Democratic National Convention LANGUAGE is NOT VERY PRETTY EITHER !

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Iran, Russia, and China's Central Role in the Venezuela Crisis !

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (photo below) just completed, by most accounts, a successful visit to Latin America. He began his five-nation tour by invoking the Monroe Doctrine and suggesting the Venezuelan military could manage a "peaceful transition" from the authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. This reminded several regional observers of President Trump's suggestion last year of a possible "military option" for Venezuela, hinting at possible U.S. or multilateral intervention to stop the country's collapse.

Any party in the Western Hemisphere seeking to undertake military intervention in Venezuela— including Venezuela's own military—must take into account the role Iran, Russia and China have played in the crisis. Russia and China were prominently mentioned by Tillerson during his visit to the region; Iran, however, was notably absent from his remarks.

Most regional analysts will likely agree that Venezuela has become a Cuban-occupied country. With more than 30,000 Cubans embedded in Venezuela, many of whom are part of the intelligence and security apparatus, it's clear that the Castro brothers played an integral role in the country's collapse. However, this narrative of Cuban intervention misses two key points. First, it fails to identify precisely Cuba's role in Venezuela, and, secondly, it ignores the presence and influence of other key extra-regional actors.

External support from China, Russia, and Cuba has contributed significantly to propping up the Venezuelan government during the last decade.

Of these, Russia and China are perhaps the two most visible. As in Syria, and, historically, in Central America, Russia is the primary supplier of military aidand technical support to the Venezuelan armed forces. Venezuela represents 75% of Russia's total foreign military sales in the region, accounting for more than $11 billion in arms sales. Additionally, the Russian state-owned energy firm, Rosneft, has provided Venezuela with an estimated $17 billion in financing since 2006. Moscow has leveraged its collateral deals to acquire expanded stakes in Venezuela's oilfields—specifically, the heavy-crude Orinoco belt—providing Russia greater control of Venezuela's strategic energy assets.

Russia is not alone in translating Venezuelan debt into strategic assets. According to the International Institute of Finance, China holds more than $23 billion in Venezuela's foreign debt, making it the country's largest creditor. Through these credits and loans, Beijing is the primary benefactor and principal banker to the South American nation, yielding enormous leverage over the state.

Chinese energy companies are also gaining an increasing share of Venezuela's most lucrative oil field, the Faja Del Orinoco (FDO). China secured a 25-year land grant to the FDO. In exchange, China has used its checkbook to fund many of the nation's social programs, such as subsidized housing and free medical clinics.

Pictured: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro visits Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Iran on October 22, 2016.

External support from China, Russia, and Cuba has buoyed the Venezuelan government during the last decade. Cuba's robust counterintelligence and human intelligence networks, which permeate Venezuela's highest political and military levels, are indispensable to China and Russia because of their operational knowledge of Russian-supplied equipment, along with their longstanding ties to communist clandestine networks.

In this context, it is hard to imagine a strategy that would remove Havana's presence from Venezuela without first passing through Moscow or Beijing. Iran, on the other hand, can operate independently in Venezuela because it taps into a separate, more robust clandestine network that has been developing in Latin America for more than half a century.

Approximately 60% of the population of the city of As-Suwayda in southwestern Syria (pop. 139,000, according to the 2004 census) are Venezuelan-born dual citizens. Many more have arrived since 2009. The district of As-Suwayda (same name as the city) has been dubbed "Little Venezuela." Estimates indicate that upwards of 300,000 Syrians from the As-Suwayda Governorate currently live halfway around the world in Venezuela. According to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, more than a million Syrians reside there. This Syria-Venezuela connection could represent a clandestine network managed by Iran and critical to the advancement of Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution."

As in the Syria conflict, Iran's primarily role is preparing the Venezuelan battlefield through a range of operations in irregular warfare, using non-state actors and surrogates to gain influence over the population. Its influence is often not visible on the ground, but it was evident when Iranian-trained forces helped repress anti-regime protestors in 2017. During anti-Maduro demonstrations, the motorcycle-riding members of the Venezuelan civilian militias known as Collectivos were clearly modeled on and trained by Iran's paramilitary Basij militia (photo below). The role of the Basij in crushing Iran's Green Revolution in 2009 provided lesson for dealing with anti-regime protestors half a decade later in Venezuela.

Strong evidence suggests that Venezuela used its immigration agency (SAIME) to provide Venezuelan identities and documents to several hundred, if not thousands, of Middle Easterners.

The extent of Iran's influence in Venezuela has long been a source of debate among U.S. and regional security analysts. In many ways, Iran has positioned itself in Venezuela to capitalize on China's economic clout and Russia's military footprint. For instance, Iran's Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL) used a variety of joint projects with Venezuela's military industry (CAVIM), as well as Russian and Chinese oil contracts with PDVSA, to shield it from international sanctions.

Iran's most salient expertise, however, is in the development of clandestine structures through surrogate forces and proxy networks. Its most prominent proxy force, Lebanese Hezbollah, is known to deploy to global hotspots on behalf of Iran. Meanwhile, the Qods Force (the extra-territorial arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps - IRGC) works with Hezbollah to increase social pressure in these hotspots to exacerbate conflicts. The Hezbollah and IRGC-QF cooperation is an important component of the Syrian civil war.

In Venezuela, long-standing clandestine networks from Syria, Lebanon and the Middle East are playing a similar role behind the scenes in shaping the narrative and ultimately directing the actions of the country's key players. These networks have provided the Venezuelan regime with the know-how to control the population and propagate its narrative. Their influence is evident from the prominence of Arabs in the Venezuelan government.

Protesters have taken to Venezuela's streets to condemn unprecedented levels of oppression.

The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela began with severe shortages of food and medicine, prompting a a popular uprising last year. Syria faced a similarly severe drought before its civil war that contributed to the violent uprisings that began in 2011. As in Syria, Venezuela faces a humanitarian crisis that exacerbates refugee outflows with serious counterterrorism concerns and a strong Russian and Iranian presence. Unlike Syria, however, this crisis rests much closer to U.S. shores.

Strong evidence suggests that Venezuela used its immigration agency (SAIME) to provide Venezuelan identities and documents to several hundred, if not thousands, of Middle Easterners. Unless our regional allies have proper vetting and verification measures in place, as well as a high degree of counterintelligence support, they will not know if the Venezuelan refugees spilling across their borders are legitimate refugees or members of a transregional clandestine network between Latin America and the Middle East.

As Secretary Tillerson calls upon regional allies to increase support to resolve Venezuela's humanitarian crisis and apply more pressure to the Maduro regime, it would also make sense for the Trump administration to help U.S. allies by enhancing their counterintelligence and counterterrorism capabilities against Iran and Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere. It appears that some of this cooperation is already beginning to take place, as evidenced by a new agreement between the U.S. and Argentina to tackle Hezbollah's illicit financing in the Southern Cone.

The Way I See It......dealing with the tragedy that has transpired in Venezuela over more than two decades will require a better public understanding of the central role of extra-regional actors, particularly Iran, in the country's crisis.

Any intervention in Venezuela -- military, humanitarian or otherwise -- will not work unless it is aimed at removing the external influences, especially Iran, Russia and China, that have turned Venezuela into the Syria of the Western Hemisphere.

A special thanks to Joseph M. Humire as the executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS) and a fellow at the Middle East Forum for the information leading to this posting.

OBAMA OPENED HIS PLAY-LUNCH IN IRAN AND THEN WALKED AWAY!

And now the stench of negroid methane still lingers over a Middle Eastern powderkeg that is certain to erupt into full-scale war with the involvement of major powers, the US and Russia. This is yet another reason Trump must make peace with Putin and quickly. 

See a year-old posting by Larry Pickering:  NOW PUTIN OPENS HIS PLAY-LUNCH IN OBAMA'S SPACE

Here’s the problem: Russia is allied with both Iran and Syria and supplies both with military equipment designed to shoot down Israeli and US warplanes. 

The US under Obama and aligned with a crab-walking Saudi Arabia wanted yet another regime change in Syria and Bashar Assad banished. But Assad was democratically elected (well democratically in an Islamic sense) despite the rebel Syrian army’s uprising. 

Putin has done Obama like a dog’s licked dinner plate. It was he, not Trump, who rid Syria of ISIS in its al Raqqa headquarters, and now Trump needs Putin’s help to solve the current mess to avoid all-out war, so he is right to veto further Russian sanctions, allowing at least for a chance of meaningful talks.

Obama, Kerry and Clinton (above) dealt a compact with the devil assuring Iran and thus North Korea of nuclear capacity within a decade. 

Iran has always worked in concert with North Korea’s nuclear progress. In return for the misguided nuclear deal these three mentally retarded galahs expected Iran to act responsibly in the meantime. 

Putin was peeing in his pants … he knows the word “responsibility” does not appear in the Iranian lexicon.

Ali Khomeini Someprick was still screaming “Death to America… Death to Israel” during'' the signing ceremony.

Shia Iran has now predictably moved missiles across a shattered Iraq and into Syria, just as Israel’s Netanyahu (above) predicted when he pleaded with a deaf UN to    get Obama to reverse his insane deal with Iran. No-one listened.

This now places Iran’s missiles on Syria’s and Lebanon’s northern borders with Israel… the State they have vowed for decades to drive into the Mediterranean, and you’d be excused for thinking Obama wanted the exact same thing.

Meanwhile Israel is bombing the crap out of Iranian drone installations while Iran is shooting down its jets over Israel. Drones can only mean one thing... reconnaissance to attain GPS coordinates of the locations they want their warheads to land, sites like the Knesset.

                   Israeli jet shot down by Iran over Israeli airspace on the weekend

Trump will now renege on the Obama deal with Iran and back Israel in a war that will likely last a little longer than six days this time. Trump should already be in Airforce One and on the way to Moscow because he cannot afford (and can avoid) direct confrontation with Putin. They need to talk as at least “pretend” best friends.

Unlike Obama and that dickhead John Kerry (above) who intends a Presidential run in 2020, Trump and Mattis have the intelligence, in more ways than one, to get this solved before Netanyahu drops a nuclear warhead on Teheran.

The Way I See It......Thank God for Trump, because the question might be asked, WTF would Hillary Clinton be doing in response to an all-out Middle Eastern nuclear war?

                               Probably using Vile Cursing at her undeserved security people, checking to see who Bill is bonking and    …taking the dog for another walk maybe?

The spectre of the “stolen generation” is stopping rape reports of Aboriginal kids !!

It took 48 hours before media disclosed it was an adult Aborigine who raped that two year old girl in Tennant Creek. Naturally most people already thought it may have been, but it shows media's reluctance to risk claims of racism. And in this case a representative of “Territory Families” who received 21 warnings about this group of Aborigines said, "they (the warnings) were not substantial enough to take the child out of this household and away from the mother." Not substantial enough?

Perhaps the thought of removing the child evoked memories of the “stolen generation”. 

The "stolen generation" is an emotive term that does not portray the good will (albeit ill-advised) of white families that wanted to give Aboriginal children a chance to escape the vortex of Aboriginal culture, especially when it came to small children. 

 Government Agencies have ignored Tennant Creek for years says elder, Ross Williams.

This atavistic culture that snares females is as primitive as the Islamic culture and it should be loudly criticised and not hidden for fear of cries of racism when it clearly IS a race problem.

Aborigines and Muslims both treat women as solely a procreative necessity. Women are legally bashed when they disobey men. Young men are entitled to “educate” young girls in how to satisfy older men. In Aboriginal culture older women are used to “educate” young boys who are also an expendable resource in Muslim culture.

This primitive freedom to treat females and young boys this way is exacerbated with alcohol and other drugs that cloud any semblance of modern Western values and the judiciary makes huge allowances for “cultural” considerations in any sex crime.

It is very much the same in Indian culture and young boys were (are) to be freely partaken of by older males in Greek culture.

             Why are Aborigines attracted to Islam? Well, the cultures are closely aligned.

The more primitive the cult the more women folk and girls are regarded as less than human.

The well-known Muslim practice of “thighing” allows a betrothed baby girl to be used as a masturbation tool until she reaches the age of nine when penetration is practised.

What happened in Tennant Creek went too far even in Aboriginal culture but the man guilty of this horrifying crime must be set an example of, to show we will never condone this type of sexual bastardry committed on babies and toddlers. But he should not be gaoled… a hundred lashes would produce a better outcome than gaol.

                                                       The Aurukun mob

The problem is that we spend well over $30 billion a year trying to drag Aboriginal culture into the 21st century. It simply can’t be done in such a short time-frame, especially when whites obfuscate the issue with claims of “Constitutional recognition”, “treaties”, “Mabo land claims” and stupid twig-waving “welcome to country ceremonies” and “sorry” days. This all makes the Aborigine feel victimised and deserving of, and justified in, seeking retribution.

Original inhabitants? No! There were other people here before our Aborigine who has been here at least 30,000 years but neither we nor he was the first, and that applies to all lands which at one time were “invaded”.

Whites who run and profit from the Aboriginal industry are doing a grave disservice to a nomadic people who not so long ago hadn’t invented the wheel or figured out how to use numbers above the number one! 

They shifted from water hole to water hole depleting the freely available resources before shifting to another water hole.

Their home grown religion was steeped in a rainbow serpent and the savage law of payback.

No permanent shelters, no plants, no water reticulation, no clothes, no worries. Women were a mere commodity that carried burdens and produced offspring.   

Our main problem is that we refuse to recognise we are dealing with the most primitive race on earth and we will never bring Aborigines into the Western fold by denying that and convincing them they are victimised. 

We keep telling them they are victimised so eventually they believe us and become activists like the whites waving placards, erecting false embassies and planting a separate flag.

I have lived with Aborigines and have stayed in Tennant Creek where the continuous rumbling of earthquakes can be mistaken for Aboriginal riots in the streets. It is worse than Alice Springs where at least they seem to congregate in the river bed for the night.

One thing that must never happen is to put another Aborigine in gaol. They simply do not understand what four walls are, leading to hysterical trauma and suicides. 

The worst tribal punishment they know of was banishment or “pointing the bone”, that often led to death anyway.

But death by four walls has been the punishment of many natives including the great Albert Namatjira… and we still don’t get it. Shameful banishment to another area is an effective punishment... and there is still plenty of land to do that and elders will agree to enforce it. 

The Way I See It.......we cannot judge Aborigines by a European yardstick and yet we cannot allow Muslims, who understand the Western mores of the nation they were invited into, to claim a cultural excuse.

Keep throwing tens of billions in taxpayer funds to Aborigines each year and they will continue to go backwards. We haven’t learnt a thing in 200 years! .We need to stop looking at the black man through the white man's eyes.

You see, the white man's fear of an allusion to “the stolen generation” led that poor little girl to be returned to the same family.

What’s the bet it happens again? 

             

Another Black Idiot says farm land should be taken from white farmers and given to blacks !.

The newly elected South African president is seeking to take farm land from white families and give it to blacks for reparations. Hope is dashed that he was going to be a refreshing change from the corrupt and stupid Jacob Zuma. 

During an address at the nation’s parliament in Cape Town, Cyril Ramaphosa made it clear that he is stupid too! His goal is to give blacks land from white farmers as a way to heal “original sins” that happened many decades ago.

Ramaphosa said he wants to see “the return of the land to the people from whom it was taken … to heal the divisions of the past.”

He plans to confiscate land — without compensation — from white people who own farmland and give it to blacks to make up for injustices that happened hundreds of years ago.

“The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans,” he said.

Former Zimbabwe President, Robert Mugabe, also supported this effort between 1999-2000 as part of a land redistribution program, and it was so catastrophic that the nation has been relying on handouts from the United Nations’ World Food Program ever since. Stupid!

Without experienced farmers, the nation quickly went from being a global export leader to not being able to produce enough food for even half of the country.

Aside from that, it is horrifying that Ramaphosa is going to force white families off of their farms, refuse to pay them any compensation, and give their land over to blacks simply because he believes it is owed to them.

The Way I See It.....anyone who believes Zimbabwe’s economic model is intelligent is utterly incompetent and this horrendous action should never be tolerated. These people never learn and love to play the victim card.

BUSTED: HERE’S THE ONE ANTI-TRUMP TEXT MESSAGE THAT WILL CRUMBLE THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION

Since Day 1, we knew that this whole Mueller investigation was a witch hunt by the deep state to take out President Trump, and this brand new batch of text messages from FBI agents is the smoking gun evidence.

In the hustle and bustle of the Alabama Senate election last night, you might have missed that Fox News got hold of 10,000 text messages from Anti-Trump FBI agents that were working on the Russia investigation.

After sifting through many of the messages, the most damning text reveals a plot to take out Trump even BEFORE he was elected.

Here’s a more in-depth analysis of this from Ben Shapiro (below) at the Daily Wire:

On Wednesday, CNN published text messages between the former second-in-command in FBI counterintelligence, Peter Strzok, and his mistress and co-worker Lisa Page (below). Strzok was involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, instrumental in helping to launch the investigation into supposed collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and staffed on the Trump-Russia investigation itself.

Now, one of those texts may wound the special investigation beyond repair.

That text is dated August 15, 2016. Strzok texted Page, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in [deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe’s] office that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40…”

This looks an awful lot like motivation for launching an investigation into Trump in order to sink Trump as a hedge against Trump’s victory. The FBI’s investigation into Russian governmental interference in the election began in July 2016, just weeks before Strzok’s text message. And that means that there is now more of a smoking gun of FBI corruption against Trump than there is of Trump colluding with Russia.

How can Mueller come back from that? He’s fired Strzok and Page, but if the investigation was initially a political hit job, how can it now turn into something good and decent, particularly in the absence of a smoking gun regarding collusion? It’s not just that this is fruit of the poisonous tree — there’s no fruit to show, just the poisonous tree. And as Victor Davis Hanson has written, the Mueller team is filled top-to-bottom with political activists who have a specific anti-Trump agenda.

The Way I See It.......this seems to be some pretty damning evidence that this entire investigation was a sham to begin with. It never had any substance…they just wanted to do EVERYTHING they could to take out Trump!!!

Mueller Indictments May Have Been Plagiarized From Media Sources !

Mueller's recent indictment against Russians mimics reports in media from years ago.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced last week indictments against Russians, but a quick cursory search shows those crimes were outlined several years ago. However, it looks like this announcement may not be everything that it claims after some very interesting reports from Buzzfeed as well as The Atlantic surfaced.

Mueller indicted 13 Russian operatives and three Russian entities for using social media to sow discord in the 2016 presidential election.

The problem with his indictment is that liberal news organizations like The Atlantic and BuzzFeed published very similar reports on the Russian efforts several years ago.

Mueller’s indictment charged 13 Russians for using a company based in St. Petersburg called the Internet Research Agency. The indictment says they organized and launched rallies that were both for and against Trump after he won the presidential election.

“Defendants and their co-conspirators used false US personas to organize and coordinate other false US personas to organize and coordinate US political rallies protesting the results of the 2016 presidential election,” said special counsel spokesman Peter Carr, summarizing the indictment.

In 2014, BuzzFeed published a report detailing how the troll group identified in Mueller’s indictment had made their goals and activities well-known to the public.

Max Seddon’s article details how they carried out their scheme:

“The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day.”

“By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.”

The Atlantic published a similar report in 2013 detailing how the Russians were carrying out a social media scheme to create discord among Americans over political issues.

“The effect created by such Internet trolls is not very big, but they manage to make certain forums meaningless because people stop commenting on the articles when these trolls sit there and constantly create an aggressive, hostile atmosphere toward those whom they don’t like.”

“These include commentary systems on the web sites of every major media outlet in the city that the trolls began to occupy a long time ago and react to certain news with torrents of mud and abuse.”

Are we really to believe the FBI and other government agencies were unaware of these Russian efforts since 2013?

More importantly, Mueller’s indictment is disturbingly similar to the BuzzFeed and Atlantic reports. The indictment said Russian trolls created fake accounts using another individual’s persona and worked to play both sides of a political issue to create chaos.

The grand jury indictment revealed the Russian group even organized two rallies in New York City on Nov. 12, 2016. One rally was to support Trump, and the other rally was to oppose Trump.

One of the rallies was called held on Nov. 12 was called, “Trump is NOT my President.” The indictment concretely states the Russian operatives were focused on sowing discord in America, not promoting Trump over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The Way I See It........it is also likely Mueller’s indictment closely resembles the two news media reports so he could save face on the phony Russia collusion investigation.

After nearly a year of investigating and no evidence of collusion or wrongdoing from Trump, the Mueller investigation is grasping for anything at this point to keep the witch hunt going as long as possible.