Trump taps Ambassador to Norway Kenneth Braithwaite to replace ousted Navy chief

President Trump announced Sunday that Kenneth Braithwaite, the current ambassador to Norway, would replace Richard Spencer as the secretary of the Navy shortly after Spencer's ouster earlier in the day.

Trump's announcement came hours after Spencer was fired by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, with Esper claiming that Spencer had met behind his back with White House officials and offered to allow a SEAL convicted of a war crime to retire at his current rank.

"I was not pleased with the way that Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s trial was handled by the Navy. He was treated very badly but, despite this, was completely exonerated on all major charges. I then restored Eddie’s rank," Trump tweeted Sunday evening, referring to Gallagher's trial and acquittal on murder charges.

"Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer’s services have been terminated by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. I thank Richard for his service & commitment. Eddie will retire peacefully with all of the honors that he has earned, including his Trident Pin," Trump continued.

"Admiral and now Ambassador to Norway Ken Braithwaite will be nominated by me to be the new Secretary of the Navy. A man of great achievement and success, I know Ken will do an outstanding job!" he said.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said Spencer's firing was due to the Defense secretary's lack of confidence in the Navy chief following secret dealings with White House officials.

Spencer, Esper's spokesman said, had made overtures to White House officials urging them to accept that Gallagher would retire at his current rank if the president agreed to not intervene in his case.

In his own letter, Spencer seemed to suggest that his ouster hinged instead on an order from the president apparently related to the Gallagher case that Spencer could not follow due to moral reservations.

"I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag, and my faith," Spencer wrote.

The president, meanwhile, pointed to insufficient cost-cutting efforts carried out by the Navy and general dissatisfaction with how Gallagher's case was handled.

"Likewise, large cost overruns from past administration’s contracting procedures were not addressed to my satisfaction. Therefore, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer’s services have been terminated by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper," the president tweeted.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/471855-trump-taps-ambassador-to-norway-ken-braithwaite-to-replace-ousted-navy-chief

Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher With Ties to the CIA’s MKUltra Mind Control Project

On the night of July 4, 1954, San Antonio, Texas, was shaken by the rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl. The man accused of these crimes was Jimmy Shaver, an airman at the nearby Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record. Shaver claimed to have lost his memory of the incident.

The victim, 3-year-old Chere Jo Horton, had disappeared around midnight outside the Air Force Base, where her parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

Within an hour, the group came upon a car parked next to a gravel pit; Chere’s underwear was hanging from one of the car’s doors. Shaver wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and in a “trance-like” state.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how’d he gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped.

Deputies arrested Shaver. At 29, he was recently remarried with two children and no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver had seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “probably was not normal … he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10:30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: He could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned, he must have done it.

Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The commander of the base hospital, Col. Robert S. Bray, ordered a psychiatric evaluation, to be performed by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the head of psychiatric services at the air base. It fell to West to decide if Shaver had been legally sane at the time of the murder.

Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/

Part 1

>>7367051

When the American POWs returned, the Army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those scientists was West. Born in Brooklyn in 1924, he had enlisted in the Air Force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. His friends called him “Jolly,” for his middle name, impressive girth, and oversized personality. When he got out, he researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. He would later claim to have studied 83 prisoners of war, 56 of whom had been forced to make false confessions. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.

West’s success with the POWs gained him entrance into the upper echelons of the intelligence community. Gottlieb, the poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, along with Richard Helms, the CIA’s chief of operations for the Directorate of Plans had convinced the agency’s then-director, Allen Dulles, that mind control ops were the future. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further potential brainwashing by the Soviets. But the defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.

In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that communist spies could turn the American mind into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius.” Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKUltra in motion.

Little is known about the program. After Watergate, Helms (who by that time was CIA director) ordered Gottlieb to destroy all MKUltra papers; in January 1973, the Technical Services staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens.

In the mid-1970s, after the Times revealed the existence of MKUltra on its front page, the government launched three separate investigations, all of which were hobbled by the CIA’s destruction of its files:Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (1975); Senator Frank Church’s Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975-6); and Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Inouye’s joint Senate Select Committee hearings on Project MKUltra, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification (1977). When records were available, they were redacted; when witnesses were summoned to testify before Congress, they were forgetful.

We do know the project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its umbrella were at least 149 subprojects, many involving research on unwitting participants. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality earned him the nickname the “Black Sorcerer,” developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.

Part 2

>>7367070

The CIA seems to have pared MKUltra back in the mid-’60s, according to congressional testimony and surviving financial records, but Jolly West’s government-funded research continued apace. Late in the fall of 1966, West arrived in San Francisco to study hippies and LSD. Tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look in keeping with his military past, he cobbled together a new wardrobe and started skipping haircuts. He secured a government grant and took a yearlong sabbatical from the University of Oklahoma, nominally to pursue a fellowship at Stanford, although that school had no record of his participation in a program there.

When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, West was the only scientist in the world who’d predicted the emergence of potentially violent “LSD cults” such as Charles Manson’s Family. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, West had contributed a chapter called “Hallucinogens,” warning students of a “remarkable substance” percolating through college campuses and into cities. LSD was known to leave users “unusually susceptible and emotionally labile.” It appealed to alienated kids who would crave “shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.”

Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation.

Another of his papers, 1965’s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. He cited two cases: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a “military offense” induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. (It’s not at all clear that the latter referred to Shaver’s killing of Chere Jo Horton.)

He’d also supervised a study in Oklahoma City, in which he’d hired informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender “a fundamental change” in “basic moral, religious or political matters.” The title of the project was “Mass Conversion,” and it had been funded by Gottlieb.

In the Haight, West arranged for the use of a crumbling Victorian house on Frederick Street, where he set up what he described as a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.” The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. He installed six graduate students in the “pad,” telling them to “dress like hippies” and “lure” itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didn’t mind grad students taking notes on their behavior.

According to records in West’s files, his “crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. Dr. Gordon Deckert, West’s successor as chair at the University of Oklahoma, told me that he found papers in West’s desk that revealed that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.

Part 3

End

>>7367057

I'd say it's a big step in the right direction but there are large portions of the Navy that are comp'd af

Fed's Kashkari Says It's Time For The Federal Reserve To Start Redistributing Wealth

It may come as a surprise to some younger Americans, but the US did not always have income tax. In fact, one of the main catalysts behind the American Revolution and resulting War of Independence was the colonial protest against British taxation policy in the 1760s. Then, in the beginning, the independent nation collected taxes on imports, whiskey, and (for a while) on glass windows, even as states and localities collected poll taxes on voters and property taxes on land and commercial buildings. In addition, there were state and federal excise taxes. But all throughout, there was no official income tax for nearly a century and a half.

Yet while the United States imposed income taxes briefly during the Civil War and the 1890s, it was not until the 16th Amendment was ratified that the US permanently legalized a federal income tax in 1913. Incidentally, that was the same momentous year - just before the start of World War I - that another milestone event in US history took place: the birth of the Federal Reserve. Shortly thereafter, states also began collecting sales taxes in the 1930s.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/feds-kashkari-says-its-time-federal-reserve-start-redistributing-wealth

>>7367142

Fuckin boomer porn

>>7367155

5:5

Harry Morton, Founder of Pink Taco Chain, Dies at 38

Morton also owned the live music venue The Viper Room on the Sunset Strip, which was previously partly held by Johnny Depp.

Harry Morton, the son of Hard Rock founder Peter Morton and founder of the Los Angeles establishment Pink Taco, has died, a company spokesperson has confirmed.

Morton died Saturday afternoon at his residence. The cause of death under investigation by the Beverly Hills Police Department, but no foul play is suspected.

"We are saddened by the passing of Harry Morton, the founder and former owner of Pink Taco. Harry was a visionary and restaurateur ahead of his time, and his contributions, both professionally to our brand and personally to those he worked with, were numerous. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends during this difficult time," a company spokesperson said in a statement sent to The Hollywood Reporter.

According to TMZ, Morton was found unresponsive in his Beverly Hills home by a family member and was pronounced dead by paramedics after arriving on the scene.

Morton's father, Peter, is best known for having co-founded the Hard Rock Cafe. Meanwhile, Harry’s grandfather, Arnie Morton, founded Morton’s Steakhouse.

Harry Morton founded and opened the first local Pink Taco at the Westfield Century City Mall in 2011. A second L.A. location was opened on Sunset Boulevard. Outside of Los Angeles, Pink Taco has locations across the country, including Chicago, Boston and Las Vegas. The original location opened in the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Morton began his career as a restaurateur while working summers at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Morton was also the owner of the live music venue The Viper Room on the Sunset Strip, which was previously partly held by Johnny Depp. He also served as an investor in Beacher's Madhouse.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that a corporate entity connected to Morton paid about $25.46 million for the old Elvis Presley estate.

Morton was also famously linked to actress Lindsay Lohan.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harry-morton-dead-founder-pink-taco-chain-dies-at-38-1257706

STILL NOT PRESIDENT

>>7367279

I like it

CBP: Border Apprehensions Decline in October

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan announced today border enforcement results in October, the fifth consecutive month to see significant decline in apprehensions and inadmissible cases at ports of entry along the Southwest border. CBP enforcement actions along the Southwest border have declined over 68 percent since the height of the border crisis in May.

“This Administration has implemented critical policies and reached important agreements with our partners in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala that have resulted in the fifth consecutive month of reduced apprehensions on the Southwest border,” said Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan. “These are positive results, but Congress must pass meaningful legislation to stop the exploitation of vulnerable families and children, and bring integrity back to our broken immigration system.”

Defying typical, seasonal trends, enforcement actions declined in October for the first time in seven years. CBP’s total enforcement actions on our Southwest border declined by 14 percent in October, compared to September, for a total of 45,250.

This number reflects a 19-percent decline in the number of inadmissible aliens at U.S. ports of entry, and a 12 percent decline in Border Patrol apprehensions.

CBP seized more than 47,000 pounds of drugs on our Southwest border last month – 50 percent more than we intercepted in October 2018. Seizures of methamphetamine last month totaled more than 9,200 pounds – double the amount seized in October 2018. Fentanyl seizures on the Southwest border totaled 225 pounds – 48 percent more than CBP intercepted in October 2018.

Nationwide, CBP intercepted more than 54,500 pounds of narcotics – 45 percent more than October 2018. CBP seized 9,735 pounds of methamphetamine – up 90 percent over October of 2018, and the agency intercepted 284 pounds of fentanyl – up 84 percent over October of 201

https://saraacarter.com/cbp-border-apprehensions-decline-in-october/

'Very positive': Scott Morrison talks to Donald Trump about hostages, China

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has spoken to United States President Donald Trump about the outlook for a major trade deal between the US and China amid predictions of an agreement before the end of the year.

Mr Morrison phoned Mr Trump on Monday morning, Canberra time, to thank the President for America's help in freeing an Australian man held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The conversation also ranged across relations with China but there was no confirmation of whether the two leaders spoke about revelations of Chinese interference in Australia and the potential defection of a Chinese spy.

Australian government sources said the two leaders had a "very positive" call set up by Mr Morrison to thank Mr Trump for the efforts to free Timothy Weeks, an Australian academic taken hostage three years ago.

Mr Morrison conveyed his "deep appreciation" for the efforts of Mr Trump and his administration, which included dealing with the Taliban and Afghan authorities to arrange a hostage swap.

The conversation also discussed the bushfires, with Mr Morrison thanking Mr Trump for the assistance of US firefighters.

While the call was set up to discuss Mr Weeks, it also canvassed the latest trade talks between the US and China given Mr Trump's comments on Friday that an agreement was "potentially very close" after months of negotiation.

"The bottom line is, we have a very good chance to make a deal," Mr Trump told Fox News last Friday.

While the US Congress has passed a bill seeking to defend human rights in Hong Kong against interference from the ruling Chinese Communist Party on the mainland, Mr Trump has not said whether he will sign this into law.

"I stand with Hong Kong," he said in the Fox interview. "I stand with freedom. I stand with all of the things we want to do. But we're also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history."

US national security adviser Robert O'Brien said on Saturday the first phase of a trade deal with China could be in place by the end of the year.

"I still think that's possible," Mr O'Brien said.

"At the same time, we're not going to turn a blind eye to what's happening in Hong Kong or what's happening in the South China Sea, or other areas of the world where we're concerned about China's activity."

Mr Weeks, 50, taught at the American University in Kabul before he was seized by the Taliban in August 2016.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/very-positive-scott-morrison-talks-to-donald-trump-about-hostages-china-20191125-p53dss.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed