Aleppo Part iii: The City of Aleppo

Once considered the crown jewel of Syria, Aleppo has been the hardest hit and suffered the heaviest violence over the last five years. For a war that started in July of 2012, and cost the country more than 300,000 lives, it’s an all too constant reminder that the city has become a battleground for the Western section controlled by the Syrian Army and Eastern section patrolled by the Jihadi terrorists.

• Syria’s largest city, and the third largest in the region behind Constantinople and Cairo
• Located at the Northeastern tip of Syria
• First settled in 5000 BC
• Consistently inhabited since 4000 BC due to it’s proximity between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq
• First city council established in 1868
• Population of about 2.3 million, roughly the same size as Toronto, Ontario
• UNESCO World Heritage site in 1986, Aleppo citadel (seen in the photo above), was built over three centuries from the 10th century and damaged in July 2015 by heavy air raid blasts

ALEPPO PART II: PROPAGANDA

Since 2012, it has proven to be too dangerous for Western journalists or foreign correspondents to report directly from Syria. Most now file their reports from nearly 300 km away, in Beirut, Lebanon. Or roughly the distance from Ottawa, Ontario to Drummondville, Quebec. How could we possibly expect accurate news given such a distance?

In their place, through either self interest or naivety, “local activists” unable to escape jihadi control have taken over. These sources operate under the complete control of al-Qaeda sponsored news groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.

Below is a list of some of the most questionable propaganda tools:
• Omran Daqneesh, the Aleppo boy
– if his injuries were so bad that he required an ambulance, why were media allowed to take photos of him before he received treatment?
– his image has resurfaced in numerous other photos/videos in several different situations, including in one where he’s about to become beheaded
– from most reports, it appears to be Trauma makeup
• White Helmet staged mannequin challenge rescue videos
– illustrates how easily it would be to stage other rescues
• Seven year old Syrian girl, Bana Alabed who has a verified twitter account
– in an area as badly hit as Eastern Aleppo, how was she able to maintain a twitter account, when many of the city’s remaining residents are without power?
– why would a mother (who is apparently helping her run this account) choose to remain in Aleppo where food and water is scarce?
– how did she become verified on twitter so quickly?
– why is her mother dressed as a jihadist fighter in some of the photos on her original twitter account?
– why was her account registered in the UK?

Part 3 will feature a profile on the city of Aleppo for late Wednesday night.

Aleppo Part I: The White Helmets

I’ve put together this 3 part fact sheet on various topics related to the city of Aleppo. It is the worst hit and largest city in Syria, and according to Wikipedia is the site of “major military confrontation between the Syrian opposition (including Free Syrian Army, and Sunni fighters, including Levant Front) in partial cooperation with the Army of Conquest, which includes within it Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly al-Qaida‘s Syrian branch,^[88] against the Syrian Armed Forces of the Syrian Government, supported by Hezbollah and Shiite militias and Russia,^[65][89] and against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units.”

Part 1 will focus on the White Helmets, as they’re known within the media, or the Syrian Civil Defence, their official title.

• Founded in 2013 (by a British ex-military officer, James Le Mesurier, more than one year after the ongoing Battle of Aleppo began in 2012)
• In Eastern Aleppo and Idlib (a city South of Aleppo), the hardest hit areas, their presence is minimal
• Major funding is being provided by USAID, to the tune of more than $23 million
• Total funding since 2012 is estimated at $100 million by the US/UK and other influential countries
• As of 5 days ago, 95% of the area has been liberated by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA)
• They purport to be neutral, yet some carry guns and reports have stated that some are posing for photos standing over dead Syrian soldier’s bodies
• Their videos contain children identified in multiple video sources used primarily as propaganda

Monday will feature Part 2: Propaganda

Non Confidence Vote

This entry is in regards to this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-electoral-college-republican-faithless-electors-stop-election-result-a7473296.html

I’ve been under the weather for most of this week, but a reader sent me a link this afternoon and I thought it was worth sharing. I had read a bit about it, but with the Wisconsin recalls and election hacking probe, it flew under my radar.

To break things down, there are 538 electoral votes spread out over the 50 US states, and the majority of that (270), is required to be elected President. Now here’s where things get interesting. From the graphic above, you can see that Donald Trump was nominated the Republican representative with 7,234 votes (or 34.4%) of the Republican party, with Ted Cruz coming in second at 4,515 (21.4%) and finally Marco Rubio at 4,438 (21.1%).

These numbers are important, since the top three successful candidates would be revoted on, if there was a non confidence vote within the party. This could be for any number of reasons, such as illness, or simply the candidate being unfit to serve as president.

The race to 270 is also interesting in the sense that Trump,’s  final tally of 306 electoral votes, would mean the party would require 37 (the difference between his total, and the number required 270) to re-elect a new candidate.

As the above article states, this has happened only once in 1808, when six electors voted against James Madison.

The Russia Complex

There’s an inherent danger in making accusations, without providing evidence. In the political sense, it can lead to immediate conflict and even start wars.

Senior US Republican senator Lindsey Graham has said his campaign email account was hacked by Russians.

Early this morning, Graham told CNN that he believed “the Russians” hacked into the Democratic National Committee, and accused them of trying to “destabilise democracy all over the world”.

Russian officials have repeatedly denied the claims.

The irony here, is that the US government has been involved in influencing a number of elections throughout history. We’ve seen it in Guatemala, and most recently in Haiti in 2010/2015, and Honduras as recently as 2009.

During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, the Honduran military forced out democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The United Nations condemned the act of a military style coup, and the Organization of American States suspended Honduras’ membership, calling for Zelaya to be reinstated.

“If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid, including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people,” Clinton had said in April of 2009.

It’s difficult to say the impact the US government has had on the people of Haiti, given the number of US sponsored coups and low voter turnout as recent as 2015 resulted in an 18 percent of registered voter turnout. Additionally, 23 percent of all votes were never counted, due to fraud and violence on Election Day.

But the meddling didn’t stop there. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon apologized earlier this week for the treatment of Haitian’s by the UN, after years of denial.

In regards to Russia, it’s an all too familiar scapegoat. An easy target.

Undemocratic States of America

 

Since it’s inception in 1787, the Electoral College has guarded against Democratic or Republican leaning states (traditionally California, New York and Texas, Florida, respectively) from influencing who is elected as President. In almost 130 years, only three times has someone with a larger number of total votes lost the Presidency. But suddenly, in an election where the democratic candidate lost, in this case one Hillary Clinton, the system is in need of eradication.

This article, is nothing more than an attempt to whip the American people into the same sort of rage their Purple Revolution attempted.

It’s unjust, and it’s undemocratic.

BBC, or the Biased Broadcasting Corporation, as I like to call it has long been a harbinger of democratic slanted news reports, despite being tax payer funded.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38254946?ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=facebook

The Election Hack

President Obama has ordered a “full review” of what the CIA is calling Russian hacking in an effort to influence 2016 election results and hopes to have results of the report before leaving office.

“The President has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process” said Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counter terrorism at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast meeting yesterday in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

“We may be in – crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what this means, what has happened and to impart those lessons learned and that’s what we’re go about doing”

The review, which was ordered earlier this week, will extend back t0 2008.

The intelligence community has firmly pointed a finger at Russia, but this ongoing review will look into potential hacks by “all foreign actors”, the White House has said.

The Wisconsin Recall

Media Watch has learned that Hillary Clinton is behind the Wisconsin vote recall. Not Jill Stein.

Stein is merely being used as a front as to not alert suspicions. If you’ll remember, it was Hillary who had ridiculed Trump for questioning the vote tallies.

According to the podcast Abe Lincoln’s Tophat, a Green party insider named Robert Fitrakis had this to say: “I was on the inside of some of these decisions, first of all, Jill Stein had no inclination on earth to recount this election. It wasn’t her idea. She was contacted, and you’ll see some of this in news reports of this. John Bonafas, who worked as a Green attorney in 2004, who was then involved in elections, and a variety of social scientists who were obsessed with the numbers, their target was Hillary Clinton. Jill Stein was plan B.”

Standing Rock: What you need to know

It’s been brought to my attention by a few people, that more coverage should be placed on the events at Standing Rock. I’ve spent the last couple hours researching, and have put together an info sheet that should help educate and inform.

1. An initial Keystone pipeline access route was originally set to enter through an area just North of Bismarck, North Dakota (the capital city of close to 67,000 people). But due to concerns of a spill and to reduce risk, was moved to just North of Cannon Ball, a town of 875.

2. On site guards originally deployed attack dogs and military personnel used armoured vehicles and riot gear to combat “aggresive intrusions on privately owned land.”

3. These protests were supposed to be peaceful.

4. Billionaire owner of Energy Transfer, Kelcy Warren, a Texas based entrepreneur, worth an estimated $4 billion, according to Forbes Magazine, is spearheading the pipeline project.

5. This isn’t just a local issue, as the local tribe has said they fear the project “will disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for thousands of tribal members on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and millions further downstream.”

Republic of the United States of America

It is a common misconception, that the United States of America is a democratic state. It is not, in fact. It is instead a republic. This years election proved that point implicitly.

That a state like California, with it’s nearly 40 million people, 55 electoral votes and just shy of 2 million votes alone in the city of Los Angeles were registered for Hillary Clinton, shows a desperate need for voter reform. Or perhaps to that note, a total abolishment of the electoral voting process completely.

Further to that point, when a citizen of Wyoming’s vote counts for four times that of one in Michigan, or in Vermont, three times that of Missouri, the limitations on a true electoral voting system are highlighted rather boldly.

So while both systems elect politicians to represent their interests to form a government, in a republic, each vote is not in fact equal.