Canadian Conservatism: Scheer Ineptitude, Max's Madness, Harper's Return and How to End the Income Tax

Andrew Scheer, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, is an amiable dude with little charisma and, seemingly, even less political sense.

Having won the leadership of the party by the narrowest margin over rival Maxime, Bernier, Scheer demonstrated the sheerest ineptitude by appointing Bernier, to the shadow cabinet not as the representative of one of the great offices of state: Finance, or External Affairs but, drum roll, the Innovation non-portfolio.

Mad Max, as Bernier has long been known, a man crazy enough to run a double marathon to catch the public eye, responded with "piss on that," or words to that effect, and launched his own People's Party of Canada (PPC). Meantime Stephen Harper is, to judge by his latest book, preparing for his own second coming.

For Scheer, the prospect of success appears now to be zilch. With the right of center vote split with the  PPC, Scheer will surely lose the 2019 Federal election to Trudeau's flaky feminists front for global governance, whereupon Sheer will be pushed aside and Stephen Harper will be called upon, once again, to unite the right.

To succeed, Harper will need to bring Bernier back within the Conservative Party fold, which means offering him the portfolio of his choice. The Department of External Affairs has profile, but no real power because Canada is a negligible power on the world stage. Bernier, therefore, will chose Finance.

 Bernier at the Department of Finance might be a fine thing. But only if Bernier has a clue what to do with the department that largely dictates the vitality of the Canadian economy and hence the fortune of every Canadian.

But Bernier, if anything like almost every politician, is bound to be too focused on either getting or enjoying power, to have energy to worry much about the public good. Indeed, of all Canadian politicians it is hard to think of more than a couple with much idea about where they were going. One was John A. Macdonald, whose idea was to unite the British North American colonies into one country that was not America. The other was Pierre Elliot Trudeau, whose idea was to unite all the countries of the world into one political system under a sexy dictator like Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, or someone named Trudeau.

Here, then, as a service to the nation, we offer a policy for our future Finance Minister, Mad Max Bernier.

First, the income tax. Don't mess about, Max, with a piddling increase in the basic personal exemption. Just abolish it. Yes, just abolish the income tax. Period.

But wait, you say, the income tax provides half of all Federal Government revenue? Yes, exactly. That's the reason to abolish it.

You think government doesn't waste half it's revenue? Listen, before I wised up, I worked for three governments. In every government office where I worked the goal was the same: maximize the budget and hire more people. The result? Managers and more managers, directors, and directors general, coordinators, program managers, middle managers, matrix managers, micro-managers, every one of them a more or less complete waste of time. in fact a dead weight soaking up resources destroying wealth and sucking the creative intelligence out of all who work for them.

But bureaucrats aren't stupid. Deny them the security of a government office and most will soon be on their feet again, even perhaps contributing to the sum total of human happiness.

But if you fear that Ottawa cannot manage with less than 300 billion a year, here's how to replace the income tax: with a beefed up GST. The European equivalent of the GST, the Value Added Tax, runs as high as 27% in Hungary, 25% in Norway and Sweden, 20% in Britain and 19% in Germany. So, why is Canada's equivalent only 5%?

The GST is a consumption tax that is rebated to those of low income, so there's no social argument against raising it from the current 5% to, say, 20%, a mid to low rate by European standards and only slightly higher than China's 17% and Russia's 18%. Raising the GST to 20% would generate an extra hundred billion, or two thirds the current income tax revenue. The shortfall could be covered by some useful down-sizing of government: for a start, most of the auditors at Revenue Canada.

As for the advantage of the GST over the income tax, just think of those young people saving to buy a home, or so many older folks rather desperately trying to save for their retirement. No income tax means a much greater opportunity to save, with the income from savings, whether in the credit union or invested in the stock market, all adding up tax free. Yay!

But what about rich people, some may ask? Why should they not pay a healthy chunk of income in tax? Yeah, well remember, the really rich pay essentially not tax anyhow. They're mostly invested for capital growth, which means no tax payable until the capital gains are realized, which may not be for years, and even then, in Canada, the rate of tax on capital gains is only half the rate on earned income.

Makes sense, eh! Income earned by the sweat of your brow taxed at the full rate, capital gains accumulated while you loll in a leather arm chair, or sunbathe on a Caribbean beach, taxed at only half the full rate, and even then only after accumulating untaxed for possibly decades, or generations.

But even with the GST set at a sensible rate, the Federal money gusher will be a bit below full flood, so how to fully satiate Ottawa's addiction. Easy really, a capital tax such as they have in that most democratic of all democratic countries, Switzerland. A one point five percent annual levy on all household wealth over $1.5 million would be about right. That would touch only the top ten percent, and would generate something like $60 billion a year. Ouch!

But how bad is that, really? Consider if you were comfortable with a household wealth of, say, ten million, then you'd pay $150,000 a year in capital tax. Is that a punitive rate? Well assuming the $10 million were invested, the income from those investments together with your director's or professional consulting fees might add up to, say, three-quarters of a million a year. In that case, the income tax you'd pay, under current law, would be around $300,000 a year. So switching from income tax to a capital tax, would cut your tax liability approximately in half.

Wow, this is like magic. We're slashing everyone's tax, rich or poor, yet government gets the same revenue.

But wait a minute, there's that hefty new rate of GST. Who will be paying that? Well not the poor, since they get the GST rebate. And it's not those trying to save for a home, for school, or for retirement. Then it must be the rich. Unless they live modestly and invest their wealth in farms and factories and rental housing, etc.. In that case they won't be greatly touched by the GST. Instead, their surplus income will be added to the invested capital of the country thereby enhancing the productivity of labor and thus raising wages, lowering housing costs and generally benefiting other people.

But if the rich spend for consumption, them we got 'em. A new mansion for ten million, that'll be $2 million five in GST, thank you very much. A world cruise for two, a coupla hundred thou for the bridge-deck state room, beer, light wines and general entertainment, and it'll be fifty G's in GST.

Ain't that beautiful. Rich people incentivized to invest for the public good, unlike that London banker's wife who, over several years, spent twenty million on wines and spirits, plus a coupla hundred million more on a private jet, jewelry, etc., etc.

Obviously there's much more we might propose. A sweatshop import tax, for instance, or what we might more tactfully call the Federal Wage Arbitrage Tax, to give our poor Montreal garment-industry workers some slack in the competition with those even poorer Bangladeshis working for pennies an hour in collapsible factories for Canada's billionaire Weston family to make fashionable garments modeled by Justin Trudeau for sale in Canada.

But we can't solve all the problems of the day in just one blog post.

American Abortion Law: Roe Lied, Millions of the Unborn Died

John Ward Bids Farewell to the Twattering Class

John Ward writes: ... this morning, I redesigned my Twitter profile masthead as follows:

This, Ward adds,

was clearly too much for the pinched goblins, and so I have been locked out and will not be reinstated until I’ve sent a State ID, my inside leg measurement, and clearly stated the political affiliation of the two squirrels who share Sloggers’ Roost with me. Obviously, I won’t be doing any of that.

Yes, the billionaire tech crowd have achieved in a decade or so the arrogance of the French aristocracy in the immediate run-up to their tumbrell-ride to le guillotine.

I wonder how the lives of the Lords of Silicon Valley will end. Some, apparently, hope to stuff their brains into a computer and thus live for ever. Can't happen too soon, in my opinion. Good-bye Zucks, Bezos, Brin, Page and Musk and good luck.

Haaretz: Most Israelis Oppose Accepting Refugees

Haaretz: September 20, 2018: WASHINGTON – A clear majority of Israelis oppose accepting refugees from war-torn countries into Israel, according to a new poll released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Institute. The poll included respondents from 18 different countries, and among the Israelis surveyed by it, 57 percent were against accepting refugees – more than in any other country included in the survey.

Nothing unreasonable about Israelis opposing an influx of refugees. Man is a territorial animal. Each nation has a territorial base. If Israelis, Brits, French or Germans move over to make way for people of other nationalities, their own nation is diminished.

When one is talking of a few thousand fleeing for their lives, few are opposed to their own country taking in refugees. But when nations that have a below replacement fertility rate, as is true of all the European nations, are expected (i.e., compelled by their own leadership) to take in "refugees" by the million, people naturally become resistant.

Moreover, when the "refugees" aggressively assert the supremacy of their own culture over that of the natives of the land where they have sought haven, it becomes obvious that the natives have been betrayed by a treasonous, globalist and anti-democratic leadership, and are set for destruction as a racial and cultural entity.

So Israelis are perfectly rational and morally justified in resisting the influx of "refugees" most of whom are likely, in any case, to be economic migrants not victims of war. To do otherwise would be to place their own national survival in jeopardy.

One just wishes that Jews would remember that the same right of refusal applies to other countries. They would then, perhaps, not be so loud in their seemingly endless criticism of the countries such as Canada, the US, Britain that failed to offer safe haven to six million European Jews prior to, and during, WW2.

Howard Kunstler: Christine Blasey Ford Is a Big Fat Liar

“I believe her!”

Really? Why should anyone believe her?

Senator Collins of Maine said she believed that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford experienced something traumatic, just not at the hands of Mr. Kavanaugh. I believe Senator Collins said that to placate the #Metoo mob, not because she actually believed it. I believe Christine Blasey Ford was lying, through and through ...

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Google: Time to End Free Speech

Breitbart News October 9. 2018: An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.

Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a “blip” in history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filter into its products.

But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other tech platforms now “control the majority of online conversations” and have undertaken a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

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New York Post: Break up Amazon before it does any more damage to America

By Maureen Callahan:

New York Post October 9, 2018: When Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would be raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour last week, the reception was rapturous. The Seattle Times called it “the just thing.” “Good for them,” said President Trump’s chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow. “I’m in favor of higher wages.” Bloomberg called it proof that “an even higher minimum wage is probably safe for big, productive cities.” Senator Bernie Sanders, a chief Bezos antagonist, called it “enormously important.” “Unequivocally good news,” said The Washington Post.

The latter is owned by Jeff Bezos, an all-too-easily forgotten point these days. Because for all the questions to follow this announcement — Why now? What is Amazon eliminating to pay for this? How much praise does Bezos, recently crowned the World’s Richest Man, deserve while paying, as of 2017, a median Amazon income of $28,446? — we are not asking the real one.

When did we become The United States of Amazon?

Author, entrepreneur and NYU business professor Scott Galloway has emerged as one of Amazon’s fiercest critics. At last month’s Recode Code Commerce, Galloway gave a 45-minute talkon the future of retail that savaged Amazon and warned of the threats the company poses not just economically but philosophically and morally.

“I believe our society is effectively going through this very uncomfortable transition that is bad for our youth, bad for America and bad for the planet where we no longer worship at the altar of character and kindness,” he said. “We worship at the altar of innovators and billionaires.”

Galloway calls this “a perversion” that has occurred without our true realization. And Amazon, he says, is more responsible than any other tech giant.

In his best-selling book “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google,” Galloway cites some arresting statistics: Far fewer U.S. households have a gun than Amazon Prime, by 30 to 64 percent. More Americans have Prime than voted in 2016 (55 percent), or earn $50,000 or more a year (55 percent), or go to church (51 percent). He calls Amazon’s ability to woo Prime subscribers at a $119 yearly cost the equivalent of “entering into a monogamous relationship” with its consumers, who as of 2016 spent, on average, $193 per month. (Non-Prime members average $138 per month.)

From 2006 to 2016 Amazon’s stock price growth surged by 1,910 percent, destroying Sears, J.C. Penney, Kmart, Best Buy, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Target and Walmart.

Perhaps most importantly: Since the Great Recession, Amazon has paid just $1.4 billion in corporate taxes compared to Walmart’s $64 billion.

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Wall St. Journal to Conservatives: We Are All Deplorables Now

Judge Kavanaugh would have been on any Republican’s short list for the Supreme Court. ...

Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh is a credit to the process he established to win the election and govern with conservative support. He sought the help of legal elites on the right, led by the Federalist Society, who compiled an impressive list of potential nominees. This isn’t a rogue judicial operation to choose presidential cronies. It is the gold standard for legal talent that believes in the original meaning of the Constitution. It’s hard to see how any GOP President would have done better, and others have done much worse.

Yet this is precisely why Democrats and the left have set out to destroy Judge Kavanaugh—not in legal philosophy or competence, which they knew was a political loser, but as a human being, a spouse and father. They need to destroy him personally with accusations but no corroboration, as they tried with Clarence Thomas, so they can deny the open Supreme Court seat to a judicial conservative. ...

Republicans are well aware of Mr. Trump’s excesses and falsehoods. But they have also come to understand that the resistance to him isn’t rooted in principle or some august call to superior character. They know Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite her history of deceit. Voters know this is about the left’s will to power by any means necessary.

Republicans across America can see, and certainly their Senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.

Bezos' Decision To Raise Wages Is Largely A Machiavellian Distraction

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

For the many low wage Amazon workers - both full time and temporary - set to receive a raise thanks to the just announced boost in minimum pay to $15/hour, the news is certainly a big plus. It should also be noted that had Amazon not been subject to intense scrutiny and criticism from the likes of Bernie Sanders and others, Jeff Bezos never would have responded with such an aggressive move. That said, if you think a little beyond the surface level about why he’s doing this now and what his real motives are, it becomes clear nobody should take this move at face value.

Stacy Mitchell, co-director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, is someone whose work on Amazon I’ve cited on various occasions. She tweeted out an important thread this morning that helps you take a step back and not miss the forest for the trees.

1. It’s nice to see Amazon workers get a raise today, and not just the regular hires, but the temps too.  What led to this?  Five things...

• 2. First, it’s a very tight labor market and Amazon needs a bunch of people in its warehouses right now for the 4th quarter.
• 3. Second, advocacy by @SenSanders & @RoKhanna, & groups like @jwjnational & @ilsr, compelled Amazon to act. Amazon almost never responds to critics. But Sanders and Khanna unnerved Amazon deeply, as I pointed out in an earlier thread:
• 4. Third, Amazon is run by the world’s richest man  (net worth = $160 billion) and his recent attempt to make this unconscionable disparity seem okay with a $2B charity pledge just didn’t cut it. Bezos is the face of inequality. That’s still true after today.
• 5. Fourth, Amazon has another way to cut labor costs: automation. It needs fewer workers today to sell & ship $100M worth of stuff than it did just a few years ago. That trend is only accelerating. Some e-commerce warehouses in China have a staff of 4 people. They fix the robots.
• 6. Finally, and this is the big reason: Amazon fears an antitrust case to break it up. They’re right to be nervous. In the last week: @SenWarren called for it. The EU's @vestager opened an antitrust probe. A former Amazon exec said competition depended on splitting Amazon in two.

7. To keep its grip, Amazon is going to try to buy off constituencies, one by one.

8. Workers getting a raise is a good thing. But what we need is so much bigger. No company should have this much power. Inevitably, it means that Amazon gets to set the rules, economically & politically. And those rules will always privilege Amazon's interest over the public’s.

Bezos is naturally attempting to portray this as a come to Jesus moment, but you shouldn’t buy his spin for a second. Based on what we know of his business practices, the guy’s built the behemoth that is Amazon by operating in a Machiavellian fashion (see my recent post: Amazon is Far More Dangerous and Powerful Than You Want to Admit).

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Related:

Washington Examiner: Amazon's corrupt minimum wage ploy

Daily Caller: AMAZON RAISES WAGES BUT CUTS OTHER MAJOR PERKS FOR MANY HOURLY EMPLOYEES

Brett Kavanagh and the Death of Vincent Foster

My Sinister Battle with Brett Kavanaugh 

by Ambrose Evans-Prichard

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph. He has covered world politics and economics for 30 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels.

3 OCTOBER 2018 • 11:15 AM BST

Illustration by Kerry Squires

Twenty-three years ago I crossed swords with a younger Brett Kavanaugh in one of the weirdest and most disturbing episodes of my career as a journalist.

What happened leaves me in no doubt that he lacks judicial character and is unfit to serve on the US Supreme Court for the next thirty years or more, whatever his political ideology.

He was not a teenager. It related to his duties in the mid-1990s as Assistant Independent Council for the Starr investigation, then probing Bill and Hillary Clinton in the most sensitive case in the country.

Brett Kavanaugh sits behind Kenneth Starr during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the possible impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998 Credit: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

To my surprise, the incident has suddenly become a second front in his nomination saga on Capitol Hill. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has accused him of violating secrecy laws by revealing the details of a federal grand jury.

“Disclosing grand jury information is against the law,” she told Politico. She said it also showed he had misled the Senate by assuring categorically that he had never leaked grand jury material to journalists.

Sen Feinstein released a ‘smoking gun’ document from the archive files of the Starr investigation. It shows Mr Kavanaugh’s efforts to suppress a news storyabout his wild cross-examination of a witness, including a wayward discussion of “genitalia” that particularly worried him.

This piqued my interest since I am named in the document and the witness – Patrick Knowlton – was in a sense ‘my witness’.

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Bill Still: Christine Blasey Ford, a CIA Asset?

Doctor (of educational psychology), Christine Ford apparently heads up the CIA Undergraduate Internship program at Stanford University. Her father is said to have been a CIA banker.

John Nolte: Fox Fake News: Christine Blasey Ford Is ‘Credible’

GP: Christine Ford Published 2008 Article on Self-Hypnosis Used to Retrieve and “Create Artificial Situations”

Martin Armstrong: Kavanaugh is the Tipping Point for Decline & Fall of the United States

Information Liberation: Sex Crimes Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell Highlights Massive Inconsistencies In Christine Ford's Testimony

No More Mr. White Guy: Ann Coulter

Reflections on the Senate Judicial Committee hearing on Judge Kavanaugh's nomination to the US Supreme Court

Craig Murray Nails Theresa May's Latest Lies on the Skripal WMD Poisonings

For all the lies, bunk and bullshit with which it is bestrewn, the alt media still provide vastly better information, if you know where to look, than the pathetic lying and fortunately dying, mainstream media. As proof, one needs only to read Ambassador Craig Murray's latest piece on the Skripal Poisonings story. In it, Murray entirely destroys the narrative as announced by Britain's Prime Misformer, Theresa May, and repeated with variations and elaborations by the entire UK and foreign corporate media, and the Western government propaganda agencies the BBC, the Gruniard, the CBC, VOA, etc.

What Murray demonstrates is that the British Government's "proof" of guilt of the Russians, Petrov and Boshirov, in the Skripal poisonings as announced by Theresa may in the House of Commons,  is a farrago of nonsense, and that while it remains unknown, the real story of the poisonings (if indeed the Skripals were indeed poisoned, a fact for which, as I have argued, there is reason to doubt) has to be something entirely different from May's bollocks delivered to Parliament. In fact, May's Parliamentary statements about the Skripal poisonings are so obviously mendacious that a competent opposition would have by now forced the Prime Minister to resign for lying to Parliament.

Here, I will not endeavor to summarize Murray's article which has the clarity and brevity characteristic of Murray's blog posts. Rather, anyone remotely interested in the mechanics of the anti-Russian propaganda op. involving the Russian traitor, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, should read Murray's article, The Incredible Case of Boshirov and Petrov’s Visas, for themselves.

Related: 

Southfront.org: ANOTHER VERSION ATTEMPTING TO EXPLAIN TRIP OF ‘GRU AGENTS’ PETROV AND BOSHIROV TO SALISBURY

A Tax Reform Plan for the People's Party of Canada

Maxime Bernier has split with the Conservative Party of Canada on the ground that they are morally corrupt, a mundane fact, applicable almost certainly to every political party in contention for power in the Western world. Still, by creating his own party, the People's Party of Canada, Bernier has an opportunity to add some fresh, and indeed important, ideas to the toxic stew of bad or idiotic policies that constitute the bedrock of mainstream politics in Canada. Tax policy is among the many areas of Canadian national policy in need of re-imagining, and the issue of the carbon tax provides an opportunity to undertake major tax reform.

Economists agree that carbon emissions reductions can be achieved most efficiently by means of a carbon tax. The carbon tax is unpopular, however, because it is seen as just one more government impost upon an already overtaxed populace.  Bernier can, therefore, seize the initiative by committing to an overall revenue-neutral carbon tax achieved by raising the basic personal exemption to Federal income tax from $11,365 to $33,300, the latter amount being the median income from employment in Canada. Thus, at a stroke, the PPC would be committed to relieving 50% of the Canadian workforce of all Federal income tax.

In addition, the PPC should commit to paying every low-income worker an amount equal to 15% (the base Federal tax rate) of the difference between their earned annual income and $33,000. As a result of these measures every one of Canada's 18 million workers, whether they are of high or low income, would receive a benefit, either in cash or reduced Federal income tax, amounting to approximately $3,000.

Some will ask why the poor should pay no tax when they are the beneficiaries of many publicly funded services. But the answer to that is obvious: first, the poor do the shitty jobs while the rich reap the benefit of the labor of the poor, so why would one not expect those who are better off to pay most if not all of the taxes; second, even if they pay no Federal income tax, the poor will still pay a large proportion of their income in tax, including gas tax, provincial income and sales taxes, liquor tax, tobacco tax, and all the taxes imposed across the supply chain that must be reflected in the price of everything that a person buys.

As for the cost to the Federal treasury, it would be quite small. The tax reduction on the wages of low income earners would cost the Treasury approximately $27 billion a year, which would be more than covered by the anticipated carbon tax revenue of $35 billion a year. In addition there would be the cost of the tax reduction on the wages of high income earners, another $27 billion a year, leaving a deficit of $19 billion after factoring in the carbon tax revenue. That deficit could be covered, ideally, by cuts in Federal Government expenditure, or alternatively by a 2% increase in the GST, a consumption tax that is already rebated to those of low income.

As for the overall effect of the carbon tax on the Canadian economy, the potential downside is to expose home industry to unfair carbon-tax-free competition from abroad. That however can be avoided by imposing a countervailing duty on all goods from countries without a carbon tax, a trade barrier that would provide Canadian industry significant protection against the intense competition from the sweat-shop economies of the developing world. Also on the plus side, the cut to personal income tax would increase consumer spending and hence stimulate the economy.

Trudeau Government are Bloody Idiots on NAFTA

The title of this post is not mine but the title given to the above video by its creators Rebel Media when posting it on U-Tube, and I am not sure that that title truly reflects what is going on between Canada and the US on NAFTA.

Given the way negotiations are going, Canada may well fail to get a renewal of NAFTA with the United States. That, however, may be not because of the apparent stupidity of Canada's approach to the negotiations which, as the video shows, involves multiple insults directed at President Trump.

Rather, what we may be seeing is a deliberate trashing by Canada's of its chances of a NAFTA deal, the objective being to generate in Canada an anti-US and, in particular, an anti-Trump sentiment that would provide the basis for Trudeau's 2019 Canadian Federal Election campaign.

Then Trudeau, who has proved a weak prime minister, with a silly agenda, can pose as a strong man standing up to the seeming bully and blackguard Trump, rather than against the very moderate and reasonable seeming Andrew Scheer of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Ambassador Craig Murray Probes the Alibi of Petrov and Bashirov, the Alleged (by Theresa May) Skripal/Novichok Poisoners

On reading the interview given by the Russians, Petrov and Bashirov, alleged by the British Government to have poisoned the Russian traitor, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, by painting the, as-developed-in-Russia, WMD, Novichok (allegedly seven times deadlier than Britain's own deadly nerve agent, VX), on the front door-knob of Sergei Skripal's house, I was far from convinced of the innocence of their weekend visit to Britain.

To be unconvinced of their innocence, is not of course, to be convinced of their guilt, but it does mean remaining open to the possibility that their visit at the time of the Skripal nerve agent poisonings was not coincidental (or perhaps we should say alleged Skripal nerve agent poisonings, since the resident in Emergency Medicine at the Salisbury hospital to which the Skripals were taken for treatment denied that anyone had been admitted to the hospital with symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning).

Likewise, Ambassador Craig Murray was, initially, far from convinced by their account of the innocence of Petrov and Bashirov. On reflection, however, he concluded, for reasons set forth in this blog post, that the story offered by the Russians, is in fact, entirely credible, and, in this, I think Murray's arguments are compelling.

The Russians, Murray concludes, could very well have been, as they claim, on a weekend break to see the sights in and around Salisbury, including the city's superb Norman cathedral, and the nearby ancient settlement of Old Sarum, but were prevented from making the two-mile expedition from Salisbury to Old Sarum by the unseasonable snowfall that shut-down public transport that weekend.

Thus, the story of the Skripal poisonings remains what it was at the outset: an allegation against Russia by the British Government unsupported by any convincing evidence made known to the public. Indeed, since the now reportedly recovered victims of the crime have been kept entirely from public view with the exception of one video-taped statement by Yulia Skripal, a statement that, as I have previously explained, could very well be entirely fake, it is open to question whether any crime against the Skripals actually occurred.

More certainly, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess of Amesbury, England were poisoned, with deadly effect in the case of Dawn Sturgess, by what the police report to be Novichok contained in a perfume spray bottle that Charlie Rowley scavenged from a litter bin in Salisbury. But how that connects with Russia, if indeed it does connect with Russia, has never been explained by British authorities.

It seems then, that the case against Russia consists in the following facts:

(1) The alleged victims of an (alleged) attack with the nerve agent, Novichok, were Russian.

(2) One of the alleged victims was a Russian spy turned traitor who, however, had been pardoned by the Russian state and released from Russian gaol some years ago under an international spy swap.

(3) The nerve agent by which the Russian victims were allegedly poisoned was developed in Uzbekistan, then a member of the Soviet Union, and is thus Russia-connected. The connection is essentially meaningless, however, since Novichok can be readily synthesized by any competent organic chemist, and has been synthesized in various countries, including, probably, the U.K.

(4) The Russians, Petrov and Bashirov, happened to be on a weekend visit to Salisbury, as tourists so they say with apparent plausibility (along with probably a number of other Russians), the weekend that the Skripals were poisoned.

(5) In May, two months after the Skripal poisonings (or rather we should say alleged poisonings), the police were reported, this month, (see the George Galloway video included in my earlier blog post, after 9 min and 12 seconds) to have investigated the London hotel room where Petrov and Bashirov apparently shared a bed on the night of March 3rd. There, the police report finding a trace of Novichok, yet despite the deadliness of this nerve agent, the police neither warned the hotel's proprietor of what they had found, nor instigated a chemical WMD clean-up at the hotel, and thus did nothing whatever to save from harm the many people who, since March 4th, have presumably slept in that Novichok-contaminated room.

The implication seems clear, the alleged Novichok contamination of the room of the "flea-pit" (George Galloway's description of the hotel) where the Russians stayed must have been so slight as to be (a) totally harmless, and (b) and to make its supposed identification questionable. Indeed, if Galloway's description of the hotel as a "flea-pit" is appropriate, it could well be that the organo-phosphorus compound found in the hotel room and claimed by the police to be Novichok was, in fact, a regular organo-phosphorus pesticide that is likely used on a regular basis in cheap London hotels catering to poorer people from around the world, many of them likely carrying with them fleas, bed bugs, and lice.

If there is other relevant evidence against Russia, the British Government has not revealed it, which suggests that the case against Russia has been fabricated as a justification for intensified Western economic sanctions against Russia, which provides both a military and, with its revival of Russian ethnic nationalism and Christianity, a cultural threat to the elites that rule the Western nations and seek to force the submission of the European peoples to global governance through the promotion of multi-culturalism and  mass replacement immigration.

Petrov and Bashirev might perhaps seek to reverse their present ill-fortune by suing Theresa May for defamation of character.

Postscript:
In response to the RT interview with the Petrov and Bashirov, Theresa May has stated through a spokesperson that:

[T]he suspects' comments [i.e., the comments of Petrov and Bashirov] were "an insult" and "deeply offensive."

Exactly how they were an insult, and deeply offensive, except inasmuch as that, if true, they implied that Theresa May is a big fat liar, was not explained by the Prime Minister's Spokesperson who went on to say:

"The lies and blatant fabrications in this interview given to a Russian state-sponsored TV station are an insult to the public's intelligence" and "More importantly they are deeply offensive to the victims and loved ones of this horrific attack," but again, no explanation is given as to how the claim of innocence when charged with murder can be considered offensive.

Furthermore, the prime minister's spokesperson told reporters that police had set out "very clearly" the evidence against the two suspects although, oddly enough, the public seems to have no idea what that evidence is, other than the claimed trace of Novichok in the London hotel room where Petrov and Bashirov are said to have stayed the night, a trace so insignificant that the police forgot to tell the hotel owner about it or do anything about a cleanup of the contaminated room. Indeed a trace so slight that the evidence that it actually was Novichok has never been made public.

PostPostscript:
And while we are dealing with unsubstantiated claims, here's what seems like a hypothesis worthy of consideration that was offered by CalDre at Craig Murray's blog:

... Sergei was a triple agent and these two gents were his handlers, probably sent to pick up something. UK discovered he was a triple agent, and the planned drop, and “attacked” the Skripals, blaming his handlers, to kill two birds with one stone.

Related:
Daily Mail: EXCLUSIVE: Owner of hotel where novichok spies stayed for two nights was only told by police about his killer guests YESTERDAY - and he still doesn't know which room they were in

Theresa May's New Statement on Russia's Nerve Agent Attack in England's Green and Pleasant Land Drives Intelligence Irregulars to Renewed Effort on the Novichok File

Theresa May's latest Parliamentary statement concerning the depraved, hooliganist, gangsterism of Vlad the Poisoner Putin has given Internet sleuths and secret agents a second wind in their investigation of the alleged, bungled, Russian-state-authorized WMD attack on the now missing Russian traitor, Segei Skripal, in carried out in the heart of England's normally peaceful cathedral town of Salisbury.  

Recognizing the fertility of imagination and intellectual heft of many among this groups of investigators, not to mention the literally thousands of individuals who have commented on their work, suffice it here to provide links to the state of the investigation as viewed by among the best and brightest of the intelligence irregulars.

Related:
George Galloway:


RT: RT editor-in-chief’s exclusive interview with Skripal case suspects Petrov & Boshirov (TRANSCRIPT) 
Sky News: Salisbury novichok poisoning: Russian 'spies' filmed window shopping after attack
Daily Caller: RUSSIANS ACCUSED OF POISONING EX-SPY IN BRITAIN CLAIM THEY WERE JUST TOURISTS
CBC: Putin says Russia identified suspects in Novichok poisoning
Strategic Culture Foundation: Britain Should Be in the Dock Over Skripal Saga, Not Russia
Rob Slane: Petrov, Boshirov and the Missing 42 Minutes
Craig Murray: Skripals – The Mystery Deepens

Digital Journal: U.K. authorities name suspects in the Skripal poisoning case
George Galloway: Salisbury is far from a Novichok Slam-Dunk
Moon of Alabama: The Strange Timestamp In The New Novichok 'Evidence' - UPDATED

John Helmer: The new allegations in the Skripal case, and the standard of proof

Rob Slane: Open thread relating to the new OPCW summary report into the “Amesbury poisonings”
CanSpeccy: The Novichok File
Russia Insider: British Police Find Putin's Passport at Scene of Salisbury Poison Attack

Why President Trump Will Never Reopen the 9/11 Investigation

Thierry Meyssan, a French journalist and political activist, founder of the Voltaire Network and author or the book: 9/11 The Big Lie, has issued an open letter to President Trump demanding that he reopen the 9/11 investigation. He writes:

Mister President, The crimes of 11 September 2001 have never been judged in your country. I am writing to you as a French citizen, the first person to denounce the inconsistencies of the official version and to open the world to the debate and the search for the real perpetrators. In a criminal court, as the jury, we have to determine whether the suspect presented to us is guilty or not, and eventually, to decide what punishment he should receive. When we suffered the events of 9/11, the Bush Junior administration told us that the guilty party was Al-Qaïda, and the punishment they should receive was the overthrow of those who had helped them – the Afghan Taliban, then the Iraqi régime of Saddam Hussein. However, there is a weight of evidence which attests to the impossibility of this thesis. If we were members of a jury, we would have to declare objectively that the Taliban and the régime of Saddam Hussein were innocent of this crime. Of course, this alone would not enable us to name the real culprits, and we would thus be frustrated. But we could not conceive of condemning parties innocent of such a crime simply because we have not known how, or not been able, to find the guilty parties. We all understood that certain senior personalities were lying when the Secretary of State for Justice and Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, revealed the names of the 19 presumed hijackers, because we already had in front of us the lists disclosed by the airline companies of all of the passengers embarked - lists on which none of the suspects were mentioned. Read more

There is, however, not the slightest possibility that Trump will do anything to uncover the truth about 9/11 for the simple reason that Trump was a party to covering up the truth in the first place. Interviewed by a German TV reporter two days after 9/11, Trump clearly articulated the official cover story:

Why did the buildings come down? It was the tremendous power, the tremendous heat... the tremendous amounts of fuel that was dumped on the building. Sixteen hundred degrees temperature. I guess that's probably more than anything could take, no matter what. What could have prevented such a disaster? People were willing to die and willing to become Kami Kazis. There's very little you can do about it.* How must the US respond?  They have to find out who did it and they have to go after those people.

So there you have it. The full official narrative.

(1) Kami Kazis, you can't stop 'em.

(2) Jet fuel fires, bound to bring the buildings down, even though they were designed to withstand precisely that, an airliner strike and jet fuel fire.

(3) We gotta go to war with whoever they say did it. 

Trump is, was, and for decades past has been as much a creature of the so-called deep state as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Bushes. He`s just with a different faction, a faction that has split with the globalist Clinton faction. Trump, a military academy graduate, is the public face of a faction based in the military. It is because of his military backing that Trump has not been assassinated. If the Clinton camp were to murder Trump, the Trump faction would execute a military counter-coup and dispose of their opponents in the traditional military fashion with firing squads, or indefinite incarceration.

The military have put their man Trump in power because they know they cannot defeat or contain rival powers without rebuilding the industrial base upon which the ability to deliver overwhelming military force anywhere any time depends. That`s what Making America Great Again is about: it is about rebuilding both industrial capacity and public morale as the necessary foundations of continued global military domination.
———
* Especially when the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, acting for the President who on a childrens' story book reading trip, had ordered a NORAD stand down. 

Google: The Crooked Search Engine

See for yourself:

DuckDuckGo: Image search for "Idiot"

Bing: Image search for "Idiot"

Google: Image search for "Idiot"

LOL.

Related:

Breitbart: Nolte: Google Tape Proves You Cannot Trust CNN, NYT, or Even Fox News

CanSpeccy: How the Shit CEO of Google, the Dirty Search Engine Company, Dicked Himself

Almost needless to say, a search for "CanSpeccy +James Damore" in Duck Duck Go brings up the above CanSpeccy article on the second line of the first page. The same search in Google yields a total two pages of results none of which include the linked article. So if you like wearing blinkers, go on using Google, as directed by a shit CEO.

For myself, I guess that means moving back to WordPress. 

Postscript: We how have moved. See:

CanSpeccy.Wordpress.com: Why Maxime Bernier Matters to Canadians and Canadian Democracy

Ambassador Craig Murray Examines the British Deep State's Connection with the Skripal Nerve Agent Poisonings

Craig Murray reminds me of Rex Stout's fat detective, Nero Wolf: he is very lazy and very bright, but when he exerts himself one is rewarded by a display of genuine intellectual heft. Murray's recent blog post, which focuses on the poisoning of Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal (or was he a triple that the Brits had no further use for?) and his Daughter, Yulia, signals a surge of activity that should be worth watching.

Murray begins his post by reference to a Freedom of Information request submitted to the BBC, the British state's official propaganda outlet:

On 8 July 2018 a lady named Kirsty Eccles asked what, in its enormous ramifications, historians may one day see as the most important Freedom of Information request ever made. The rest of this post requires extremely close and careful reading, and some thought, for you to understand that claim. Dear British Broadcasting Corporation, 1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer. 2: When did the BBC know this? 3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal. Yours faithfully, Kirsty Eccles The ramifications of this little request ... cut right to the heart of the ramping up of the new Cold War, of the BBC’s propaganda collusion with the security services to that end, and to the concoction of fraudulent evidence in the Steele “dirty dossier”.

A challenge, that is, to the British Government's claim to democratic legitimacy and one that Murray himself has pursued with an unanswered request for information from BBC news editor, Mark Urban.

What next, I have no idea, but Murray ends his piece with the words of the Scottish/American, naval commander, John Paul Jones:

“We have not yet begun to fight.”

And for those unfamiliar with the words of John Paul Jones, here's an outline of the kind of fight Murray is talking about:

At the outbreak of hostilities with the British in 1776, Captain John Paul Jones, in command of the Providence, wrecked the enemy fishing industry in Nova Scotia and captured sixteen prize British vessels. In 1777 and 1778 he captained the Ranger and raided along the English coast, bringing the war home to King George and his subjects. In recognition of his feats, the Continental Navy put him in command of five American and French warships, including his flagship, the Bonhomme Richard. Commodore Jones led his tiny squadron on raids of the Scottish coast, disrupting commerce, capturing numerous merchant ships, and making an aggravating nuisance of himself to the Crown and Royal Navy. John Paul Jones later engaged in one of the bloodiest naval engagements of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Flamborough Head, off the northern coast of England. At dawn on September 23, 1779, his four-ship squadron spotted what they believed to be a 41-ship convoy, guarded by the 44-gun Royal Navy frigate, Serapis, and the sloop-of-war HMS Countess of Scarborough. One of his squadron, the warship Alliance, captained by a Frenchman, refused to obey Commodore Jones' orders to engage the enemy. He attacked the Serapis, but two of his heavy 18-pound cannon burst in the opening salvo, seriously damaging the Bonhomme Richard and killing many sailors. John Paul abandoned the use of his heavy cannon, believing them to be too dangerous. The Serapis pounded and raked his ship with her heavy cannon. Severely mauled and outgunned, his ship on fire and sinking, John Paul had few options. The British commander issued a taunting demand for John Paul to surrender. His lieutenant recorded his historic words of defiance, "I have not yet begun to fight!" John Paul knew that his only hope was to attack and board his enemy, so he swung his burning vessel around to ram the British warship. They came alongside and bound the ships together with grappling hooks. To John Paul's astonishment, the Alliance showed up two hours after the fight began and poured cannon fire into both ships. In bloody hand-to-hand combat, his crew fought the British sailors with hand grenades, musket fire and sabers-and overcame them. The British commander was forced to surrender the Serapis to the Americans. Jones' crew tried desperately to save the Bonhomme Richard but the damage was too great and the vessel was lost. John Paul crossed over to the Serapis and took command of one of the greatest naval prizes of the war. Source: American Thinker

So stay tuned. The fight over the fraudulence of the May government's Russian WMD attack narrative may yet have spectacular consequences.

Related:
Craig Murray: Imagine if the BBC Were Honest