Opinon/Must Reads 
The Cashless Society Is a Creepy Fantasy (Bloomberg)
Sorry Not Sorry: Politico’s Thrush Doubles Down on Podesta Emails (U.S. media is a total disgrace, The Hill)

Pope Leo X: Occult Father of Luther’s movement A commentary on Roberto de Mattei’s, “To Which Church does Pope Bergoglio belong?” ________________________________________________To which Church does Pope Bergoglio belong? By Roberto de Mattei  Corrispondenza Romana (Italian newspaper) October 19, 2016Translated by Francesca Romanahttp://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2016/10/de-mattei-to-which-church-does-pope.html#more

Egyptian airports must upgrade their security measures if Russian tourists are to return, Moscow officials have said [Xinhua]
Egyptian officials this week have reportedly implemented almost all the necessary airport security measures demanded by Russia before the resumption of flights to Cairo, an aid to the minister of interior told local media on Friday.
Hesham Bastawi said a biometric employee-access system, which monitors the time of arrival and departure of staff, is among the measures to be implemented.

https://southfront.org/results-of-russian-military-campaign-in-syria-se…

21st Century Wire says…
This is one of the better, more genuine ‘TED’ talks we’ve seen this year.

21st Century Wire says…
The following is an alternative discourse on contemporary geopolitics and what some refer to as ‘the end of history’ – from an Islamic eschatology perspective. All roads lead to Damascus, but also to Crimea and Jerusalem.

ANTIMEDIA | October 21, 2016 On Wednesday, the Guardian released an article titled “U.S. and U.K. reject Russian offer of ‘pause’ in airstrikes on Syria.” Aside from the fact it’s riddled with the outlet’s usual pro-U.S.-U.K. and anti-Russian propaganda, the article sank to the lowest of possible lows in an attempt to present the Russian military […]

A member of the Kurdish security forces stands guard near an oil field attacked by the Islamic State earlier in the year [Xinhua]
The Russian Ministry of Defense on Saturday said that its reconnaissance aircraft detected two US-led coalition fighter jets carrying out an air raid on the city of Daquq, just south of Kirkuk and Mosul.
The Ministry of Defense says that according to its intelligence sources there are no Islamic State fighters in that area.

A few years ago, Alan Grayson suggested we use a mobile billboard-- a truck with billboards mounted on them like the ones on this page-- in a campaign we were doing to help defeat Buck McKeon. Grayson was right about the efficacy of the mobile billboards compared to far more expensive TV advertising... and Blue America has been doing it ever since.

by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.

By Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch | October 21, 2016 It has become crystal clear. For the record, here it is. She has big ambitions, which she does not spell out for fear of frightening part of the electorate, but which are perfectly understood by her closest aides and biggest donors. She wants to achieve regime […]

By Finian Cunningham | RT | October 21, 2016 Russophobic rants by some European Union leaders and their willful distortion of events in Syria is a reflection of why the 28-member bloc is careering toward disaster. We are witnessing a crisis of appallingly inept leadership. German, British and French leaders were among the most hawkish voices […]

Exclusive: Confident in a Hillary Clinton victory, Washington’s foreign policy elite is readying plans for more warfare in Syria and more confrontations with nuclear-armed Russia, an across-the-spectrum “group think” that risks life on the planet, says Robert Parry. By Robert…Read more →

Beyond Hillary Clinton’s insults about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin — and finger-pointing about ISIS — foreign policy has gotten little attention in Campaign 2016 and that’s especially true about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reports Dennis J Bernstein.  By Dennis J…Read more →

Scientists are working on finding solutions to the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. The latest weapon in their arsenal is Tasmanian devil milk.
The Tasmanian devil is a marsupial, which means it’s a mammal that is born very early in its development and spends a few months growing and suckling inside their mothers’ pouches, just like kangaroos and opossums. [1]

The BRICS Post | October 21, 2016 Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made good on a promise he made in August to steer relations with China toward mutual benefit and bilateral cooperation. During his visit to Beijing on Thursday Duterte said that he was still committed to discussing the South China Sea territorial dispute in […]

Keith Olbermann: "It has long been anticipated that the runaway train quality of the Trump campaign would eventually claim as its collateral damage all or most of the GOP and its leaders... To the Republican leaders I ask again, when will you disavow this anti-democratic demagogue? When will you defund him? When will you deny him?

Halloween is fast approaching, so you’re probably seeing pumpkins with all kinds of interesting carvings and elaborate colors. Gone are the days of simple jack-o-lanterns. Pinterest has put those to shame. But if you see a teal pumpkin, it has special meaning.
Teal-colored pumpkins signify participation with and support of the Teal Pumpkin Project, an initiative started by FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education), to provide children with food allergies a safe trick-or-treating experience. [1]

…
This content is for Abonnement-Panamza members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

  By Prof Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Chair, Swedish Doctors for Human Rights – SWEDHR Prime Minister of Sweden Stefan Löfven, and with him the Swedish banker Marcus Wallenberg (CEO of Investor, the main holding company of the Wallenbergs), are travelling to Saudi Arabia for an official visit. The meetings with the Saudis, as announced…

Each notion proclaimed by the White House as the top priority of the Obama administration’s policies is in fact just a slogan. Quite often such slogans are used by the ruling elites to divert the attention of the public from their behind-the-scenes crimes, under the guise of the ongoing struggle for the greater good.

As the situation in the South-China Sea continues to detoriate, we should remember that it was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who took advantage of Japan’s role as host to the recent Group of 7 industrial nations’ annual summit to introduce a provocative resolution criticizing China’s presence in controversial islands of the East China Sea known in China as the Diaoyo Islands and in Japan as the Senkaku islands.

…
This content is for Abonnement-Panamza members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

4.84/5 (45) In yesterday's blog I indicated that there was a lot of very strange space news that emerged in the context of President…
The post STRANGE DEATH OF BRITISH UFO RESEARCHER IN POLAND appeared first on Giza Death Star.

On the panel are Conservative former chancellor Ken Clarke MP, Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner MP, runner up in the UKIP leadership election Lisa Duffy, DiEM25 initiator and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the previous owner of … Continue reading →

Outstanding and informative rebuttal to a recent piece by Eric Draitser on CounterPunch, as well as to the lies in general purported by corporate media and rights groups as to how events played out in Syria in the early days of the unrest/war on Syria. Gowans also provides a much needed lesson in historical context. Masterpiece, by Stephen Gowans!

what's left
October 22, 2016

The level of media deception and being broadcast by the western media is spectacular. Countless staged images have been supplied by western-funded pseudo ‘NGOs’ like the Aleppo Media Centre and the notorious White Helmets.

To any neutral observer of the events happening in the Middle East, the battle for re-taking the city of Mosul by the Iraqi forces, aided by the US military “advisers”, from the Islamic State does appear to be the departing US president’s last attempt at giving his party’s voters an image of success ahead of the up-coming elections.

Against the backdrop of the incident involving the apprehension of North Korean poachers which is now being discussed in the Russian media (one person injured on the Russian side, one person killed and eight persons injured on the other side) and might seem to be an unprecedented escalation of the conflict, it is worth mentioning the similar “front” between South Korea and China that accompanies the deterioration of relations due to the THAAD issue.

Shawn Helton
21st Century Wire
Yesterday, a wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks hit some of the top online companies websites including Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and Reddit. One cannot rule out the very real possibility that this a staged-managed event, especially when you consider The New York Times was listed among those affected. If recent US media and political themes are anything to go by, you can expect a cascading chorus of blame directed at Russia.

This article was written for the Unz Review: http://www.unz.com/tsaker/the-us-is-about-to-face-the-worst-crisis-of-i… Watching the last Presidential debate was a rather depressing experience.  I thought that Trump did pretty well, but that really is

by Judith Curry
Ok, we’re getting down to the wire.

U.S. voters are starting vote, the final voting day is Nov 8.  There have been some ‘interesting’ articles this past week, for your consideration and discussion.
Policy positions
Both major candidates now have posted detailed policy positions:

-by Skip KaltenheuserIt was a long hard slog to publish Lucifer's Banker. Had Brad Birkenfeld managed to get his book out say, a year or so earlier, we might not be staring at the political train wreck we are now. It might have changed the political landscape, perhaps the standard bearers. Maybe even elevated different issues for the last lap beyond the cursory checklist now fed us. But I’m glad it’s arrived.

Militants shifted some of the battle to Kirkuk.
The post 553 Killed and Executed in Iraq as Militants Attack Kirkuk appeared first on Antiwar.com Original.

One great real truth seeker that I have linked to on many occasions, and has put forward many great comments at this site is of course Buelahman, who writes "Buelahman's Revolt" at www.buelahman.wordpress.com.... I have always been reading his fine work and I have long respected his honest opinion through his comments at this site...

October 22, 2016
Apparently, the US Left has yet to figure out that Washington doesn’t try to overthrow neoliberals. If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were a devotee of the Washington Consensus–as Counterpunch’s Eric Draitser seems to believe–the United States government wouldn’t have been calling since 2003 for Assad to step down. Nor would it be overseeing the Islamist guerilla war against his government; it would be protecting him.
By Stephen Gowans

Donald Trump seems to be a shady dealer, a blusterer, a prevaricator, an abuser of women — not my choice for president. Yet a case can be made for Trump as the slightly lesser of two evils.
Hillary Clinton could be called an abuser of women, children, and men – through war.

I’ve written often about our Iraqi refugee friend and his oldest son from Baghdad. I will call them Mohammed and Ahmed. They made the torturous flight last year from Baghdad to Kurdistan and then across Turkey. They were on three Greek islands before permission was granted them to continue their trip. They passed through several countries at the time the borders were being closed. They arrived finally at their destination in late September 2015. Finland.

With the American people, and so many people elsewhere around the planet in fact, so focused these days on the farcical "election" campaign taking place between Killary Clinton and Donald Drumpf, few are paying attention to what has been happening elsewhere around the world, especially with the ever changing situation in Syria....

The above ad from the DCCC just started running in TX-23, the immense South Texas congressional district (almost a quarter of the state in size!) that stretches from Socorro and the outskirts of southwest El Paso, along the Rio Grande border with Chihuahua and Coahuila through Guadalupe, Big Bend, Del Rio, the big smuggling center in Eagle Pass, and up into the western and southern suburbs of San Antonio. Those Bexar County suburbs are the Republican part of the swing district-- won narrowly by Obama in 2008 and narrowly by Romney in 2012.

An NSA whistleblowers doesn't think Russia was behind the DNC leaks.

The Spearhead Transmission invited me back on to discuss the so-called “New Cold War” with Russia, Trump and Hillary and what a Hillary presidency would mean for foreign policy, as well as the larger-scale global plan of installing a brave new world.

The White House has issued an “American declaration of war on Russia” in Russia’s eyes, says the Nation magazine.

Xi called Duterte’s visit a “milestone” in China-Philippine relations [Xinhua]
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made good on a promise he made in August to steer relations with China toward mutual benefit and bilateral cooperation.
During his visit to Beijing on Thursday Duterte said that he was still committed to discussing the South China Sea territorial dispute in a bilateral fashion with his Chinese counterparts.

Free Preview Clip
https://www.peterbcollins.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Atkinson.mp3
Do Not Resist is an important new documentary that reveals the militarization of local police, and the impacts of "for-profit" policing.

Web security firms and US intelligence claim “Fancy Bear” is behind hacks of DNC and Podesta, no clear Russian link….--Vice Motherboard adds new info but buries disclaimer that no “smoking gun that can clearly frame Russia
--NSA contractor Harold Martin now facing espionage act charges

You have to read it to believe it.

Media Monarchy plays STRFKR, Le Tigre, Eminem and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for October 21, 2016. ♬

Palestine Information Center – October 21, 2106 OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – Israel is seeking to buy three more advanced submarines from Germany at a combined price of $1.3 billion, an Israeli newspaper reported Friday The planned purchase aims to replace within the next decade the oldest submarines in its existing Dolphin fleet, which began entering service […]

He-e-e-ere's Speaker Louie! DailyKos caption: "Now, doesn't this inspire confidence?" Yeccch!