing and management, reinvented as the paper of record for the UK/US intel agencies, which in turn currently harbour some of the most extreme anti-Russian pro-war ideologues in the business. As such its editorial policy gives us an insight into exactly who is currently getting most leverage in policy-making. When they go relatively soft on Russia you know the voices of sanity are making headway. When they begin ranting about Putin you know the lunatics have grabbed the steering wheel again and we’re heading back towards the cliff edge. Currently the Guardian’s editorial style isn’t so much ranting as it is writhing on the ground screaming “Putin…curse him…and crush him…we hates him forever…”. Since the still unexplained and increasingly odd Skripal “poisoning” hit the headlines, there has been at least one hysterical anti-Russian piece published every day over at Graun HQ. And if we thought previous bias and inaccuracy was deplorable, the journalistic standard displayed in these recent examples has become …

Mark Galeotti’s response to Putin’s plea for reason: lies & penis jokes

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The Guardian produced two responses to Putin’s speech of March 1, in which he both unveiled far-reaching new Russia weapons systems and used this as a platform to (once again) plead for an end to Western warmongering. Both of them display both the intellectual/educational/ethical impoverishment of the authors (an impoverishment that is now systematic in corporate media), but also the completely delusional world they inhabit. Today we take a look at Mark Galeotti’s Putin’s new arms race is all about his need to be taken seriously. Mark Galeotti, who is apparently (believe it or not) “senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and head of its Centre for European Security” went full idiot in the Guardian yesterday with a short piece entitled Putin’s new arms race is all about his need to be taken seriously. The mere fact the title carries with it the implication that we don’t need to take the elected president of the largest country in the world with enough nuclear weapons to eradicate all life in earth “seriously” is …

Putin’s message couldn’t be clearer: The West needs to stop provoking a war we don’t want & which no one can win

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The western press has basically opted out of analysing this, so let’s do it for them. Why is Putin talking about the new generation of weapons? What does he hope to achieve?

Lewis Carroll’s White Queen would have a career in the media today

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“I can’t believe that!” said Alice. “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewi Carroll – Alice Through the Looking-Glass Lewis Carroll invented the White Queen as an absurdist emblem of a refusal to deal. But now that deluded lady would slot right in at the BBC, CNN, Guardian et al. In fact to live in the mainstream western culture of today we need to be able to believe a lot more than six impossible things before breakfast. We need to plug into an entire matrix of the unreal, never happened, never could happen and purely ridiculous. There is now almost no point of contact between the world described in daily mainstream news and social …

WATCH: Vladimir Pozner reminds parallel universe inhabitants of a few basic realities

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We are posting this mostly uninteresting pseudo-debate purely for what happens in the first few moment. Vladimir Pozner, journalist, tells the anchor man and two other guests some important realities and then leaves, refusing to participate further. The other two guests then proceed to ‘debate’ what are essentially invented issues in an invented reality. It’s a microcosm for the current struggle, which is becoming less about conflicting opinions and more about those prepared to deal with reality and those who refuse to do so. Full video can be seen here. And thanks to our Twitter friend Bryan MacDonald from whose feed we grabbed this Russians vote for their next president in March. Will Putin win his fourth term? In the Arena to debate: @albats, @vkaramurza and Vladimir Pozner. Full debate: https://t.co/JLMhD42fKS pic.twitter.com/bZrZDVpfMk — UpFront (@AJUpFront) February 24, 2018

The Guardian is right – Ghouta is “Syria’s Srebrenica”; another attempt to use humanitarian concern as a hook for military intervention

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Simon Tisdall’s latest lament that the West isn’t doing enough to save the lovely terrorists in Syria makes one unintentionally accurate claim. “Eastern Ghouta,” he says “is turning into Syria’s Srebrenica.” We agree with him on this, but not for the reasons he offers in his article.

“Yanks to the rescue”: Time’s not-so secret story of how Americans helped Yeltsin win 1996 presidential election

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Imagine Izvestia ran a headline in January 2018 titled “Rescuing Donald”, in which it proudly boasted that a group of crack Russian election-fixers had been sent over to Washington to make sure Trump beat Hillary. Does anyone imagine it would stop short of impeachment for Trump and maybe even hot war with Russia? Yet 22 years ago Time magazine ran just such a feature on how four Americans and an ex-pat Russian had managed the 1996 Russian presidential election to ensure a win for Boris Yeltsin. And apparently that was something to openly boast about

Guardian’s “Putin stealing election” shows new wave of Russia-hate being rolled out

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The sheer wanton deception, the outright, blunt and brutal propagandising is getting worse. It’s attaining new heights of spittle-flying hate. And in concert the war drums are beating again in Syria and Ukraine.

And we can be sure this is going to continue up until and for some while after the Russian election is done.

Supposing any of us live that long.

“Nunesburgers” & denial from the MSM while Politico blames Putin

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The “Nunes” Memo isn’t political dynamite but it could be the final blow to the whole ridiculous and virtually fact-free Russiagate narrative. It confirms the Steele dossier is a scam, and demonstrates the lies employed to get approval for spying on Trump’s team, it shows the vindictive bias in the establishment towards an elected official. But, of course, the mainstream media and various paid opinion-makers are not admitting that. In fact there’s a chorus of evasion and distraction and frantic meme-creation right now, from bots spamming talking points, and “#nunesburger” hashtags to avowedly serious opinion pieces claiming it’s all a “half-baked conspiracy theory”…blah…blah… There’s no shortage of examples of just how eerily lockstep the various strands of the campaign are, but here’s one of the “serious” ones to mull over. Politico’s The Nunes Memo & Putin’s Long Game. Here’s the text with our annotations: Ever since the U.S. intelligence community discovered the Russian operation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and aid President Donald Trump’s victory, some Republicans have been laboring to undermine investigations …

Russian election 2018: why Navalny with 2% support & a criminal conviction is the West’s ‘only’ opposition to Putin

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March 2018 will almost certainly see Vladimir Putin re-elected to the presidency of the Russian Federation. His overwhelming popularity will pretty much guarantee this outcome. But this is not the story being told in the Western media. Even though Vladimir Putin’s ascendancy in the polls has been verified by Western pollsters, and even though a few more level-headed Western outlets feel obliged to admit he would likely win a free and fair election with ease, the majority of the mainstream media have taken the launch of the presidential campaign as a cue to almost entirely bury even these basic facts, and instead to focus on claims that the ‘only real opposition‘ in Russia has been banned from challenging Putin due to flagrant political censorship. By ‘only real’ opposition they mean Alexei Anatolievich Navalny, lawyer, ‘activist’, occcasional chum of neo-nazis with an awkward tendency to compare racial minorities to cockroaches, and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, who is, ironically, currently serving a suspended sentence for fraud and embezzlement, and is, thereby, banned under the Russian Federation’s …

How anyone who questions the White Helmets narrative became victims of the Guardian propaganda machine

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the Guardian recently published an article by Olivia Solonclaiming criticism of the White Helmets in Syria was a disinformation program ‘propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government.’ The Guardian, in contravention of proper journalism, refuse a right of reply to people libelled in this article.

Did BBC team responsible for faked footage of Syrian chemical attack travel under terrorist protection?

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Most of our readers are now more than familiar with the bizarre events surrounding the BBC Panorama program Saving Syria’s Children. .But a further twist to the story seems to show that the crew who filmed this questionable footage were closely associating with members of a jihadist terrorist group affiliated to ISIS.